Oxford City Council has taken legal action to bring seven homes, which were being used as short lets, back into family use.
The Council successfully issued seven planning enforcement notices for the property Beechwood House in Barton Road, where the owner had been using the mansion style residential property to run a short let business without sufficient planning permission.
However, having accepted these notices without appeal, these seven properties are now back on the Oxford property market as C3 dwelling houses (non-HMO residences) with a minimum tenancy of six months for single or family use. Converting a full residential property such as Beechwood House into a short-term rental for longer than 140 nights in the calendar year is considered a material change of use, requiring planning permission.
The notices required the owner to cease use of the properties as short lets from 7 July 2025.
“We are committed to ensuring that properties in Oxford are used for the purposes they are registered for.
“It’s almost impossible to say how many much-needed homes Oxford has lost to short lets because the sector is still virtually unregulated. What we do know is there are nearly 3,500 households on our waiting list for council housing and that unregulated short lets can cause misery in our communities.
“We want people to visit and stay in our amazing city. Oxford has so much to offer. But uncontrolled short lets are a blight on our communities, they deprive us of much-needed homes and deepen our affordability crisis.
“We've been asking government for powers to regulate whole-property short lets for years. The time for change is long overdue.”
- Councillor Linda Smith, Cabinet Member for Housing and Communities
The problem of short lets
The rise of websites like Airbnb and Vrbo has led to a rapid increase in the number of short lets in Oxford in the last decade.
The increase in renting out entire properties for all or most of the year has resulted in the loss of valuable homes in the UK’s most unaffordable city.
Meanwhile, there are nearly 3,500 households on the waiting list for social housing in Oxford.
In the worst cases, short lets have been used for illegal or antisocial purposes. Short lets are often in quiet residential neighbourhoods. The strain this causes can be immense.
The short-let sector remains virtually unregulated. This means the Council has little power to enforce standards it requires for other rented accommodation.
It is also difficult to tackle issues like antisocial behaviour and nuisance when there is a stream of different people using a property.
The Council has taken successful planning enforcement action in cases where owners changed the use of a house into a short let without planning permission.
However, this is a lengthy process which relies on people making complaints about individual properties.
Since 2018, the Council has repeatedly lobbied for powers to put whole house short lets on a level playing field with other privately rented and commercial tourist accommodation – including a mandatory registration licensing scheme, run and enforceable by councils.
Mandatory registration would ensure owners meet minimum safety standards. It would make investigating complaints significantly easier and allow the Council to set conditions addressing local needs or concerns – like restricting noise levels at night.
In extreme cases, it would provide the Council with wider and easier-to-use powers to act against the illegal use of short lets.
The Council has also lobbied for the introduction of a new planning class for short lets, which would allow it to restrict their numbers and location and for enforceable conditions to be applied where necessary. While the previous government proposed making a new use class in February 2024, this remains yet to be introduced in planning law.
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