The Government has rejected calls for 10-year selective licensing schemes and insists that the government recognises the burden that licensing puts on landlords.
Speaking during a Commons committee meeting on the Renters’ Rights Bill, minister Matthew Pennycook said it was important that selective licensing, and the system introduced by the Bill, operated effectively alongside each other.
“We think a maximum duration of five years for discretionary licence schemes strikes the right balance,” said Pennycook. “It gives local authorities time to realise improvements while ensuring that landlords are not by default subject to increased regulation for prolonged periods.”
Green MP and co-leader Carla Denyer had tried to introduce an amendment to increase scheme lengths from five years and enable local authorities to start using licence conditions to improve housing conditions.
She wants the government to remove the Secretary of State’s ability to veto selective licensing schemes covering more than 20% of the local authority area and to remove the requirement for councils establishing schemes to ensure that the PRS forms a high proportion of properties in the area.
“If there are acute issues in the private rented sector that can be addressed through a selective licensing scheme, it seems arbitrary for local authorities to be unable to establish such a scheme just because that sector does not form a large proportion of the whole housing stock,” said Denyer.
“It does not make sense for local authorities introducing selective licensing schemes to have to spend a lot of money on preparing the paperwork for the scheme without knowing whether it will ultimately go ahead,” she added.
Denyer backed the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health which has urged the government to remove unnecessary barriers to using licensing schemes in a bid to improve housing standards.
Pennycook did not comment directly on the issue of using licence conditions to improve housing conditions and MPs didn’t vote on the amendment.
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