Selective licensing ammunition from Nottingham

Some figures enclosed, some of you landlords may enjoy for your ammunition elsewhere. Click here to download Selective Licensing Update pdf.

What is interesting to me is only 642 licenses have been issued. Imagine if you had to wait that long 16 months for your car MOT or driving License. After having paid £780.

Approx 230 properties improved, but thousands more got worse cause of less budget and thousands homeless because of Licensing. That’s not a good compromise.

They say the late court ruling mean’t late changes to forms. It wasn’t late, everyone knew about it, I had several emails from the Council and Councillor Jane Urquhart saying they was aware of the ruling, but felt that it didn’t apply to the Nottingham Licensing scheme, so they chose to ignore it for months causing Landlords to spend millions in the meantime until Nottingham Council finally backtracked.

The text below a Landlord sent me:

I did go looking for actual homeless figures and found these council meeting minutes which you might already have seen.

This OVERVIEW AND SCRUTINY COMMITTEE September meeting is worth a read as well as the pdf referred to in it which mentions a budget of £9 million for homelessness. Section 20. Click here

Also the October meeting has a report on SL . Click here

The unexpectedly high numbers of licence exemptions due to planned sales is interesting.

Overview and Scrutiny Committee 9 October 2019 Selective Licensing Update

1. Summary

This ambitious scheme, one of the largest of its kind in the country, started on 1st August 2018 and is due to run to July 2023. Its implementation followed a pledge by the previous administration to introduce a city-wide licensing scheme which was part of an overall vision of ‘Quality Housing for all’.

A team of 75 officers, across 12 different roles (many of whom were recruited from outside the authority) has been established, and there is at this stage satisfaction with how the scheme has developed. Appendix 1 and 2 offer some further key statistics, graphs and mini case studies.

2. Performance update

Key statistics (to end of Aug 2019, unless otherwise stated)

• Licence applications received 17,523 *
• Temporary exemption requests received 763 **
• Draft licences issued 3903 Final licences issued 472
• Pre-licensing inspections completed 475
• Interventions (works required / improvements made) 237
• Properties improved prior to our inspection, but because of the scheme 67
• Properties improved through our intervention 160
• Formal Enforcement (Civil Penalties and / or Prosecutions) 16* Up to 32,000 properties are believed to be subject to selective licensing. However, due to reasons such as the uncertain and fluctuating housing market it is estimated that the Council will receive 24,000, which is what the fee is based on.** Temporary exemptions notices (TENs) are given where there is evidence of the property being taken out of licensing e.g. selling a property. They last 3 months and can be extended once for a further 3 months, if after this time the property requires licensing a licence is required.

  Commentary

  The Council has received above the level of expected licence applications to date. A whole new team needed to be created, new processes and ways of working had to be developed whilst working within a new regulatory context. This has presented challenges, but we are already seeing some positive outcomes.

  Higher than expected levels of temporary exemption requests have been received: these require a response and this has created an unexpected pressure on the team. The following are the priorities and delivery plan for the scheme as identified by the Executive Board report, April 2018:

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