Council urged to review HMO fees
A Slough councillor has urged the council to look at its licence fee charges for a house of multiple occupation (HMO) after being ‘very surprised’ the authority is only charging half of what neighbouring boroughs are.
Cllr Subhash Mohindra (Con, Upton) said he believes the council is losing out on ‘a lot’ of money due to the lesser charges.
Cllr Mohindra raised his concerns over the fee charges during a discussion on the general fund revenue budget proposals 2024/25 and the medium-term financial strategy for 2024/25 to 2027/28 at a meeting of the corporate improvement scrutiny committee at Observatory House last week.
He said: “I’ve been looking at all the HMOs fees for all the boroughs.
“[I] looked at Windsor, looked at South Bucks, looked at various other authorities.”
Cllr Mohindra said Slough council’s charges are only ‘half’ of what these neighbouring authorities are charging in HMO fees.
He said: “I’m very surprised and that’s not been increased since four, five, six years now and I’m concerned, why are we lagging behind?
“Windsor is charging £800, we’re charging only £400 per licence,” he said.
Cllr Mohindra added: “I reckon we’re losing a lot of money on that. I think this has to be looked into.”
Cllr Iftakhar Ahmed (Con, Wexham Court), said: “At the time when they were introduced, they were very competitive.
“There’s HMO licence fees and there’s also selective licensing fees, so there will be a further report coming to the cabinet in due course and we will review those and respond to you accordingly in a timely manner.”
Elsewhere in the meeting, council leader Dexter Smith (Con, Colnbrook and Poyle) discussed the Government’s recent announcement of a £500million emergency funding to help councils with providing children and adult social care services.
Cllr Smith said: “We’re still assessing what the impact of that will be. It is for social care, principally children's social care.
“The cost of children's services is creeping towards 40 per cent of the total budget and we think that there could be somewhere in the region of about a million pounds help from that.”