Oldham Council's planning committee has refused permission to turn a vacant takeaway and the four-bedroom flat above it at 121 Long Lane, Chadderton into a seven-bedroom house in multiple occupation, against the recommendation of its own planning officers.

The decision was taken at the committee's meeting on Wednesday 23 September. Councillors first voted down a motion to approve the application, then voted to refuse it on highway safety grounds.

A house in multiple occupation, usually shortened to HMO, is a property rented out to several people who are not related and who share facilities such as a kitchen or bathroom. Oldham introduced an Article 4 Direction on 1 January 2026, which removed the automatic right to convert a family home into a small HMO without planning permission.

What was proposed

The application, from MWIJ Properties Ltd, would have converted a ground floor unit last used as a hot food takeaway and a four-bedroom flat on the first floor into a seven-bedroom HMO, with all seven rooms let as single rooms. The shop window would have become two smaller windows; no other openings were proposed.

The committee report records that all seven bedrooms meet the council's HMO standards, which set a minimum of 6.5 square metres for a single room. Council monitoring data found no HMOs within 50 metres of the site, with the nearest recorded HMO about 74 metres away on Sycamore Avenue.

The application came to committee at the request of Councillor Rob Jackson and Councillor Graham Shuttleworth. Jim McMahon, the MP for Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton, also objected, setting out six points in a letter summarised in the report: over-intensive development causing harm to the character of the area, unacceptable impact on neighbouring amenity, highway safety and parking impacts, failure to provide satisfactory living conditions for future occupiers, failure to show the proposal would not contribute to harmful concentrations of HMOs, and insufficient justification for the loss of an active commercial use.

The nursery's warning

The site shares a boundary with the Play Alma Mater day nursery at 123 Long Lane. Sarah Shaw, who owns the nursery, told the committee that the two gardens run alongside each other.

121 Long Lane on OpenStreetMap shows the address on the east side of Long Lane, near Sycamore Avenue. Readers can also open the address in Google Maps or explore nearby Street View imagery. Street View images may predate the application; the council's planning report is the source for the property's proposed use and its description as vacant.

"Our main concern about the property is that it adjoins the nursery and it would affect our ability to safeguard children from harm and antisocial behaviour that could be heard through walls and the garden area," she said.

She said the nursery has already lost business because of the proposal: one child has left and another application has been withdrawn, and parents have said in writing they would look for childcare elsewhere if it went ahead. She also said the nursery had gone into lockdown three times in the past during incidents linked to another property nearby.

Residents' emails about Yew Tree House

Councillor Graham Shuttleworth, who represents Chadderton South for Labour, read out residents' emails about Yew Tree House on Sycamore Avenue, which he said had been an HMO and is now used as temporary accommodation. He said he had received 797 emails about the property. He recounted residents' allegations of antisocial behaviour and said incidents linked to the property had led the nursery to lock down. Those allegations were not established by the planning committee.

He told the committee the nursery employs 11 staff, five of them Chadderton residents, and that nothing in the papers says who would manage the HMO, who would check tenants' details or how complaints would be handled. Asked what grounds he would refuse on, he said: "the main one that you would use is safeguarding, children's safeguarding."

Officers put the council's position on the record. The committee report states that the council's community safety team is not aware of antisocial behaviour or disturbances at Yew Tree House, and that the temporary accommodation team confirmed the building is used as temporary accommodation for households on the council's homeless register, not as an HMO. The report also notes that the property is about 135 metres from the application site, well outside the 50-metre radius used to assess HMO concentration.

Why officers said the scheme should be approved

Wendy Moorhouse, the council's highway engineer, told the committee the comparison had to be with what the site is already allowed to be: a takeaway and a four-bedroom flat, which could hold eight adults between them. She said a seven-bedroom HMO generates so little traffic that it does not appear in the industry database used to forecast vehicle movements, and that takeaways generate short bursts of parking from customers who are more likely to park illegally.

"I actually think that there'll be less traffic generated, less demand for parking and less demand for parking of short-term customers that are more likely to park illegally and unsafely," she said.

Peter Richards, the council's assistant director for planning and development, told the committee it should not decide the application on assumptions about who might live there. "We shouldn't be considering who the occupant is or making assumptions about them" because of their socioeconomic background, he said. "Many of us in this room will have lived in an HMO at some point in our lives. Are we a risk?" He added that he would be "deeply uncomfortable" with a refusal based on children's safeguarding, because planning policy does not allow the council to treat a type of tenancy as a risk in itself.

Councillors pressed officers on the traffic evidence. One councillor questioned the report's traffic profile and said seven residents could each have visitors arriving at the same time. Councillor Nadeem Iqbal asked about the size of the bedrooms, which the report lists at 8.4, 8.7 and 7.7 square metres for the single rooms. Officers replied that the rooms comply with the council's standards and that the council has no parking standards that would allow a refusal for lack of parking.

The vote

A motion to approve was moved and seconded and was lost. The Chair, Councillor Josh Charters, asked whether anyone would move a refusal or a deferral. When nobody did, he moved a refusal himself on highway safety grounds, seconded by Councillor Nadeem Iqbal. "I would say that in this report there is no evidence to show that this HMO wouldn't adversely affect traffic levels," he said.

The Chair had earlier said he would prefer motions to come from the floor rather than from the chair.

Council officers warned before the vote that a refusal against advice needs a planning reason that can be defended. "If you're going to refuse this against officer advice you need to do so for a valid planning reason, and more importantly you'll need to provide evidence to support that reason for refusal in the event of an appeal, because if you don't there's a risk that the council will have costs awarded against us," one officer told the committee.

They also pointed to the planning history of Yew Tree House. In 2015 the committee refused a change of use to an HMO there on highway safety grounds, against officer advice, and a planning inspector allowed the appeal. Two other refusals at the same property were not overturned. Councillor Shuttleworth responded that Yew Tree House is a different property and that its other refusals stood.

What happens next

The applicant can appeal to the Planning Inspectorate, which would put the decision in front of a government inspector rather than the council. The outcome of any appeal would depend on the evidence and the inspector's assessment of this application.

The officer report on 121 Long Lane, the full agenda and the video of the meeting are published by the council. The nursery's registration details, which record Sarah Shaw as the registered person, are on the Ofsted website. The council's planning committee pages carry the draft minutes once they are published.