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To: Nottingham City Council

Stop Nottingham Council's Selective Licensing Charge!

Scrap plans to role out a Selective Licensing scheme across the entire Nottingham City Council area which could end up costing tenants an additional £10-£20 a month in increased rents! This ridiculous attack on private rental sector tenants in Nottingham is due to start in Spring 2018

Why is this important?

1. One of the most costly ill thought out schemes in the country.

The scheme is meant to help tenants and landlords (and the community) by 'driving up' standards for all Nottingham's private rentals. However, at £600 per property for all 43,000 private rentals, that's £25m that will be going to the council that could have been spent on such improvements. Tenants and landlords will have to stump up cash for a full department of 77 people just to handle processing license applications! Most landlords who are already on tight budgets will need to get that extra cash to pay for this worthless license from somewhere and that somewhere will be through higher rents. By the council's own calculations tenants will now have to pay £12.10 A MONTH MORE as a result of the scheme but we believe that the added bureaucracy may mean AT LEAST £18-£20 A MONTH EXTRA per tenanted property.

2. There is absolutely no evidence to support this scheme

The council claims to have received 4,500 complaints regarding private rentals in the last four years. If you take this number against all of Nottingham's 43,000 rental properties that represents just 2% of properties complaining a year assuming (but not at all likely) that they were all from different properties. On further examination the council made on average less than 500 improvement actions per year in the same period and further it is difficult to assess whether these actions were major or trivial. This is not convincing enough for TENANTS TO POSSIBLY PAY UP TO £20 MORE A MONTH TO THE COUNCIL and looks more like a scheme to punish all tenants and landlords to rescue their own finances.

2. Tackling so-called 'Rogue Landlords'

Rogue or more aptly 'Criminal' landlords should be dealt with using tough existing sanctions. 99% of private landlords are not rogue. Nottingham City Council has a belief that all landlords are rogue until proven otherwise. The Council benefits from laws already in place to enforce prosecution. This scheme won’t add any extra ‘needed’ penalties. All this is going to do is add an extra penalty on already prosecutable offences and criminalise landlords for not having a license. If there are any criminal landlords operating under the radar then they won't take any notice of this scheme.

3. The scheme will NOT cut anti-social behaviour

The scheme is meant to tackle anti-social behaviour in areas with higher proportions of private rental properties which they believe are more deprived. After reading the council's justification for this we are still at a loss as to what the link could be between this scheme and any promised reduction. Nottingham City Council consistently under-performs on a whole raft of measures and penalising tenants and landlords is not going to solve any of their deep seated issues but by grabbing £25 million more from tenants they will make things even worse.

4. A totally bungled consultation process

So far the consultation has been a totally shabby affair leaving most tenants and landlords oblivious to the proposal. We believe that the consultation has been deliberately managed to get the changes in via the back door. For example, a recent costly City Council magazine called The Arrow (that no one reads) in it's pre-Christmas edition had a tiny ambiguous article mentioning the scheme with a dead web link to find out more. Halfway through the so-called consultation it has now only been correctly published in the new edition - this is UTTERLY UNACCEPTABLE.

5. The worst timing with central government tax changes.

The scheme will come into effect payable as a lump sum by landlords just as drastically higher tax bills from central government take effect which will prevent them offsetting finance costs which in themselves would already have meant large rent rises for most private sector tenants.

6. No impact in areas that have already adopted the scheme.

The council has provided no evidence from areas where similar schemes have been enforced of any improvements. Indeed, most have turned to farce or been exposed as the money making racket they are. The only noticeable impact in other areas has been that rents have risen rapidly and private sector investment may even have been displaced to other areas meaning there could be less rentals available in the future. Nottingham is blanket rolling this scheme out in all areas which will be a punishment on all of us and a £25 million pound drain on the people of Nottingham.

Please sign this petition to call a halt to this thoroughly ridiculous cash grab by the council.

How it will be delivered

The petition will be sent to the council at the end of the consultation period.

Nottingham

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Updates

2017-02-02 21:11:31 +0000

50 signatures reached

2017-01-31 11:19:39 +0000

25 signatures reached

2017-01-30 17:20:50 +0000

10 signatures reached