The overall concept of a shared house isn’t an issue, it’s just the designs that cause objections, according to a South Swindon Parish councillor.

The area sees a high number of HMOs applications being submitted, mainly because it covers the town centre and Old Town - both very popular locations.

While the council does provide plenty of objections, it’s not just for the sake of it.

Patrick Herring, vice-chairman of the planning committee said: “There isn’t actually anything wrong with HMOs in principle.

“We get a lot of ‘no HMOs fullstop’ in feedback to planning applications but that’s not the right attitude.

“It’s that they need to be good ones to be worth doing. Unfortunately what we tend to find is that they are the default for landlords who absolutely want to maximise the amount of money with the minimum effort rather than designing good HMOs.

“There are quite a lot of standards around this stuff. There are the national standards and Swindon Borough Council which has relatively decent standards around how they are supposed to look - things like room size, light and ventilation into rooms which is so frequently left out.

“You will have some rooms that will have a tiny window the size of a shoebox in one corner facing an alley way.

“A lot of it isn’t groundbreaking stuff. It’s quite common sense. But it’s the stuff that landlords and developers don’t really want to do. They want to do the bare minimum.”

The standards for HMOs were set out in the borough’s local plan up to 2026.