Jun

LAW: Agent faces £10,000 bill after licencing fine appeal rejected

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A managing agent who failed to licence a property has had his appeal thrown out by a First Tier Property Tribunal.

Taren Lamba tried to convince the judge that he was not in control of the property in Kenwood Road, London (main picture) by insisting that all he did was take in the rents on behalf of his company Smart Move and then pass them onto the freeholder landlord, making an annual charge.

The tribunal heard that Enfield Council had fined him £10,000 after an inspection in December 2021 found the house was occupied by a tenant and family.

Enforcement officers discovered defective front and rear doors as well as no valid licence, despite a selective licence scheme having been introduced three months earlier.

At the hearing, Lamba also argued that the financial penalty was too high and that he hadn’t received several items of correspondence from the council.

Those items he received he had either referred to the freeholder or responded directly to them.

Enfield Council said its scheme was widely publicised to landlords, managing and letting agents within the borough before its introduction and that information was publicised on the authority’s website.

Failure

The judge ruled that Lamba’s failure to submit any evidence of compliance with the licensing scheme clearly hindered his case and that it was clear he had control of the property because he received the rack rent. The tribunal added: “We consider that the amount set by the respondent in the sum of £10,000 to be a reasonable amount for an offence of this type, since the local authority scored the matrix with care and took into consideration the requirements of their explicit scheme.”

Read the decision in full.