How crazy, out of touch and ignorant, arrogant council officers can be. Do not give in.
What I found over the years is that council officers go around their inspections fault picking, that is all they do. Some council officers are better than others at their job, but you may find some officers that have lost the plot altogether. What to do in such cases? This is when the following story will help you. In 2012 I had a council officer visit one of my HMOs in Nottingham. The officer decided to make a room uninhabitable, this was based on the fact that the boiler was in the loft above this habitable room. Therefore, in order to access the boiler, you had to go through the room. Because of this, the room must not have been habitable, according to the officer. His argument was that if the boiler stopped working, and it required maintenance, the tenant could have denied access to the boiler and therefore the whole house would have been without heating. Basically this view was based on no law and this happens all the time. Of course that room had been habitated for well over 10 years now.
If you look at any report from the council officers after their visits, what you find is that some of their requests of course are subjective and based on NO LAW. They basically sometimes make things up as they go along! But going back to that case, the council officer tried to make one room uninhabitable based on the boiler being in the attic of that room.
I still keep the email he sent me stating this. To this I replied with an email copying other people . All I had done in my reply is pointing out that most rooms in HMOs have interlinked smoke detectors in each room, each detector in the room requires periodic access for various reasons. If it were true that no item with requires maintenance for the house to be operational can be placed in the habitable room therefore no HMO with smoke detectors in every room must have none of the rooms occupied at any point as sleeping accommodation. Therefore, the vast majority of HMOs would be empty by law. It was really absurd, and of course there was no law stating that the boiler could not be located in an habitable room or in the attic of the habitable room. Basically, the officer made it up, as usual.
After I sent that email I heard nothing for years and no issue was ever raised on the matter The room had been habitated ever since for over 10 years without any issue at all. Obviously other council officers visited the same house several times, and we never had any issue, with this , do you know why? Once again because the council officer MADE IT UP! There was no law no regulation nothing that prohibited that room to be habitable, absolutely nothing. Imagine if I just rolled over and accepted it, I would have lost in the region of 70K over the years in lost rental income. Therefore, it is important to stand your ground and never roll over to unreasonable requests.
Why fight back, is it worth it?
Most of the time no matter what they come up with, it is cheaper to comply and move on.
On other occasions when they might, for example, object to the use of a room as rentable, then it might be definitely worthwhile to fight them head on, provided that you have the law on your side.
Before doing this it is better to know whether it is true that the room, in our example shall not be let out as sleeping accommodation, This is when you have to establish whether the request made by the officer is lawful or not.