Portsmouth landlords have won their legal battle to force the city council to ditch blanket conditions in its HMO licence application forms.

Portsmouth & District Private Landlords Association (PDPLA) have argued for years that these deterred landlords from applying for a licence and forced swathes to sell up. An Upper Tribunal has now ruled that councils cannot prescribe the detailed contents of tenancy agreements through licence conditions, removing previous requirements to include inventories, deposit arrangements and rent clauses.

It also held that failing to provide documents requested by the council is not an offence unless the request is made in the form of a section 235 notice. Other changes include the condition regarding electrical safety being reduced to the statutory requirement, while the tribunal confirmed that requiring landlords to provide tenants’ personal information to the council is inappropriate as a licence condition.

PDPLA says the most significant clarification is that discretionary licence conditions can’t be applied on a blanket basis across all HMOs. Councils must be able to justify each discretionary condition for the specific property; while mandatory conditions are unaffected, ‘standard’ conditions must now be supported by property‑specific reasoning.

Wording

Portsmouth Council has now written to licence holders to say that future licences will contain updated wording “to ensure clarity and alignment with current legislation”. Landlords’ current licences remain valid.

However, PDPLA believes a few small changes at the outset could have avoided years of appeals and considerable expense for both sides.

Chairman Martin Silman (pictured left) tells LandlordZONE that the whole licensing experience has driven the vast majority of small HMO landlords out of the city. “I had four small HMOs, now I have none,” he says. “The damage is hidden, as a proportion of the small HMOs have been snapped up by developers and turned into eight or nine bed HMOs, so the capacity has only shrunk a little.

“The big issue is that choice and a large number of small, hands-on landlords have been replaced by fewer growth-focused developers.”

Validates

Landlord Simon Fletcher, who took the case to tribunal, believes the decision validates the association's long-standing position that each licence condition formulated by a council must have a robust justification that will stand up to thorough scrutiny. “We hope this decision will be noted across the country as a large number of councils impose conditions on a blanket policy basis without proper justification,” he adds.

“This is too little too late to make any real difference to the overall PRS landlord exodus; but we hope that it will prove useful in helping to ensure responsible and experienced landlords remaining in the sector are not overly burdened by over-zealous councils.”

Council

A Portsmouth City Council spokesperson says: "We have noted the recent Upper Tribunal decision which concerns a single licence issued for one property. The decision does not automatically apply to all licences.

"Whilst standard conditions provide a consistent framework for licensing decisions, our dedicated team of officers consider the relevant facts and circumstances of each individual property when determining licence requirements.

"We welcome the added legal clarity provided by the Tribunal and, as a result, we will make some limited changes to the wording of certain conditions used in future licences to make sure they remain clear, proportionate and aligned with current legislation. Whilst the Tribunal concluded that some individual conditions should be amended in that case, it also upheld significant aspects of our approach and confirmed important principles regarding local authorities' powers to regulate standards in HMOs.

"We will continue to work with and support landlords, many of whom share the council's aim of ensuring residents have safe and well-managed homes, to provide good quality rented homes."  

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