Over 50 councils have been allocated shares of a £2.4 million fund to crack down on rogue landlords, the government has announced.
Councils had been given until the end of November 2018 to apply to access the fund, and now the 56 that will use the extra money to tackle the problem have been revealed. Over £330,000 has been allocated to Greater London Authority and Greater Manchester Council Authority, which will distribute money across local authorities in their region to specifically combat rogue landlords.
Data and digital tech to the fore
The government wants the extra money to be used in a variety of ways, such as better use of digital technology or improving sharing of data with external agencies including as the police. It also wants councils to use the funding to improve their internal procedures and help with gathering information on landlords who make the lives of their tenants a misery.
Housing Minister Helen Wheeler said, “This extra funding will further boost councils’ ability to root out rogue landlords and ensure that poor-quality homes in the area are improved, making the housing market fairer for everyone.”
But the National Landlords Association policy officer Gavin Dick does not want this funding to be the end of the matter.
“While councils take measures on enforcement is always welcome, there is a significant amount of criminality that affects both landlords and tenants in the private rented sector,” he said.
“These measures need to go much further to be effective.”
An investigation by ITV and The Guardian that revealed that a database of rogue landlords had not been added to since its launch was followed by a change in policy, allowing the public access to the blacklist. A threshold where landlords could be exempt from having to pay to improve the energy efficiency of a property was raised by nearly 50% to £3,500, and a rogue landlord checker for London has had over 1,000 entries.
Why the funds are needed
But there is clearly still a need for councils to weed out the bad apples in the sector. The Residential Landlords Association (RLA) says that 89% of councils in England and Wales did not use the powers granted to them in April 2017 to issue civil penalties against rogue landlords who fail their tenants.
The RLA report also states that two thirds of local authorities did not bring any prosecutions against private landlords. They also found that a fifth of councils did not force landlords to carry out repairs by not issuing Improvement Notices.
