Barking and Dagenham HMO Room Sizes and Section 257 Converted Flats

Room sizes trip up more HMO landlords in Barking and Dagenham than almost any other compliance requirement. Measure wrong, and the council can reduce the permitted occupancy, refuse your licence, or take enforcement action — all of which cut directly into rental income.

Minimum Bedroom Sizes

The statutory minimum sleeping room sizes for HMOs in England are set by the Licensing of Houses in Multiple Occupation (Mandatory Conditions of Licences) (England) Regulations 2018. LBBD applies these national minimums as a baseline across both mandatory and additional HMO licences:

These are usable floor area measurements. LBBD officers measure the floor space at a height of at least 1.5 metres — any part of the room where the ceiling height is below 1.5 m (common in converted loft rooms and attic bedrooms) doesn't count toward the minimum.

LBBD also applies local minimums: 8.5 m² for a single bedroom with separate communal kitchen facilities, 14.0 m² for a single bedroom containing internal kitchen facilities, and 18.0 m² for a double bedroom containing internal kitchen facilities. A double bedroom with separate communal kitchen facilities has a 10.22 m² minimum.

Kitchen and bathroom facilities cannot be counted as sleeping space, even in studio-style rooms. Where a bedroom contains kitchen facilities, apply the local standards above as well as the council's amenity standards for cooking facilities.

What Officers Measure During Inspections

LBBD inspectors bring measuring equipment and will check every room they access. They measure:

• Floor area of each bedroom, compared against the maximum occupancy stated on your licence application
• Ceiling heights, particularly in converted properties with sloping roofs
• Kitchen and bathroom dimensions against amenity ratio standards (the number of facilities versus the number of occupants)
• Communal living space — though this isn't subject to a hard statutory minimum, officers assess whether shared space is adequate under the HHSRS overcrowding hazard category

If a room falls below the minimum, the council won't simply note it and move on. They can impose occupancy conditions on the licence limiting how many people may use that room, or they can refuse the licence entirely if the property can't meet minimum standards for the number of tenants you've declared.

Floor Plans: What LBBD Expects

Your licence application must include measured floor plans. For selective licence applications, hand-drawn plans with accurate dimensions are accepted. For HMO applications, LBBD expects scaled technical drawings showing room dimensions in square metres, ceiling heights, window positions, fire escape routes, and the location of kitchen and bathroom facilities.

Getting the floor plans right before you submit saves time and money. If the plans don't match what officers find during the inspection, you face delays while the application is reworked — and in the worst case, your Part A fee is at risk if the property fundamentally can't accommodate the occupancy numbers you declared.

Section 257 HMOs: The Converted Block Exception

Section 257 of the Housing Act 2004 defines a specific category of HMO: buildings (or parts of buildings) that have been converted into self-contained flats where the conversion work didn't comply with the Building Regulations 1991 or later standards, and where less than two-thirds of the flats are owner-occupied.

Many older converted properties in Barking and Dagenham fall into this category — particularly Victorian and Edwardian terraces divided into flats without proper building control sign-off.

The licensing treatment of section 257 blocks is often misunderstood:

At the building level, section 257 converted blocks are exempt from both mandatory and additional HMO licensing. LBBD doesn't require a single HMO licence for the whole building.

At the individual flat level, each privately rented flat within a section 257 block still needs its own selective licence. The building-level exemption doesn't extend to the tenancies within it. If you own a flat in a converted block and rent it out, you need a selective licence for that flat — even though the building as a whole is exempt from HMO licensing.

This distinction catches landlords who own multiple flats in the same converted block. Each flat requires its own application, its own Part A and Part B fees, and its own compliance inspection. There's no block-wide licence that covers everything.

Leasehold Complications

If your property sits within a block where LBBD itself holds the head freehold (common with ex-council estates), you need written consent from the Leasehold Services team ([email protected]) before submitting a licence application. LBBD generally prohibits HMO operation within its own freehold stock, so if you've been letting a flat as a shared house in an LBBD-owned block, you may face restrictions that go beyond licensing into breach-of-lease territory.

For a structured walkthrough of room measurements, floor plan preparation, and how section 257 blocks fit into the licensing framework, the Barking and Dagenham Landlord Licensing Guide covers all three schemes with a decision worksheet for each property type.

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