The Secret Landlord

If the Government wants to charge me hundreds of pounds to rent out my properties, it must be held accountable

Another week, another hit on landlords, and another layer of bureaucracy to overcome. As part of Michael Gove’s Levelling Up White Paper, the Government has proposed holding all private rental sector properties to the Decent Homes Standard and introducing a new landlord register.

That means signing every landlord up to a licensing scheme. While officials have yet to decide how this policy will be implemented, analysts said existing licensing schemes run by individual local authorities offered the Government a blueprint.

However, adopting these schemes would likely result in large bills for landlords. Those in Newham, east London, the first local authority to launch a large-scale licensing scheme for private rental properties, must pay a fee of £750 for five years.

Now, I don’t want to come across as cynical, but we’ve been here before. Several times. And has it made a difference? Not a jot.

I am fully in favour of people renting a property of a decent standard and to prove my places are up to scratch, but the issue is the system. It has echoes of the warped EPC measurements that don’t measure the right thing.

Licences, as far as I have experienced, aren’t worth the paper they are written on. Experts have warned that councils may not be able to cope with the number of additional homes needing to be assessed. Over the years,

I’ve had a number of properties which have been subject to selective licensing schemes. Stamping out antisocial behaviour and improving the quality of local housing stock were their main objectives, the council claimed.

I’m all for such things and so I posted a cheque ( the cost of each scheme is dependent upon the council issuing the licence, but it’s usually around the £500 mark, with the scheme lasting up to five years). I heard nothing further (not even a receipt), so I called up the council and quizzed them on their key performance indicators and how they would judge the scheme to be a success.

I was greeted with silence. And this hasn’t happened to me just once, but three different times, with three different councils. It beggars belief that I have sent in money for their scheme and never heard anything back. Even for schemes which have since ended, I have never been informed of their results, despite my asking.

What I have managed to ascertain is that a scheme I was formerly on got 66pc of landlords to sign up. That means 34pc of landlords did not sign up. This was of great concern to me and so I asked the council what it was going to do about this.

I suggested that surely those who didn’t sign up were the ones to worry about. If a licence was required to rent out a property and almost a third were still unlicensed (and to my knowledge, unchecked), how would this improve property standards ( one of the main tenets of the scheme)? I tried calling and emailing several times with these repeated requests and the only reply I ever got was: “we’re looking into it”.

I will admit, I gave up. Which is disappointing because I am actually interested to find out what improvements they got from the introduction of the scheme and whether they met their (not-shared-with-me) KPIs.

The problem I have with introducing more licensing for landlords is that given that the system doesn’t seem to work, what hope is there for a bigger scheme? I’ve spoken to landlords who have sent off their monies to receive their licences a few weeks later and yet no checks were carried out. No property visits were made and many were not even asked for the most basic of certificates, such as gas safety.

How is any of this ensuring the properties meet current licensing standards, let alone the proposed Decent Homes Standard?

To me, the main problems arise from the fact that these schemes are introduced but not enforced. Why is it that a third of the properties on my former scheme were not licensed? In Newham, the numbers remain remarkably similar – a third are still unlicensed. This means one third of rental properties potentially do not meet the correct standards. How many properties across the UK in selective licensing areas are like this?

These statistics and rule- breaking behaviour are of huge concern to landlords – including me. Because the fact is, most good landlords will likely have the required licences. But the not-fitfor-standard properties continue to be rented out. If enforcement is happening, councils remain tight-lipped, but the numbers do not lie.

Regulations are being flouted and that is not good for anybody. For any future scheme to work, it needs to be transparent, accountable, and willing to share information. Without this, the system (and any future variation of it) will remain broken.