Nottingham Landlord Licensing – Letter to Councillor

Nottingham Landlord Licensing – Letter to Councillor

15:40 PM, 7th August 2018, About 6 years ago 22

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Subject: Re: Landlord Licensing

Dear Councillor Urquhart,

My wife and I have just spent a day and a half applying for 7 licences for 7 almost identical apartments in one building owned by our company in the Park, that notorious hotbed of antisocial behaviour in the city????

I have to report that in all of our thirty plus years in business I have never come across such a poorly designed questionnaire. The endless unnecessary time consuming duplication and ambiguous questions are to say the least totally mind boggling. In our case, 7 separate payments for one building being part of the nonsense!!!  Did those responsible for the design of the questionnaire think of trialing it across a diverse group of landlords in advance of it going live?
Could I suggest you personally trial the licence application without any help or advice.

Having completed and submitted our 7 applications we are still unsure whether they have been correctly completed, as there seems to be no easy way to  read back through the submission. The pages are not numbered so you have no idea where you are within the form and a printout of the application does not show whether the required support documentation has been included.

The consequence of imposing this licence application on private landlords will probably, no doubt, work in the council’s favour through the imposition of a huge number of £30,000 fines on the IT illiterate landlords who for their sins possess limited computer skills.

Bad landlords will of course not respond and you will therefore need to find them if you can, in order to prosecute. Good landlords who make every effort to act in the best interests of their tenants will no doubt be paying for this legally questionable scheme!

Regards

Chris

PS Councillor Urquhart responded that she would forward on my comments to the appropriate department.


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Comments

amarni

15:22 PM, 13th August 2018, About 6 years ago

Ah Mike,

I really sympathise with the time, stress and anxiety and jobsworth form-filling to trip you up that you and other landlords of multiple properties are enduring, penned in as many of you are. The councils/government really are a lowdown law unto themselves and their grip is tightening overall. They have a slushfund of our money (council tax) to dip into whenever they want. It is a bottomless gold and silver fund for them. Recently, Guildford Borough Council upgraded their offices - all paid for us, the taxpayer and which are now proposing to stop visitors parking - which will mean that the staff can park 24 hours without paying a penny to shop in town, whereas I, who live in the area and have a parking space off-road have to pay £2.00 just to park in the street or as happened last week received a penalty notice £70 or early pay £35 charge just for visiting my tenanted property for 20 minutes to clear some items out and run them down to the local dump which turned out to be closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays ongoing - no notice given to residents. "Did you not read the sign said one in an orange top..." I was fuming and managed to toss some carpet into a container before leaving the rest still in the car to return on the Thursday.

I lived in old free West Berlin in the day for many years and now experience living here back in England is akin to a noose being tightened day-on-day.

Worse is that NLA and some landlords side and connive pretending they want to kick out so-called rogue landlords but in truth want to distance themselves as having scruples. I am certain most who are now viewed a respectable have in the early days taken cash. A programme about Bit-Coin etc shown a few months ago finished with the consensus that ultimately 'cash is, was and will remain King. Generally, it is truly sickening how everyone takes a stand against all those decent landlords - in fact - most, and are now treated by the government with less respect and rights than prisoners.

Comply with this, comply with that and yet Grenfell lifts and doors were out of order and the council did not know who and how many were living there, legally or not. Look at the LA garden which are never looked after. What a farce! I believe that one of the directors at Shelter stood down because he was somehow connected to that build and not called to account.

Worse, tenants are actively supported to dispise those offering access to a roof over their head. Of course as seen on channel 5, landlords and tenants programme, no one seems interested into how many tenants get away with trashing properties. The number of ex-tenanted flats in Guildford for sale is high, so why are few being bought by generation x? No they want film-style layout and mod cons from the outset - Most could not wield a drill or many seem unable to understand how to separate food from the pizza boxes into the food waste bin and keep the bins clean, lids closed and off the street.

Where can I escape to ? Lived back in the day in Spain - not sure I could do it now.

Old Mrs Landlord

16:35 PM, 13th August 2018, About 6 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Mick Roberts at 12/08/2018 - 17:40
Mick I think you should be billing the council for your time spent on completing these crazy forms.

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