London: Mary Portas, the UK government’s high-street champion, has joined fashion and digital business leaders to warn that relaxing planning rules risks damaging clusters of creative and design businesses.

Whitehall made it easier last year for developers to convert empty offices into homes across England, arguing that this would help deliver more housing and return empty buildings to use. The government now plans to extend the rule by abolishing exemptions for some business areas in the capital.

Portas, along with Caroline Rush, chief executive of the British Fashion Council, and Guy Levin, executive director of the Coalition for a Digital Economy, have written to Eric Pickles, communities secretary, to protest against the policy. Earlier this month, Boris Johnson, mayor of London, joined business lobbyists and property industry representatives to warn the rule on office-to-residential conversions risked damaging the city’s economy.

A large proportion of the applications so far involve occupied offices, leading to established businesses being eviction. The amount of available office space across the UK is falling at a record rate, partly as a result of the policy’s introduction, according to figures published this summer. The removal of central London’s exemptions means the capital may lose millions of square feet of office space.

“Thriving businesses are being turfed out and jobs erased from mixed business-residential areas,” Portas said. “It is hitting start-up businesses, technology entrepreneurs and the design, artistic and fashion community particularly hard.”

These businesses receive government support, Portas, Rush and Levin pointed out in their letter to Pickles. They argued: “The effect of these planning changes is to take away with one hand what is being offered with the other.”

The letter singled out Utopia Village in the upmarket Primrose Hill district of north London. This is an example of a cluster of small creative businesses that has come under threat from the office-to-residential policy.

Pickles is set to decide whether to allow a property developer to evict businesses which employ 300 people from a complex of studios and offices. Such a move would make it a test case for other developments planned around the country.

The properties’ owner wants to convert the Victorian former industrial buildings into 53 homes. Occupiers include tech, law, finance, media production, fashion and cosmetics businesses. Camden Council, the local authority, rejected the plans but the developer appealed against the decision.

John Chambers of Marshall Arts, a music tour promoter and tenant of Utopia Village, said: “What was a fully occupied, happily established and harmonious estate is being broken up. This area is ideally suited to the creative industries.”

Brandon Lewis, planning minister, said the reforms were “helping to promote brownfield regeneration, protect the greenbelt and increase housing supply at no cost to the taxpayer”.

“The government’s change-of-use reforms are providing badly needed homes such as studios and one-bedroom flats for young people,” he said.

— Financial Times