The Voice of Landlords Associations (VOLA) has urged Housing & Local Government Secretary Steve Reed to justify why growing numbers of councils are overlooking parts of the statutory guidance around landlord civil penalty fines in favour of a model formulated by Justice for Tenants.

The Renters’ Rights Act introduces a new statutory duty requiring councils to investigate and act against landlords for housing offences – and statutory guidance has been introduced to help them interpret those duties. Meanwhile, tenant advocacy group Justice for Tenants has formulated guidance – the Model Housing and Licensing Enforcement Policy - endorsed by the Association of Chief Environmental Health Officers (ACEHO) aiming to drive consistency in local policy across England.

Growing numbers of local authorities across England have adopted this model as their regulatory standard and a number are also skipping informal routes such as warning letters before hitting landlords with a financial penalty, says VOLA.

At least 150 councils now use Justice for Tenants’ civil penalty notice generator software which applies their penalty policy to set individual fines. The group has also set up a legal firm, which takes a fee for recovery of the debt if a fine is not paid immediately.

Letter

However, in its open letter to Reed, VOLA says councils’ enforcement policies don’t appear wholly aligned to the government statutory guidance or the Sentencing Council’s general guidelines and believes there could be a lack of review and due diligence.

VOLA believes the government’s working group that formulated its guidance didn’t draw on diverse experience, while previous tribunal cases discussed were all London cases and not a representative cross-section from across the country, resulting in a London-weighted baseline.

“The statutory guidance allows mitigating and aggravating factors to be taken into consideration affecting culpability or harm in the calculation of the penalty and sets out the principle that these must be considered on a case-specific basis,” says VOLA chair Charlie Baker (pictured). “However, the JFT/ACEHO model civil penalty policy prescribes as a blanket policy that a 20% uplift be applied where the landlord operates through a company structure – an attribute that does not by nature imply any elevated culpability or harm.”

Questions

In the letter, VOLA also questions whether Justice for Tenants could gain a commercial advantage through councils’ use of the CPN generator.

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government says local housing authorities are formally required to consider MHCLG’s revised statutory guidance on civil penalties when setting their own individual civil penalty policy. They also need to ensure that civil penalty debt recovery services from any provider have been properly procured, and data protection legislation is complied with.

LandlordZONE has approached Justice for Tenants for comment.

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