Nonsense on stilts: The government’s £7,000 death blow for small landlords

Am I reading this right? Am I hallucinating? I can’t be the only small landlord learning about the government’s plan for £7,000 on-the-spot fines and think, ‘Oh, do #### off‘.

This is a rushed column, so I’m shooting from the lip, and it’s in response to the outrageous news that councils can impose immediate fines on landlords.

That will be council employees whose own councils are regularly trashed by the housing ombudsman for offering poor quality homes on a much larger scale than private landlords.

It’s outrageous and is undeniable proof that the war on the small-scale private landlord has transitioned from a slow economic squeeze into outright state-sanctioned persecution.

And, even worse, landlords will effectively be penalised/ruined for the TENANT’S LIFESTYLE choices, for example, drying clothes indoors to create mould.

Severe civil penalties

ALL small landlords in England today will be reading the news with mouths open wide.

Local councils are being handed the power to dish out eye-watering, on-the-spot civil penalties of up to £7,000 if they ‘refuse to fix poor conditions’.

We’ve been here before; we all know what the word ‘refuse’ means in council parlance. If we can’t gain access, if we explain the tenant has caused mould or has broken the boiler, it’s all down to us.

Under the revamped Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS), overhauled for the first time in 20 years, individual landlords are left entirely at the whim of local authority employees.

These housing officers will act as investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury all at once, deciding what constitutes a ‘serious hazard’ from a list of 21 criteria. But the fault for those issues will not be laid at the door of the tenant. They must never be criticised, only awful landlords.

Let’s call this exactly what it is: nonsense on stilts.

Landlords could be ruined

The sheer disproportion of these fines is staggering.

A traditional, independent landlord managing one or two properties as a retirement nest egg could be financially ruined over subjective assessments of damp or heating efficiency.

Worse, the true, breathtaking hypocrisy of this legislation lies in the councils holding judgement while being exempt from the same standards.

If you want to find truly shocking, systemic and hazardous housing decay in England, you don’t look to the independent landlord down the street; you look to the local authorities themselves.

It was the fatal neglect within social housing that forced the creation of Awaab’s Law.

Council housing across the country is regularly, demonstrably found to be in a far worse state of repair than private homes.

Yet, do we see council housing directors facing personal £7,000 on-the-spot fines when their tenants are left to live in damp, mould-infested concrete blocks? Of course not.

There is one punitive rule for the private individual, and total immunity for the state.

Won’t affect criminal landlords

This plan will fail to catch the people Housing Secretary Steve Reed claims he is targeting: the genuinely criminal slumlords who operate sub-standard, unlicensed Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs) under cash-in-hand arrangements and fake corporate identities.

They will simply continue to run in the shadows.

They don’t engage with councils, and they don’t care about abiding by housing law.

Instead, cash-strapped local authorities, urged by the government to ‘go as far as possible’, will enthusiastically hunt down the easiest targets to balance their budgets.

That means targeting the decent, law-abiding, visible small landlords who are trying their best to navigate a constantly shifting legal landscape.

It is a cynical revenue-raising exercise disguised as tenant protection.

The end of landlords

For years, small landlords have been selling up, driven out by punitive tax changes and the abolition of section 21.

This administrative tyranny could well be the final nail in the coffin for many of us.

By crushing the independent housing provider, the government isn’t protecting renters, it is destroying the supply of homes, leaving tenants with fewer choices, higher prices and nowhere to go but the crumbling, fine-exempt properties of the state.

Oh, but there aren’t any homes for them, thanks to the huge numbers of people turning up in the country.

By handing cash-strapped councils the power to extract £7,000 on-the-spot fines from landlords, the government isn’t fixing bad housing, it’s weaponising bureaucracy.

While criminal slumlords duck under the radar and failing social housing homes get a free pass, the decent, independent landlord is being driven out of business.

Once again, the ultimate casualties won’t be the criminal landlords, but the renters left with nowhere to live. Labour politicians truly disgust me.

Until next time,

The Landlord Crusader