After previously refusing an co-living application in Baltic in 2021 Liverpool city council appear to be offering a more conciliatory tone in advance of the new local plan. The draft of the revised plan deals with co-living through a specific policy and differs from the previous plan where co-living was not mentioned.
The potential change of tack by Liverpool City Council comes at a time when the majority of UK cities have accepted the model even if they aren’t always popular with politicians and councillors.
The refusal which took place in 2021 was Crosslane’s plans for a 236-unit scheme which were rejected on the basis that the project provided too many one-bed units and that 192 of the homes did not comply with nationally described space standards.The following year, the city council published a policy advice note on co-living to give clarity on its stance.The advice note said that co-living schemes would be treated in the same way as any other residential product, including in terms of minimum space standards.
Co-living schemes differ from more traditional build to rent schemes in that the unit sizes are very often substantially smaller and often fall beneath nationally described space standards, which set out that a one-bed flat must exceed 398 sq ft. These smaller units are “offset” by developer offering a higher amount of communal space whilst also promoting a more social atmosphere within a building.
Liverpool’s draft local plan offers a glimmer of hope to developers who had given up on the possibility of making a co-living scheme stack up in the city. Policy H9 in the draft states that, while developers should still aspire to meet NDSS, a project that contains smaller units may still be approved if it is of high enough quality, sustainably located, and provides adequate communal space to make up for the shortfall in private space.
Although co-living has not taken off in Liverpool we do already have one scheme The James in James Street which has been operating for a few years and appears to have enjoyed a decent run of rising rents and good occupancy. There is no doubt in our view that there is room for co-living in Liverpool, certainly at lower numbers than in other cities. The popularity for co-living in Liverpool may be determined by which area of the city centre the developments come forward.
Article based upon the Place Northwest release dated 25th September
