After Leeds City Council introduced selective licensing in two of its wards in 2020 the resulting “closer working” between the council and allied agencies - enabled by the licensing schemes - ended up with “the seizure of over £50 million in Cannabis across the city as a whole.” Now the council is looking to extend licensing across five more of its ‘priority’ wards, in part, as a result of this licensing success.

The role of a proactive property inspection programme

It bears repeating that a property licence is more than just a piece of paper with the applicant’s name on it and that, once granted, the licensee isn’t simply just ‘good to go’, job done. Leeds Council’s selective licensing report to its Executive Board makes clear the importance of their proactive property inspection programme to the success of the initial 2020 schemes. Pointing out that 80% of inspected properties were “found to be non-compliant with the legal requirements” it went on to say that “working in partnership with agencies has allowed a greater impact in addressing those landlords who use the sector to support criminal activity”. It adds that “The work to address criminality in the private rented sector started in the two selective licensing areas. This initiative has now expanded to several ongoing city-wide operations working with police and partners …. By assessing the lessons learned from previous ways of working and developing the data gathered through the selective licensing scheme, we now have a better understanding of the way some landlords utilise the sector for criminality” and that this has “enhanced our ability to identify benefit fraud, council tax fraud, as well as identifying and supporting victims of human trafficking, modern slavery and other vulnerable individuals being exploited within the sector.”

Addressing criminality through collaborative efforts

But, it is not simply the ability of the licensing inspection programme to enable the council and its partners to deal with such egregious criminality that the report highlights. It also points out that “By proactively getting across the threshold into people’s homes, this has allowed officers working with partners to address issues in relation to health and wellbeing and the financial challenges faced by people” resulting in 1,419 support and assistance referrals of tenants to other agencies. The report then goes on to give a number of examples of the desperate conditions and circumstances some of the tenants officers came across when carrying out inspections were living in. These included one tenant quoted as saying “I’ve lived here for 3 years and nothing has ever been done to the house …. I’ve never had any smoke alarms or fire doors ….”

These Leeds licensing schemes, and the associated property inspections, are closely tied to the city’s overall housing strategy aimed at dealing with high poverty levels and poor health outcomes in certain areas of the city that also have significantly higher than average (for the city) levels of privately rented housing stock. Being able to get “across the threshold” of a home thus allows council officers to get real-world knowledge about housing conditions and landlord management practices.

Leeds' enforcement strength

Obviously, not all landlords are involved in organised crime - this will always be the minority - but proactive inspections, looking for serious hazards inside a house, such as poor or non-existent fire safety measures or serious damp and mould, led, in the case of Leeds, to 1,300 homes being improved. Most of these homes will have been improved via ‘informal’ action and working collaboratively with a relevant landlord who wishes, or is willing, to be compliant. Nevertheless, the council says that it still had to issue around 300 civil penalty notices against non-compliant landlords (though it should also be pointed out that, according to data provided to the Government, Leeds has a housing enforcement team capacity of 68.25 full-time equivalent (FTE) - which helped them to get across those thresholds).

Lessons from Leeds and beyond

The significance of this latter figure is underlined in a March 2024 report into the use of selective licensing, by five local authorities in London, by Cambridge House (Safer Renting). One of the conclusions of this report is that “Licensing was best regarded, not as a measure of effective enforcement, but as a measure of evidencing and understanding non compliance.”

The report points out that “In areas where compliance inspection programmes have been pursued, very high levels of property non-compliance were found to persist: 95% was an estimated figure provided for the frequency of partial non-compliance. This finding suggests that legislation should be amended to introduce a mandatory level of inspection to align statutory requirements with the practical realities of property conditions across licence types.”

Property licensing as a tool for maintaining standards

Referencing the work of Camden Council it points out that “Of the 150 compliance checks they reviewed, 99% still had outstanding work to be done …. It was clear that, in Camden’s experience, property licensing is a crucial tool to managing and maintaining standards in the PRS.”

The lesson from these two reports then, is that proactive property inspections are part of the bedrock of successful and meaningful selective and additional licensing schemes. However, this knowledge does not mean that there will not be an element of ‘pushback’ from local landlords to any licensing scheme designation that a local authority decides it wants to make.

The Leeds report highlights that local landlords resorted to Judicial Review (JR) of its schemes (as is the right of those landlords) but both of these failed. However, the issue for smaller councils is that there is a significant cost to defending against JR - Leeds is already factoring this potential cost risk into the potential 5 new schemes it is thinking of starting the preparatory work for. The data gathered from the compliance inspections and partnership work that they have already carried out in these existing schemes will go some way to (possibly) heading JR off at the pass in the future - though it could be argued that JR costs are now probably too high for landlords to stomach. Without “getting across the threshold” of homes that have been inspected this would be a much more difficult task.