Labour accused of U-turn and easing short-term lets controls
Edinburgh's minority Labour administration has been accused of doing a U-turn on short-term lets and softening its stance over control of the Airbnb-style properties.
The claim came as the council’s planning committee voted 6:5 to ask officials for a report on proposals by self-caterers for what Green councillors said would be “blanket approval” for all 1300 short-term lets operating in the city before the council’s control area came into effect in September 2022.
A letter from the Association of Scottish Self Caterers to the council proposed “a mutually beneficial solution” to the large number of pre-september 2022 applications which the council now has to look at after it lost a judicial review of the way it was implementing controls on short-term lets.
Lord Braid found that the rules of the city-wide control area – introduced to tackle high concentrations of shortterm lets – could not be applied retrospectively. As a result the council can no longer demand that all operators of wholeproperty short-term lets seek planningpermissionaspartof their application for a licence, only those who began operating after the control area was introduced.
While council chiefs maintain planning permission will still be required in the vast majority of pre-september 2022 cases, the ruling means that thousands of applications must be assessed on a case-bycase basis to test if the change of use of a property has been “material”. The ASSC said in order to guard against further legal challenges, and to reduce the burden of having to consider every existing property on a case-by-case basis, the council should agree that “any property in existing use that is not subject to complaint or enforcement is not considered to be a material change of use and therefore does not require planning permission and a certificate of lawful use can be granted”.
Labour proposed asking officials to report to the next planning committee on the matters raised by the ASSC suggestion.
But Green councillor Chas Booth said: “I cannot see what the advantage is of opening the door to a blanket certificate of lawfulness for all pre-september 2022 holiday lets, all 1300 of them.”