You make a site visit and note that there are no flat numbers on the door, only a single buzzer.  You can clearly hear people moving around inside the property, but no one answers the door.  After serving a notice of entry and returning two days later, one of the tenants answers the door and lets you view inside the property, at which point you notice that it has been subdivided into eight self-contained flats.  You only manage to enter three of the flats, but they are all significantly under-sized and only of them has a window.  The tenant advises you that they have been advised by the landlord to never answer the door to the council, and that if they did, they would be evicted.  

 

Upon returning to the office, you carry out a land registry search and find out that the owner is a local developer who is well known to the planning enforcement team.  You send the developer an email and they respond immediately, advising you that the flats have been in place for over four years.  You check with the council tax department and discover that council tax has been paid on all eight flats continuously since 2012.  You also discover that there was a previous enforcement case on the property two years ago, relating to a satellite dish on the front elevation.  The owner of the property had on that occasion submitted a retrospective planning application for the satellite dish.  On the application form, which was filled out and signed by the owner, they wrote ‘single dwelling house’ when asked to describe the current use of the property. 

 

When you advise the complainant that the property is being used as eight flats, they become angry and claim they would never have purchased their property had they known this was the case. They demand that a Stop Notice is issued without delay, that the tenants are evicted from the property and that the property be immediately returned to a single dwelling house.