With very significant public sector financial and thus also capacity constraints in the short to medium term and no let up (thus far) in Government approvals of larger selective licensing schemes, Local Authorities need to box clever to achieve their strategic housing goals in the face of the choppy waters they are currently experiencing.

LocalAuthorities looking to implement selective licensing are well aware of the immediate critiques levelled at them as soon as the words “selective licensing” are mentioned. From the landlord community it often comes down to either fee levels or a feeling of good landlords being unjustifiably “punished” for the behaviour of the bad or “rogue” landlords. Internally, officers and Councillors will be worried about capacity and increasingly scarce resources and how these may affect the successful deliverability of a licensing scheme. Tenants and the wider Community are invariably in favour of selective licensing.

From the get go a Local Authority has to commit some level of resource to just, pre “business case” proposal, researching selective licensing if it is a tool that they have not used before and this in itself can be daunting. Available data on the local private rented sector (PRS) can be incomplete (even property ownership data on the national Land Registry can be sometimes incorrect or out of date).

A good place to look when researching selective or additional licensing will be the cabinet meeting minutes of Local Authorities that have experience in using licensing as a means to improve standards in the PRS. These minutes often provide an impressive overview of what a Local Authority is seeking to achieve, the means required in achieving and the pros and cons in running a 5 year licensing programme. The main takeaway is that selective and additional licensing are simply parts of a wider tool kit a Local Authority will use and are not an end in themselves.

The trick though is to efficiently utilise existing resources so that a scheme can pay its own way and not require too much (if any) subsidy from the Local Authority’s “General Fund”. Working with partners and bidding for available funds from Government programmes (Safer Streets being a prime example of the latter).

However, another, innovative, approach can be to use a Delivery Partner for all or some of the scheme’s processes. This is not “Outsourcing” and in fact can’t be Outsourcing. Licensing is a regulatory tool and “Regulation” (in any sector) can’t be outsourced. The use of a Delivery Partner is a support function not an outsourcing of non core Local Authority services. The Delivery Partner model can support a Local Authority in the Authority’s successful administration of the scheme and allows the Authority to be the Regulator in a more effective manner. For instance, the Delivery Partner can help the Authority to successfully process a large number of applications in a concentrated time span or carry out a set number of property inspections and manage those landlords who are compliant with housing standards or tenancy management standards leaving the Authority to concentrate its existing administrative and enforcement resources on non compliant landlords. To this end, Home Safe (as one example) has successfully partnered with Great Yarmouth Borough Council in the delivery of their selective licensing scheme.

If the constraints the public sector is experiencing are now not on the horizon but lapping at the beach during the interesting times we are living through at the moment then the delivery Partner model is one tool in the tool kit worthy of consideration in any licensing proposal. Good landlord can distinguish themselves from bad landlords, tenants can get value for money and so can the Local Authority to the benefit of the wider Community and the ultimate Goals of the Authority as a Regulator and place maker.