A FORMER Barrow guest house is going to be refurbished into a house for eight people.

The closed guesthouse at 85 Abbey Road will be converted to accommodate people working in the town.

Barrow Council’s planning committee agreed the changes for the property at a meeting on Tuesday.

The three-storey property overlooks Barrow Park and is close to West View Road.

As a seven-bed guest house, it used to accommodate staff from BAE Systems, Furness General Hospital, and the offshore wind farm.

Planning officer Jennifer Dickinson told the committee that a similar application was refused permission in July last year.

Back then, the applicants hoped to convert the property to accommodate nine people.

At a meeting in Barrow Town Hall, she said: “The applicants have worked quite hard to try and overcome the previous reasons for refusal. The amended scheme includes extra amenity space in the form of an extra living room.

“Given the property’s authorised use as a guest house, it’s quite hard to argue that the amenity of the adjacent residents will be made significantly worse.”

Miles Bulloch, a director of Global Propertunities Ltd based in Convent Garden, London, applied to turn it into a house of multiple occupation.

Residents in Abbey Road, Warwick Street and West View Road were notified of the latest plans but there were no objections to a consultation.

Agents representing the applicants workers would use the building as they would a guesthouse – working at different hours, coming and going over different intervals and spending time in the property.

A council planning officer’s report said “the level of comings and goings” at the property would not be so different from its status as a former guesthouse.

It said on-street parking was available in the backstreet and surrounding side streets.