Enforcement – a thankless task

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The other week, I had the opportunity to shadow the Harrow Council Housing Enforcement Officers, who feature with me on for Channel 5’s ‘Nightmare Tenants Slum Landlords’.

Whilst my day to day job revolves around
helping landlords take back possession of their properties, I’m also acutely
aware of the lack of enforcement that exists to rid our industry of the rogue
landlords.

I wanted to learn more about what Harrow
Council’s team of Housing Enforcement Officers do on a daily basis and what
challenges they are up against.

The overarching challenge was glaringly
obvious from the moment I arrived – resource!

A local authority may designate the whole
of their district or part of their district to be subject to selective
licensing. In Harrow, different wards go through a consultation process to
determine what measures are necessary.

Harrow Council’s selective licensing aims
to tackle a significant and persistent problem with anti-social behaviour (ASB)
associated with private rented homes. Research by the council found that some
wards within its borough suffer from high levels anti-social behaviour, above
average rates for serious crime, high levels of fly-tipping and noise nuisance.
The schemes are designed to make a difference to residents, community,
businesses and the vulnerable.

However, with 1750 properties requiring
licenses but just four Housing Enforcement Officers and one person dealing with
licence applications, the backlog is extensive and the task ahead thankless.

I followed Ozzy and Andrew, Housing
Enforcement Officers for Harrow Council on two property inspections. The first
was to a property where bed sheets had been hung as curtains and was suspected
to be an unlicensed HMO. It turned out to be false alarm as it was occupied by
the owner. The second visit was to a property in Edgeware, following up on a
previous visit to ensure the landlord had abided by instructions to fix
disrepair issues.

At the moment, councils have the power to
hand out civil penalty notices of £5000 (although half of London councils did
not issue any fines last year) or even place a banning order on landlords. The
problem is without resource there is little enforcement of these. Ozzy and
Andrew told me that a lot of the time, councils don’t want to slap notices on
straight away as they want landlords to be given the opportunity to comply. To
a certain extent, I agree, but it’s important that tenants have a safe
environment to live, so any opportunity for landlords to make improvements MUST
then be followed up which requires time and head-count.

They also told me that banning orders,
which are generally issued to the worst offenders, were very hard to enforce,
very convoluted and resource intensive which is why there have been very few.

Councils have the challenging role of going
to numerous properties to enforce against naive and criminal landlords but
problem is every borough has a different budget and different resource
constraints. In Newham, for example, they have approximately 30 officers
compared to Harrow’s four. From speaking with team, they desperately need more
help but budget restrictions mean they are using agency staff rather than
employing full time officers and they often don’t have the knowledge or skills
required to be able to carry out work alone.

It is quite clear from sitting with the
team at Harrow Council that they care passionately about their job of
protecting tenants, but they are so overwhelmed with work, it’s easy for them
to become demoralized. I asked the head of the Housing Enforcement team, Jo
Smith, what would be your wish list, and she said:

–             Simplifying enforcement
notices
–             Making the procedure less
onerous
–             Having a an up to date
database
–             Most crucially, more trained
officers

For me, it was a real eye opener shadowing
the team and the barriers they are up against. 
With the growing private rented sector their roles are more important
than ever before. However, enforcement of measures designed to protect tenants
and weed out rogue landlords are inconsistent from borough to borough, it’s a
postcode lottery. It’s all very well regulating landlords, and the good guys are
happy to comply, but if its enforcement is inconsistent from one borough to
another due to resource constraints then it’s ineffective as a whole.

Obviously the first issue is resource, but
where possible, councils do need to put greater emphasis on ensuring those
properties which should have licenses, do have them.  This would then provide funds that can be
ringfenced and re-invested into enforcement so that the standard of properties
improves.

With 1200 properties still to investigate, the
team of four at Harrow Council really are unsung heroes.

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