This was an interesting meeting, attended by about 20 of Oxford’s decent and honest landlords as well as Ian Wright, the City Council Service Manager that covers HMOs and Ken Staunton, the NLA Head of Regions.

Ken first spoke about the NLA Landlord accreditation scheme which looks like is a really useful thing.  I am impressed at how much information it provides and how it has a requirement for Continual Professional Development for Landlords.  That’s very important in the continual changing regulatory landscape in which the business has to operate these days.

There was then a talk by Ian Wright from the City Council about the additional HMO registration scheme.  Ian did a good job of explaining what I think is a completely over-the top scheme that is crippling the HMO market.  It’s not Ian’s fault – he’s just doing what the Labour Administration of Oxford City Council tell him but there really are a lot of charges and I was appalled to hear that the council is demanding extra works on 97% of properties where licenses are being applied for.  In most cases tenants and landlords were entirely happy before the council interfered.  Ian did show some slides of some awful cases where council intervention is clearly needed and welcome but I suspect none of those applied to to the good and honest landlords present last night.  There was also a list given of successful prosecutions.  I was a bit surprised that the names of all those convicted were included and didn’t really understand why Ian included a case where someone had been imprisoned after performing an illegal eviction.  That case was nothing to do with HMO licensing even though that was the subject of Ian’s talk.

There was a lot of dicussion and confusion about the change to HMO registration requirements coming in January 2012 and the Article 4 direction on planning which removes the permitted development right to change a property from C3 (domestic household) to C4 (HMO with 3-6 unrelated sharers) coming in February 2012.  It’s fascinating to me that the council seems to act as if Landlords are nasty evildoers trying to extort money out of tenants while spending as little as possible whereas what I saw was a bunch of honest professionals trying to run their business in an honest a way as possible.  There is clearly a lot of confusion about the ridiculous amount over over-regulation the Labour council is trying to pile onto the HMO market in Oxford.  I find it really hard to understand as Oxford is depsperately short of housing and HMOs provide a vital part of the housing mix.  If Landlords are persecuted and saddled with ridiculous amounts of expense for work that nobody wants then that will just get passed on in increased rents and Oxford’s housing (and homelessness) problems will jut get worse.  I wish Labour would just accept that being a landlord is just an honest business in the same that running a taxi, a shop, or a bar is.

The meeting took about 2 hours and was extremely interesting.