Shocking revelations about councils wrongly applying shared housing regulations that can cost private property owners thousands of pounds without redress have led Property Investment Expert to start ‘naming and shaming’ the culprits.
Property Investment Expert will investigate problems and ask the councils for an explanation to publish online and in the public domain.
The aim is to raise council awareness of HMO regulations and to encourage them to apply standards and licence conditions in a uniform fashion.
Councils were given new planning and licensing powers to control shared housing by the government from today.
Property Investment Expert has uncovered that councils often make mistakes in applying the law, according to reports on the Communities and Local Government (CLG) web site.
These include:
- A landlord spending £400,000 on upgrading 150 shared houses with new wash basins to meet government standards – only for the council to say they were not needed a year after the work was completed
- A council employing six officers to enforce HMO licensing on all HMOs in the area only to find only a small number required a licence by law
- A landlord winning a tribunal forcing a council to retract over onerous HMO licencing conditions
The CLG document also confirms councils and the government do not know how many unlicensed shared houses are operating in England.
Also revealed is information about a confidential database maintained by an unnamed London council that rates shared housing owners as “good, bad or average” landlords - and landlords have no right of redress or access to what the database says about them.
“Clearly poor advice and training in often under resourced councils is costing property owners thousands of pounds,” said Property Investment Expert editor Steve Sims. “Something needs to be done to stop this continuing, so we will investigate complaints from property owners and name and shame council publically if they are found to be overstepping their powers.
“Landlords have to be taken to account and the government is intending to let tenants rate them on a web site, so I don’t see why rogue councils should not suffer the same fate.”
Download your copy of our guide to the new HMO Planning and Licensing rules now
We are going through a very similar situation described above. In January 2009 London’s Southwark Council issued a HMO licence for one of the properties we managed on a daily basis. The licence was for 10 people. During the application process concil’s enforcement officer came to the property a few times. She measured every bedroom and checked everything that would be needed for them to be able to issue the licence. The owner then spend thousands of pounds changing all doors, installing a second kitchen sink, second oven/cooker and extra cupboards spaces, etc. Once the job was completed the officer came back to make sure all was done accordingly. They then issued the licence for 10 people. This is a large 6 bedroom house with separate kitchen/dinner and lounge.
Now, 18 months later the council contact us again to say that a mistake was made. Another officer came to the property and subsequently sent us a letter stating that the licence is to be varied and it would only allow for 5 people (3 households) to live in the house. They wanted us to leave 3 of the 6 bedrooms empty, which makes the whole property commercially unviable. According to them the bedrooms are under the minimum size of 10m2 allowed by the council. The bedroom sizes are 8 m2, 8.6 m2 and 9 m2. At the time of the first application they even sent us documents stating that the minimum bedroom size was 6.5 m2. Now they are saying that those measurements were never adopted by the council, but only the 10 m2 one. Needless to say that we are very shocked by the fact that they can just do whatever they feel like. We then appealed to their initial proposal to vary the licence by responding to their letter and restating all the facts. They reply stating that they will allow us to use the 9 m2 bedroom as it is just about 10% variation and they also said “sorry for the inconvenience caused” while making absolute no reference to the thousands of pounds spent to get the 10 people licence in the first place. They have since issued a new licence and the other 2 bedrooms are to remain vacant. We are about the appeal to the Residential Property Tribunal but we are feeling a bit lost. We would like to believe that the council has no right to dictate their own laws as they go along. A lot of money and time was invested into this property and the results of the licence alteration will have devastating impact on our business. Any advice or help would be gratefully received!