Oxford, one of the UK’s most proactive councils in enforcing house in multiple occupation laws, is warning that landlords running shared homes without a licence risk prosecution.
A year in to a controversial city-wide shared licensing scheme, and one of the council officers responsible for the scheme, health development service manager Ian Wright, has reported on the results to date in a magazine for published by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).
The readers were told:
• 233 reports of unlicensed houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) have been investigated by the council, mainly as a result of tip offs from unhappy tenants and neighbours.
Of these, 126 are still open – with eight cases going before the courts and another seven cases waiting to go to magistrates in the pipeline, while 15 cases are under review by the council’s legal team.
The council has taken over the running of one HMO.
• Private landlords have switched 20 properties from small HMOs – for three to five tenants sharing cooking or bathroom facilities – to letting to families to avoid licensing, with a maximum of 100 tenants losing their homes.
The council claims new HMOs opening have cancelled out the loss.
• 56 applications to change homes in to HMO have been withdrawn by landlords
From the New Year, the council is to focus on ‘capturing’ unlicensed HMOs. The council reckons the city has around 5,000 HMO properties.
“Since the introduction of the scheme, a total of 1,170 applications have been received for larger HMOs and 1,011 applications for smaller HMOs. There have also been 102 applications for mandatory licensable HMOs. To date, 1,050 licences have been issued,” Wright wrote in the RICS article.
He also explained that student landlords were not the most vociferous opponents of the scheme.
“The most negative reaction to the scheme has come from the Asian community, which perceives it as affecting their properties disproportionately. A community forum has been set up to address these issues and to dispel any misconceptions about the council’s attitude,” he wrote.
