Private rented sector ‘enforcement action’ by local authorities, as far as local media or residential property media are concerned, often means newsworthy prosecutions of ‘rogue landlords’. However, as with icebergs, there’s a lot more below the enforcement surface than such news items superficially imply.

Compliance (with relevant regulations, including licensing conditions) management capacity, it could be said, is the real name of the ‘enforcement’ game.

From the get-go, licensing scheme compliance management is data-driven, from first proposal through scheme designation approval and all the way to final completion of the scheme. The quality level of landlord management practices is, initially, evidenced at the licence application stage via submission of landlord and property documentation. The actual state of properties subject to scheme requirements, is visibly evidenced by inspection reports carried out during periodic programmes of inspections of all licensed properties at intervals during the five years of a scheme.

The challenge for local authorities lies in ensuring full oversight of properties, including tracking certification status, compliance with regulations, and maintaining up-to-date records. This requires managing and integrating various data sources, such as licence applications, inspection reports, and documentation on property conditions and certifications. Without a streamlined system, officers risk losing visibility of crucial compliance information, such as whether a property has valid certificates (e.g., gas safety or energy performance) or is meeting required standards. This can hinder proactive enforcement efforts and make it difficult to respond swiftly to non-compliance.

At Home Safe, we support local authorities in collecting and managing this data efficiently. Our dashboard allows our partners to have oversight at all times of those non-compliant properties and the work landlords are required to carry out (in timescales set by the local authority) to make their properties compliant. Even at the licence application stage, using our compliance dashboard, our partners are able to see just how many properties have the correct and valid documentation that housing and safety laws demand.

Should one of our partners need to take more formal enforcement action then the evidential data they need to take that process forward is there at the push of a button. Indeed, the aggregate data that this approach can provide to our partners allows them to build a real-life, real-time overview of the properties within their licensing scheme and identify factors such as the age of all the properties, the energy performance levels of all the properties and the management practices of all the landlords of those properties.

In summary, this approach enables an authority to efficiently allocate its EHO and administrative time and resources up to and including publication of the final review at scheme end and thereby show the improved outcomes it has achieved for residents.