Nearly half of Westminster’s 22,000 council homes have been sold through Right-to-Buy in the past 30 years, and because government rules don’t allow local authorities to keep the proceeds of sale the properties haven’t been replaced by further social housing. Of course many of the flats purchased under Rent to Buy have been recycled into Private Sector renting – I personally know of 4 people who were able to retire to the country in middle age on the proceeds of the Right to Buy windfall which could be as much as several hundred thousand pounds in extreme cases.
This has left the council with a situation where they are paying housing benefit to tenants who are renting ex-council properties from private landlords – and this costs the council around four times the rent charged for a council home rented directly from the council, and on occasions up to five or six times the council rent.
What a mess – but probably not a mess that the government wishes to acknowledge as it stems from a conservative policy a generation ago, rather than something that can be neatly pinned on the last government.
Just visit any property forum or website & ask what landlords think of the idea of licensing and regulation and you will get a loud and clear indication that Landlords consider regulation to be an expensive useless waste of time.
In spite of this new rules were introduced in January 2010 which meant landlords of houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) must have their properties inspected and licensed. During the first year, until December 2011, Oxford City Council issued 338 licences – and just 11 of those, or three per cent, were issued without any additional conditions. To my mind this sends a loud and clear signal – either the Private Rental Sector is rotten to the core, or the Regulations are!
97% of Privately Rented Accommodation Isn’t Fit For Purpose?
The new regulations were introduced in two phases. From January 2011, landlords of three-storey houses or two-storey houses for five people or more were told to get their property inspected for £362, make any necessary alterations and renew the licence annually. The rules were then rolled out to include properties with three or more sharers this January, resulting in an extra 1,065 applications. Oxford is currently the only council in the country to require all HMOs to be licensed, more than 2,000 warning letters were sent to landlords in December, and since the scheme came into effect there have been eight prosecutions against landlords managing unsafe HMOs and one letting agent. The council has also taken over the management of one HMO because the landlord was not a fit and proper person to hold a licence.
So what is wrong – Landlords, or Regulations? During 2011 Pimlico Flats received 2 letters from Westminster City Council threatening enforcement action.
One was because we had 5 Flats which only had 1 lock on the door – in spite of 30 years without a crime, a daily manned reception and a 24/7 CCTV monitoring service WCC still estimated that the likelihood of death or serious injury from there only being 1 lock on each flat entrance was 1/7. It was cheaper to put a second lock on every door than argue with the Environmental Health Office about the regulations.
The second was that a tenant wasn’t sleeping with his girlfriend. How WCC were able to identify the couple’s nocturnal habits is beyond me, but they readily confessed to their crime – apparently they were working different hours and were using a sofa to avoid disturbing the partner. WCC were not prepared to accept the argument that as Landlord I had no right to dictate my tenant’s sexual habits, but fortunately the tenants were happy to give me a letter voluntarily committing themselves to sleeping together.
Clearly when 97% of the Private Rented Sector fails to meet regulations something needs to be done – what do you think should be done?
Speaking as a Pimlico HMO I was somewhat amazed at the stupidity displayed by 4 of my Bristol Bretheren who seem to have just ignored their local authority, and their responsibilities to provide safe decent accommodation.
The knowledge and attitude of local authority Environmental Health Officers can be patchy – they can be helpful, skilled, trained, or sometimes they leave you shaking your head in disbelief. You have to take the rough with the smooth, and in general things will turn out all right. What you cannot do is ignore them, or believe that the regulations apply to everyone else, but not you.
Housing Officers from Bristol City Council, found a series of problems at an HMO including:
Failure to provide adequate fire safety at the property.
Failure to ensure the shared areas of the property were maintained in a good and clean decorative order.
Failure to ensure the property was kept in good repair.
Failure to provide lighting in many of the shared areas of the property.
Keeping a property whose structure was a danger to the health of the occupiers.
Failure to provide information about the property when required to do so.
Bristol can offer a range of advice and support to help landlords comply with legislation, however, where landlords refuse to co-operate and where there are serious breaches of the Housing Act (as in this case) local authorities can and will take legal action to compel them to bring improvements.
On December 21, the landlords were summonsed before Bristol Magistrates Court in relation to alleged offences under the Housing Act 2004 and the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976. They, failed to attend Court or have representation – talk about committing suicide! The defendants were found guilty on all charges, and the combined fines totalled £30,036.30 and combined costs totalled £5,199.60.
