Councillors have butted heads over how best to deal with the uncontrolled spread of Houses of Multiple Occupancy (HMOs) in their town.

It comes as one area of Maidstone, Fant, has seen a huge number of conversions, causing problems around parking, noise, neighbour disputes and disruption from building work.

Cllr Paul Harper (Fant and Oakwood Independent), who represents the ward, put forward a motion calling on the borough council to use Article 4 directives to control the issue in the ME16 8 postcode area.

Under existing legislation, developers have “permitted development rights” to convert any house into a six-bed HMO without planning permission.

An Article 4 direction would remove these rights, meaning every application would need to go before the council’s planning committee for scrutiny.

Cllr Harper pointed out that his motion was almost identical to one he had put before the council unsuccessfully almost three years ago.

At the time, he had been assured that the council would find another way to tackle the issue, but he said: “Since then, nothing has changed, except that in the meantime dozens and dozens more homes have been sub-divided into HMOs.”

He told colleagues: “Fant is really suffering. Its nature is being eroded.”

Five years ago, he told the council, the turnover of electors in Fant had been 5% a year. Now it was more than 30%, which, he said, indicated an increasingly transient population.

Cllr Harper pointed out that only this week, the Nu Venture bus company had announced that it would be cutting its Fant No 78 bus service to just one a day in the New Year, with one of the difficulties raised being the difficulty of manoeuvring buses past the excessive parking on Fant streets.

Cllr Stan Forecast (Con), who grew up in Douglas Road in Fant, agreed with Cllr Harper, observing that “parking is at a breaking point.”

But deputy council leader Cllr Clive English (Lib Dem), while acknowledging that “there is clearly an issue”, told Cllr Harper that an Article 4 direction would be pointless because when the application came before the planning committee, members would still have no grounds on which to refuse the application.

He said that on recent occasions where HMO applications had been refused, the decision had simply been reversed by a government inspector on appeal.

He said: “What we are doing is bringing forward a Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) [to control HMOs] and revising our parking standards policy to give us the resources we need.”

He said to divert officers’ time into drafting an Article 4 order would delay the production of the new policies.

Cllr Kimmy Milham (Green), who also represents Fant Ward, was equally passionate about the perceived harm caused by HMOs to the area.

She said: “I hear from residents concerns about noise, neighbour disputes, building work to expand the house that impacts on their privacy and use of their own garden, but most importantly about how many HMOs these residents have to have on one street.

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“It is the number of them that is just as concerning as the quality of them.”

But, she said, she believed that an Article 4 direction was the wrong way to go and she didn’t want to give her residents “false hope.”

She said: “The motion tonight only addresses the postcode of ME16 8. As a resident and ward councillor, I obviously care about this area, but I cannot ignore that this is already a growing concern for those in High Street, Bridge, Tovil and beyond.

“An Article 4 direction would only push the problem somewhere else, maybe to Marden, Staplehurst, or Barming.

“We need to safeguard the whole borough from the over-saturation of HMOs, and the harm that comes with them.”

Developing new policy guidelines was the way to go, she said.

As is standard procedure, the mayor, Cllr John Perry, referred the motion to the council’s planning policy advisory committee for further debate.