NRLA says landlord HHSRS fines are ‘pointless’ without enforcement

Sounds like Beadle is encouraging councils to carry out a witch hunt, not supporting landlords.

“Good landlords, who meet standards and undertake repairs swiftly, will be unaffected by these tough penalties.”
Sorry, Ben, you cannot know that. You assume that all reported hazards are the fault of landlords. Logically, this is a scientific miracle as it proves a negative, namely that it is impossible for a tenant (by virtue only of being a tenant) to be the cause of a hazard in a property.
If Councils act aggressively, the process will become part of the punishment. Landlords will have to spend time and money defending themselves and gathering evidence as to the cause of the damp, mould or whatever, and the solution.

A Council housing officer when inspecting my first HMO volunteered that in over 90% of cases of reported damp and mould, the tenants’ lifestyle and behaviour was the cause. From my experience, some tenants only alert the landlord once a problem has got very bad. Even if the landlord has to fix it, a problem that might cost £50 to fix if treated early may cost £500 or more if not reported in a timely fashion.

Is the leader of the NRLA really calling for more of it`s members to be fined. and persecuted by Councils.

I am sorry to use gritty language, but are some of these so-called property voices completely brain dead, or have they just arrived from the planet Zog?

Property is only owned in this country because the state says it is owned. That ownership is not floating around in some romantic, untouchable, private-law bubble. It is tethered to HM Land Registry, and every registered title is therefore capable of being identified, charged, restricted, controlled, taxed, regulated, penalised and, ultimately, sold.

That is the point too many of the so-called property representatives still do not seem to grasp.

A landlord can huff and puff about not paying a fine, but unpaid statutory penalties do not just disappear because somebody is cross on the internet. They can be turned into enforceable debt. That debt can be pursued. It can be secured. It can sit against the property like unpaid council tax, with interest and costs added until somebody pays it, refinances it, sells to clear it, or is forced into a worse outcome.

The notice will arrive in calm administrative language. It will not say, “We are dismantling your property business.” It will say, in effect:

“You have been issued with a penalty. You have the statutory period stated in the notice to make representations or appeal. If you do not pay, further enforcement action may follow.”

And in many cases, unless there is a real factual, procedural or proportionality argument, there will be no meaningful ground of appeal. It will not be a debate about whether the landlord likes the policy. It will be a statutory penalty imposed under a statutory scheme by a public authority exercising statutory powers.

That is the machinery.

The council does not need to run around with a pitchfork. It does not need to nationalise anything in one dramatic parliamentary announcement. It simply needs to issue notices, impose penalties, enforce debts, recover costs and, where necessary, secure those debts against the one thing landlords cannot hide: the property.

Then comes the collection machine. Councils can outsource recovery to the growing industry of private law firms, enforcement agents and debt-recovery operators plugged into local authority systems and procedures. The debt can be pursued through the courts. The property can be charged. If the registered proprietor is an individual, bankruptcy is a possible route. If the property is held in a company, winding-up is a possible route. If the charge remains unpaid, the eventual destination can be sale.

That is not fantasy. That is not conspiracy. That is how the system works.

Instead of poring over carefully constructed, performative statements — to use the latest political expression — designed mainly to keep members paying fees of questionable value, these property voices should spend a week in the library of property and political history. They might discover that much of this has happened before, probably before many of the current operators of these landlord “voices” were even born.

This is confiscatory property history on steroids.

It destroyed the property industry before, and it will destroy it again unless the supposed representatives of landlords acquire some knowledge, some wisdom, and, above all, a backbone. Their job is not to pander to government. Their job is to fight for the people who pay them to understand the threat before it is too late.

This is not really about economics. It is an ideological shift, delivered partly through tax, but more stealthily through regulation. The object is to transfer wealth away from asset holders while avoiding the political ugliness of saying so directly.

Property owners are the low-hanging fruit because property cannot run away. It cannot be moved abroad. It cannot be put in a suitcase. It exists because the state records it, recognises it and controls the machinery around it. That is why property is so easy to tax, so easy to regulate and so easy to penalise.

Regulation has effectively turned many registered proprietors into bare trustees of their own properties. The beneficial claimants are now government, councils and renters, with the former landlord reduced to a sort of unpaid housing officer, left to discover how much of the income, capital and control the state is still prepared to leave in his hands.

The country is financially exhausted. Government cannot generate meaningful growth, so it must look for capital that already exists. That means redistribution, not by one grand confiscatory act, but by a steady chain of tax, compliance, penalty, enforcement and forced adjustment.

As one Labour MP was said to have observed:

“It is only property returning to the state.”

That may have been said quietly, but the policy direction is shouting it.