For all of you who have been following the story of the proposed selective licensing scheme, here is the final update; The two main agendas for Nottingham City Council’s proposed PRS licence is to improve the standard of rental accommodation and to reduce Anti-social behaviour in Nottingham.
I have now sat through the last of many of the Councils consultation meetings and researched the subject at length. My conclusions are as follows;
- Firstly – I cannot find any evidence to support the volumes of Anti-social behaviour which according to NCC’s licence proposal relates specifically to tenants of the private rental sector. This is certainly not evidential within Belvoir’s managed portfolio throughout the city.
- In order to support the pending licencing you have to first agree that All Private Rental Sector Tenants are the sole contributors of Anti-social behaviour in Nottingham and treated as such. To further support the blanket licencing strategy you then have to be of the opinion that any individual that commits the offence of Anti-social behaviour is a tenancy issue rather than a social issue.
- The Private rental sector is predominantly made up of fully referenced tenants, of whom by the sheer demand of rental property in the city, are selected based on the strengths of their individual applications. Private rental sector rents are also predominantly tenant/self-funded and therefore there is a fundamental reason why the tenants of these properties would want to work with their landlord for mutual benefit maintaining high-levels of property condition and tenancy conduct.
- In stark contrast between the Private Rental Sector and Social Housing, properties are provided on the basis of necessity and without the advantage of the background tenant checks or the ability to select the best applicant for each available property. In my experience this is often where the occurrence of neighbourly disputes and Anti-social behaviour begins and in-effect is the source of the problem to address.
- The mass majority of landlords in Nottingham already provide properties that meet or exceed the standards in which NCC have set out to achieve under their Decent Homes strategy.The ones that are agent managed offer an additional level of protection for both tenant and landlord to ensure standards are upheld more effectively than NCC’s additional licencing ever could.It will therefore be my recommendation that any landlord who’s properties are managed by a professional accredited letting agency such as Belvoir will automatically bypass this latest proposal.
- If you feel as strongly as I do about this issue, please click here to have your say before it’s too late… The deadline is 31st March 2017.
Lloyd Rumbold
