A housing officer has admitted he guessed the number of houses in multiple occupation in a town because the council has no idea of the total.
Boston Borough Council head of housing, property and communities, Andy Fisher was telling councillors about a recent HMO survey that estimated the Lincolnshire town had 460 shared houses.
When asked for more details during a debate on homelessness, he told the council's corporate and community committee that the number ‘could be significantly more’ and then stated ‘who really knows?’
Mr Fisher than divulged the council is looking to introduce a licensing scheme to take a tighter grip on HMOs in the area, but was concerned that landlords would not want to pay the fees and could switch shared homes back to single occupancy, pushing tenants in to homelessness.
He also told councillors that HMO properties were not poor housing just because they were shared and that most of the homes his team had visited recently offered tenants good living standards.
In 2008, a Communities and Local Government Department survey revealed that councils in England estimated that 28,000 ‘missing’ unlicensed HMOs were let to tenants.
The findings suggested England has about 56,000 HMOs, with 25,000 registered with local councils.
Many councils admitted that no records were kept for monitoring HMOs and most estimated the number of shared houses in their areas.
Around 100 landlords are prosecuted each year for letting an HMO without a licence, and most of these only reach the courts because of significant flouting of fire safety rules.
Residents, universities and councillors in Oxford are currently embroiled in a dispute over the number of students living in shared homes around the city - the university reckons the figure is around 7,000 while the residents have conducted a survey indicating the figure is nearer 10,000.
If the residents are correct, the numbers put the city’s universities in breach of planning conditions.
