Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
300-302)
MR RICHARD
JONES AND
MR MARK
BUTTERWORTH
23 NOVEMBER 2009
Q300 Chair: That would be very helpful.
Mr Jones:— is that prior
to the introduction of HMO licensing Leeds had and still has two
well established accreditation schemes. It has the Unipol scheme
for student accommodation and the Leeds City Council's accreditation
scheme and they run in tandem. As a result of a lot of contact
between the City Council and Unipol and landlords, and I think
there are about 400 accredited landlords, an awful lot of them
have signed up to an accreditation scheme already and that was
used as the vehicle to engage with landlords to get them into
the licensing scheme, so they were already the people who were
showing their heads above the parapet. They were on board, they
were working with the local authority, they were going to the
forum meetings and so on. This has emerged literally in the last
week or two. Leeds, because of co-operation from the landlords,
were far more advanced in getting their licensing scheme up and
running than, say, Sheffield, which has still not issued an awful
lot of its HMO licences. Leeds has therefore now moved on to compliance
checking and has visited some 500 to 750 properties; I can find
the exact number; it is somewhere between those two figures. They
prioritised their inspection regime on a likely worst case first
basis and looked at the more difficult properties, the more difficult
landlords. They have now done these compliance checks and by and
large have there been any problems shown? No. What we have done
therefore is that we have brought into licensing probably 2,500
student properties in the north west area of Leeds centred around
Headingley which were already members of accreditation schemes
and have now been found, on checking of the worst properties,
to be by and large compliant, no problems, landlords are not complaining
that there have been any problems with these properties which
have been checked. How many properties are licensed outside that
north west student area? Very few when I saw the last statistics,
handfuls of properties, and so it has been a massive exercise
to bring in landlords who are already in the loop, so to speak,
because they were in existing accreditation schemes, and create
this huge bureaucracy which has cost about £1.25 million.
One point I want to stress also is that that money is not paid
by landlords; it is paid, as with all regulatory fees, by the
consumer. It is the tenant who bears it ultimately through rents
or, in the case of tenants who are in receipt of housing benefit,
the public purse. We have had this whole scheme. It has not made
a jot of difference. There have been some problems over unnecessarily
high fire standards which were put in until LACORS guidance sorted
that out and that has annoyed landlords because they have had
to go over the top and that has caused some difficulties. I think
that demonstrates what has gone wrong. There is an awful lot of
pressure in Leeds from the HMO lobby to bring in additional licensing
but if you talk to local authority officers they will say, "This
is nonsense. We do not want to be wasting more time in north west
Leeds which is well policed with student unions and parents and
so on. We want to get out and get stuck into the poorer conversions,
which are not licensable HMOs because they are self-contained
flats, in other areas outside this north west area". Interestingly,
some work was done by one particular environmental health officer
just before the 2004 Act came into force on a small area on a
street-by-street basis which did achieve some real improvements
in those converted flats, and those are the areas that need concentrating
on, not yet more student and young professional type homes being
brought into the net.
Q301 Mr Turner: In a similar vein,
again in your evidence you said that the Housing Health and Safety
Rating System "has not been enforced even-handedly".
I wonder if you could give us a bit more detail on that, and again
say why you think that is so?
Mr Jones: I think this is in relation
to the owner occupier sector.
Q302 Mr Turner: Yes.
Mr Jones: Can I give you another
example of where this has happened? I do quite a bit of work with
Hull City Council and, very sensibly, instead of going down the
selective licensing route, Hull landlords persuaded Hull City
Council to go into proactive enforcement. This demonstrates that
something can be done without spending a fortune in licensing.
You pick a poor area. Two poor areas were agreed and landlords
are going in there and after training (they have to undergo a
training course) they self-inspect. We had to do a lot of work
to settle the standards, and because this was done on an area
basis—and it comes back to Mark's point about trying to
get the big hit, particularly in energy efficiency, through improving
the owner occupied sector—there was a lot of concern expressed
by landlords that HHSRS was not being enforced equally in respect
of the owner occupied sector, and it was the policy basically
not to enforce with owner occupiers in a meaningful way. That
was what I was referring to when we prepared the evidence.
Mr Butterworth: There is also
the difference between the social sector and the private rented
sector where a local authority cannot issue notices to itself
but it can for everybody else, and also the social sector does
not get prosecuted for Category 2 hazards like the private rented
sector does. On the accreditation point, we have tried very hard
with accreditation and many doors are beginning to open but one
of the biggest ones is an approved code of conduct which we spent
a lot of time and effort on, but the predecessor to the CLG could
not get any political will to accept a sensible code of conduct
which has been a major kick in the teeth for a very useful scheme
so far.
Chair: Thank you both very much indeed.
Mr Jones, it would be very helpful if afterwards you were able
to drop us a note with the specific details about the Leeds numbers
that you were talking about2
2 Number of licensed HMOs in Leeds, broken down
by ward: Armley Count 24, Beeston & Holbeck Count 30, Bramley
and Stanningley Count 3, Burmantofts & Richmond Hill Count
12, Chapel Allerton Count 29, City & Hunslet Count 34, Crossgates
and Whinmoor Count 6, Farnley & Wortley 3, Garforth &
Swillington Count 7, Gipton & Harehills Count 6, Guiseley
& Rawdon Count 1, Headingley Count, 1277, Horsforth Count,
4, Hyde Park & Woodhouse Count 776, Killingbeck & Seacroft
Count 1, Kirkstall Count 245, Moortown Count 10, Otley & Yeadon
Count 1, Pudsey Count 1, Roundhay Count 25, Temple Newsam Count
7, Weetwood Count 122, Wetherby Count 3, Grand Count 2627.
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