Great Yarmouth Council has radically altered its selective licensing scheme conditions after a challenge by landlords.

The original draft licence included a wide range of requirements relating to property inspections, document production, property management, EPCs, safety measures, occupancy restrictions, waste management and other matters that the Eastern Landlord Association (ELA) argued went well beyond the statutory mandatory conditions.

These had included conditions such as not allowing anti-social behaviour in a property and a maximum occupancy of four people in a three-bedroom house.

When challenging the scheme, ELA vice chair James Crickmore (pictured) highlighted the recent Upper Tribunal decision against Portsmouth Council which reinforced that councils cannot simply impose blanket licence conditions without specific justification relating to the individual property.

Outcome

“The outcome is that the council’s revised licence conditions now consist almost entirely of the mandatory requirements set out in Schedule 4 of the Housing Act 2004, together with a limited notification of changes provision and an antisocial behaviour condition to be applied only on a case-by-case basis,” Crickmore tells LandlordZONE, who has hailed it a victory for landlords in Great Yarmouth.

“They used the licence conditions as their justification for implementing selective licensing in the first place – so is the scheme still relevant?" he asks. "Now is the time to call it off.”

A council spokesman says its move is in common with all local authorities following the Portsmouth case and that licence conditions have been amended to include general advice to landlords explaining their duties under other legislation.

Ruling

‘’This legal ruling has no effect on the council’s powers to inspect licensed properties and to assess them for hazards. The inspection programme will continue as planned and the council will make full use of its new powers to impose civil penalties if serious hazards are found,” he tells LandlordZONE.

‘’Apart from a short delay while the council sought legal advice, it has not affected the application process because no full licences have yet been issued. There is a statutory consultation period within the licensing process so, where draft licences have been issued, these will be reissued with the new conditions and a further 28 days allowed for representations.”

Portsmouth

Landlord Simon Fletcher, who won the case against Portsmouth Council, says it’s gratifying to see landlords in another part of the country benefitting from the action it took against standardised licence conditions in the city.

“I can only hope that all other councils will now follow Great Yarmouth’s lead, take note of the tribunal’s decision in our case and remove all licence conditions that are not justified by circumstances related to the specific house,” says Fletcher.

‍