Landlords Victory in Liverpool

The attempt by Liverpool city council to impose their city wide licensing scheme on Liverpool landlords for a further 5 years has been struck down by the Secretary of State.

Full credit to the government and full credit to Brandon Lewis who changed the law after this greedy authority originally foisted their rotten scheme on Liverpool by claiming, deliberately misleadingly, that the entire city was an area of low demand.

To recap, in order to impose their scheme back in 2015 Liverpool claimed that the city ie all of Liverpool was an area of low demand. How insulting to residents, tenants and landlords and indeed everybody who loves this great vibrant amazing city.

Despite this we had the local authority working to undermine the city simply in order for this bankrupt authority to stuff its coffers with even more tax payers cash.

As we go to press we can also confirm that Merseyside police pulled a senior member of the council from his office last month and arrested him in connection with an ongoing corruption investigation. It would not be prudent to comment further on this at present.

Back to the council and their argument. Liverpool is not a city of low demand and the Government was absolutely correct in striking this garbage down.

The council recently had their sham consultation ..Sham because the 2015 consultation allowed their scheme to proceed on the back of the ‘low demand argument’.

We took the RLA to task at the time and told the previous CEO that co regulation was a serious mistake, that it was assisting the council with their dodgy scheme.

The Alliance since its inception has fought Liverpool tooth and nail. We flatly refused to legitimise their consultation process despite being invited to get involved. Our argument was that we could not engage with a process where the party running the scheme has lied in order to implement the original scheme back in 2015.

Instead we lobbied hard and then stepped back as the May government imploded. We also had a direct face to face meeting with a conservative MP and passed him a file for the Secretary of State.

That file outlined the nature of the misleading low demand argument as well as consisting of reams of evidence as to why Liverpool were not to be trusted with data. Anybodies data. We currently have an alliance member presenting another file to his legal team outlining over 150 data breaches by LCC.

At the time of writing there is a case in train in court for yet another breach of GDPR by Liverpool relating directly to landlord licensing.

We strongly disagreed with the RLA co regulating the Liverpool scheme, but we agree with a very valid point made by the RLA. They rightly point out that the majority of breaches which Liverpool crow about relate to technical breaches ie breaches such as forgetting to enclose an EPC in a tenant pack, rather than serious breaches relating to safety.

5 years in to the council’s money making racket and what has changed?

There are still parts of L4, L7 etc that are a blight on the landscape. Had Liverpool introduced licensing properly and target certain streets rather than vast swathes of postcodes, we would have backed the council. The overwhelming majority of Liverpool landlords are not rogue landlords and how dare these pompous town hall officials degrade this great city with their low demand tosh.

The council may now try to get 20% and jack up fees to pull some cash in. We say No. They have the scheme running, the infrastructure is in place so if they really are concerned about vulnerable tenants introduce the scheme on a select street basis. Reduce the fee to £100 now as the original set up costs have been paid for with millions to spare.

Do not attempt to extort further monies from tax payers as we will hold you to account.

Finally to all Liverpool residents, boycott the Liverpool Echo, the paper which pushes the Council agenda. The suggestion that lives are being put at risk by scrapping this scam is pure scaremongering.

Join the Landlords Alliance Click Here and help us to strike down every rotten scheme in the country.

There are many ways to improve housing and alleviate homelessness and selective licensing is certainly not the way to go. Liverpool ‘s gigantic failure proves that there are better ways.

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