A video report today by the BBC on disrepair in Private Rented Sector homes tells a too common story.

The broadcaster says their investigation into the private rented sector suggests that too many tenants who complain about dangerous disrepair are being let down by their council who will not follow through with enforcement.

At The Home Safe Scheme we've had a lot of experience inspecting privately rented properties on behalf of councils running property licensing schemes and we've found that, on average, for every 1000 properties inspected, there will be around 3000 issues found across those 1000 homes.

The difference is that in the selective licensing schemes where Home Safe operates as a Delivery Partner, councils can proactively "enforce" compliance with legal standards through inspection programmes that cover every licensed property instead of waiting for any tenant to be brave enough to complain and then carrying out formal enforcement reactively.

The LGA (Local Govt Association), quoted in the BBC report as saying "formal enforcement is a last resort", are right though and most members of the public will not be aware that, except in an emergency situation (where a prohibition order, preventing the property from being occupied until repair work is carried out, would be appropriate) councils are obliged by national government to engage with a landlord informally at first rather than jump straight to prosecution. If the landlord doesn't rectify the problem and ignores the council, then prosecution may be the answer.

In the Blackpool case highlighted by the BBC's video, the council seems to have taken the procedural path that it it was supposed to once it was made aware of the problem.

At the end of the day, there's not really a substitute for proactively inspecting all privately rented properties in order to get ahead of the problem but then - you'd have to roll out selective licensing across the whole country and that would be like inspecting every cargo container that came into port at Felixstowe.