A recent Upper Tier Tribunal rent repayment case highlights the responsibility of landlords to make themselves aware of local licensing schemes

In a decision on the quantum of rent repayment orders (RROs) released this week by the Upper Tier Tribunal (UTT), the tribunal has reinforced the principle that it is “incumbent on landlords to familiarise themselves with the legal requirements to which they were subject.”
The case involved a rent repayment appeal by the landlord against a decision by the First Tier Tribunal (FTT) to award an RRO set at 80% of the rent paid during the final 12 months of the tenancies of two occupants. The landlord also sought to appeal against the FTT’s decision against him on his defence of ‘reasonable excuse’ - in this case, the fact that he had not been aware that his property was subject to selective licensing.
Having gone through all the reasons that the landlord gave for being ignorant about the selective licensing scheme the FTT said that he “ought to have been” aware of it. In the UTT the Deputy Chamber President, Martin Rodger KC, said “It is not enough for a landlord to show that they made an honest mistake in failing to obtain a licence. To be reasonable, an excuse must be objectively reasonable, and the standards which landlords are generally expected to achieve are an important measure of what is objectively reasonable in a particular case.”
The Deputy President went on to say that “A local housing authority is not under an obligation to notify individual landlords of a licensing scheme and nothing had passed between [this landlord] and the council which relieved him of the responsibility of keeping himself informed. The FTT was entitled to regard his belated enquiries as too little and too late.” The reasonable excuse ground of appeal was then dismissed.
After going through a number of case law precedents illustrating what should be taken into account when setting the quantum of an RRO (for example, the difference between a housing offence that entailed a prison sentence and an offence that entailed a financial penalty) the UTT then reduced the amount of these RROs to 60% of the maximum.
The case report can be accessed here.