Woodman Pub Dartford: 5-Year HMO Backed, Bar Protected

Dartford’s Development Control Board is being asked to allow a house in multiple occupation inside The Woodman on East Hill, and to allow it for five years only.

The council’s case officer recommends granting the application. A condition would lock 87.3 square metres of the ground floor as a pub for the whole of that period, so the bar cannot be converted with it. (Officer report, 26/00288/FUL, 17 September 2026)

Eleven neighbours have objected. Kent County Council’s highways team has a holding objection on the file. The board meets at 7pm on Thursday 17 September in the Council Chamber at the Civic Centre, Home Gardens. (Agenda, Development Control Board)

What is actually being proposed

The pub has not traded for several years. The signage has been taken down and the officer’s report describes the ground floor frontage as having “the appearance of a vacant premises”.

Application 26/00288/FUL asks to keep using the upper floors and part of the ground floor as a five-bedroom, six-person HMO. It was received on 12 March and validated on 8 April 2026. The applicant is Lifeline Construction Ltd, the agent is Lyondale, and the case officer is Jas Bansil. (Dartford Borough Council planning register)

The scheme covers:

• four bedrooms on the first floor and one on the second, with two bathrooms and an en suite
• a communal lounge, dining room and kitchen in the rear part of the ground floor
• refuse storage against the western boundary and a metal cycle store in the rear garden
• pedestrian access down a gated side passage on the western boundary

The front part of the ground floor and the basement are not part of the change of use. Their lawful use stays as a public house. The rear garden runs back about 63 metres and was mostly a beer garden.

The council refused a permanent version last year

This is the second attempt. Application 25/00489/COU sought a permanent change of use to commercial storage plus the same six-person HMO, retrospectively. It was refused on three grounds:

• the loss of a public house and community facility, with insufficient evidence that the pub was not needed
• the loss of an appropriate ground floor use in a designated District Centre
• a failure to show the scheme would not be prejudicial to highway and pedestrian safety

The new application drops the storage use, keeps the pub floorspace and asks for five years rather than for good. The officer concludes that all three reasons for refusal have been overcome, because “a public house could still operate at the site” and because any permission would expire.

The HMO rules Dartford adopted in June are already being stretched

The council adopted a Guidance for the Planning of HMOs supplementary planning document on 25 June 2026, alongside two others, with immediate effect. (Supplementary planning policies report, 17 September 2026)

Policy H3 of that document says an HMO should not be created where 10 per cent or more of homes within a 50 metre radius are already HMOs. The officer’s report puts this site at 10.8 per cent, and calls it “fractionally over the suggested threshold”. Three other HMOs sit nearby, none of them next door.

The report recommends accepting what it calls a “small breach”, on the grounds that the building is a former pub rather than a family house, and that the permission would be temporary.

The same meeting gives board members their formal training on the new HMO document. It is item 8, immediately after the two applications.

Parking is the sticking point

Kent Highways has not withdrawn its holding objection. Its comments record that on-street parking cannot happen immediately outside the site, and that unrestricted on-street parking locally is “already in high demand with very little spare capacity”.

Highways officers also note vehicles have been seen parked on the frontage, causing “obstruction, unsafe movements, poor visibility”. They asked for a parking survey and for measures to make the scheme genuinely car-free.

The case officer declines both, calling them unreasonable for a temporary use of this size, and proposes a condition banning HMO parking on the frontage instead. That leaves the HMO with no parking of its own.

What the neighbours told the council

Eleven objections were received. The report groups them under headings including traffic and highway safety, parking pressure, refuse and noise, over-concentration of HMOs in Newtown, and anti-social behaviour, including a claim that occupants have camped in the garden.

One objection makes a point the officer does not dispute: an HMO above a working pub is a conflict, and nobody has explained how beer barrels would be delivered.

The conditions that would apply

If the board follows the recommendation, six conditions attach. Condition 2 just lists the approved drawings. The other five change how the building is used:

What it means for you

The pub is not being demolished or converted for good. On the officer’s reading, the front bar and the basement stay a pub in planning terms, and the whole building reverts to pub use in 2031 if nothing else is approved first. The report also notes the applicant is marketing the site “to consider its future potential”, and that this marketing is not part of the application.

If you want to speak at the meeting, two things matter:

• Only people who already commented on the application can speak, along with the applicant and agent. One speaker is allowed in favour and one against, on a first come, first served basis, with three minutes each.
• You register by phone on 01322 343987, a 24 hour line that is open at weekends. The letter the council sent tells you when the register opens and closes, and once it closes no more speakers are added. (Public speaking at the Development Control Board)

Anyone who has not commented can still write to the Chairman via the Civic Centre before the meeting, though that is not a route to speaking.

One date on the planning register is misleading. It gives a standard consultation expiry of 25 September, which is after the board has voted on 17 September. Treat the meeting as the deadline.

The agenda is on the council’s website and, five working days before the meeting, on paper at the Civic Centre and at Central Library in Market Street.

You can track this and other applications on our Dartford planning applications page, and check the town’s other town-centre schemes in Dartford planning news.