Introduction
This article has been produced for both Landlords and council officers. We focus in particular on HMO licensing inspection issues. After extensive experience of dealing with council officers due to HMO licensing and various inspections, it is clear that both Council officers and many Landlords are not clear about the real role of the council officers. The issue is that the officers tend to abuse their position and act irresponsibly, sometimes even violating the law of the land and overstep their real power.
The good news for the Landlords are that in any event the real power of the council officers are very limited. They cannot fine you, they cannot do much really. The reason is that in order to be able to do anything they need to start persecutions, and prosecutions are very hard indeed even in those cases where the defendant is not amounting to a real defence. In most cases when the landlord would amount to any defence at all, it would be almost impossible for the council to be a winner in a prosecution case. Therefore, when you see their threats of fines up to 30K and so on it is only an empty threat. They would need to start prosecutions and those are very difficult unless a serious incident had taken place, like a fire or a building collapse that injured or killed people etc.
In the famous Book “The art of War” it is said “know your enemy, and you will win every battle” or better even “the best outcome of a war is such a war where you win without even fighting” and this is the case with the council. In most cases no matter what the officers come up with there is almost nothing that they can do and issuing an enforcement notice could be dangerous, because if it is issued on the wrong grounds then:
1 You may decide to simply ignore it and they would need to start prosecutions, and the prosecutions could fail. At that point, you could sue successfully retrospectively for issuing an unlawful enforcement notice.,
2 If the enforcement notice is unlawful, then you can decide to fight it with a simple letter or email pointing out how the enforcement notice is unlawful. It is even better to ask based on what law the enforcement notice was issued, at that point if the enforcement notice is not lawful then if the council does not withdraw it they maybe liable for successful civil lawsuit.
What are the most important aspects of an HMO to be compliant with regulations.
1. Fire regulation compliance. This is the reason for most successful prosecutions. So be fire regs compliant. It is not difficult.
2 Amenities compliance. Number of cookers, Room sizes, number of bathrooms per occupant etc. You can read more about it on the Council’s HMO amenities standards.
3 Anything else is pretty much subjective and very unlikely to lead to a successful prosecution.