Cake business from home, which tenancy?

dellaclearing

Hi Everyone

Hopefully I've posted this in the right place! My partner is looking to set up her own "selling cakes over the internet" business. She's been making cakes for friends for a while, the word spread and soon friends of friends started asking. Now she wants to do it professionally.

We're moving to London at the end of the year so we want to try to open a business there but we have a few questions that have come up that hopefully someone can advise on.

We will have to rent a flat as we can't yet afford to buy, we know this means that we'll have to find a landlord or agency that is okay with us cooking for a business from their kitchen.

We know that we'll have to rent a flat with a very high standard kitchen with 2 sinks, adequate ventilation, waste disposal etc so the Environmental Health people will give us the green light.

But... Seeing as we will only ever deliver cakes to customers, or meet them in a designated area for collection, we will never have any customers coming to our home address, can we do this with a standard residential tenancy? There won't be any other employees, she will be the sole trader and I will occasionally assist if necessary with the preparation and the deliveries.
We will have a website where customers can either place orders online or phone us. In some cases she may need to go and meet the client face-to-face in some coffee shop to discuss things like design ideas etc but they will never come to our home address. Do we still have to request a business tenancy?

Will we need planning permission even though our business won't impact on the area at all in terms of visitors, parking, delivery vehicles etc?

As a sole trader, will she have to register her business to an address? Will this have to be the flat we rent? And if so, does this automatically mean we have to take a business or mixed use tenancy? How will this impact on our rental costs?

We also looked at live/work accommodation. There are a few websites offering live/work flats for rent in London but they seem quite bare on information. Does a live/work flat automatically allow us to run a business from our home location? Will there still be extra business rates to pay on the flat or is the price advertised the price inclusive of the legal right to run a business?

Does anyone have any ideas as to how we can do this from a flat with a residential tenancy so we can minimise our costs while we're starting out without getting into any legal trouble? Or if anyone knows a website with good information about live/work accommodation we'd be really appreciative.

Thanks for reading!

lincroft1710

Your tenancy could well have a condition in it that no business may be run from the flat, this could also be a condition that the freeholder of the block imposes upon the leaseholder. In any case you may have to do a great deal of searching to find somewhere to rent with the kitchen spec you need within your rental budget.

Live/work accom usually has designated area for business use which would probably be subject to business rates. You would need to check exactly what type of business was allowed by the planning permission for that development.