Buy to Let Landlord Registration is Thought to Be Ineffective
The Government plans to oblige all private landlords to register before they get a permission to rent out residential property. According to a national registration system, private landlords will have to pay a registration fee – perhaps £50 – and to maintain certain standards. Those, who fail to carry out repairing works or who browbeat tenants, could be refused a landlord license.
The idea of the introduction of national registration system for landlords came out from a move headed by the Association of Residential Lettings Agents, aimed at the introduction of a similar voluntary licensing initiative for letting agents.
At the same time, Landlord Assist emphasizes that further expenditures of landlords will influence those who enter the market and also the choice of rental property available.
Managing Director of Landlord Assist, Graham Kinnear, shares his opinion on further legislation, saying that it will be useless, as long as landlords are already suffering from reams of legislation. According to Kinneat, supplementary registration schemes will only prevent people from entering the market. The legislation aimed at ensuring that landlords meet the required gas and electric standards is already in place; legislation for failure to provide an energy performance certificate plus legislation surrounding the correct operation of Houses in Multiple Occupation licenses and the treatment of tenants’ deposits also exist.
Stephen Parry of Landlord Assist is of the opinion that it becomes evident during the working process that the number of unprincipled landlords is equal to the number of unprincipled tenants. At the moment landlords are less protected by law than tenants.
Experts comment that the government’s proposed scheme will poorly perform because only responsible landlords will comply with it, whereas bad landlords will evade it as they do ignore all current requirements. There is no sense in controlling registered landlords, says Landlord Assist. All in all, landlords and tenants are looking forward to learn the details of the proposed scheme, which are to be published in the Green Paper.
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I find Stephen Parry’s comments about whether landlords and letting agents should be licenced interesting. The aim of the powers that be is to present the PRS as a viable alternative to social housing. This means treating renting tenants as ‘consumers’ or ‘customers’ whichever you prefer. We keep hearing about the extra burden that would be placed on responsible landlords and that there is plenty of legislation in place already but these arguments miss the point entirely. As we are aware, letting agents can open and close at will on any high street with no records being kept. ARLA, like every organisation in the PRS is voluntary and whilst these organisations provide a great service, waiting around for everyone to sign up to either these organisations or accreditation schemes is a pointless exercise. I live in East London where my postal code has a high proportion of slum landlords and agents with no accreditation. I am also part of our Right to Manage company for my block of flats that has a high proportion of both. A centralised database with some basic details would start to enable tenants to start making more informed choices. Just names, contact details and whether accredited or not would be a good start and I have been quietly lobbying for this since 2007 and actually suggested it to a number of industry professionals ahead of the Rugg Review.
If landlords don’t appear on the register then that at least will prompt the question ‘why aren’t they there?’
It has also been asked as to why there is no proposal to set up a ‘bad’ tenants register and the answer to this is simple – tenants need somewhere to live as a basic human right. Landlords on the other hand choose to become so. Letting out property is a business and its about time that all that enter the market act accordingly. We also had an absent ground landlord and negligent managing agents because of the total lack of entry criteria with the landlord eventually going inside for a number of years for customs and excise fraud and the agents simply failing to file so I know first hand that misery that having not even any basic entry criteria can cause.
[Reply]
Sharon,
Thank you for your truly in-depth comment. I agree that the issue of landlords’ registration is controversial, and suggest that you bring up this topic on our website’s forum if you’re interested in it.
Kind regards,
E1 News chief editor,
Ulyana Chernyak.
[Reply]