LICENSING LANDLORDS
The Council wants to force all landlords, not just HMO landlords, in Acton Central, East Acton, South Acton, Southall Green and Southall Broadway to be licensed at a cost of £500 per property. They are currently 'consulting'. They have paid Harper Mayhew Associates to come up with a 'Case for Selective Licensing'. It is hard going. Ealing is blinding landlords and tenants with science. The report even fails to do the job the way the law requires. Mayhew ends by asking the Council to do further work and come up with its own case. The Council has failed to do this. As part of the project the Council has compiled a secret register of "suspected" rented properties. They are refusing to say what it contains, but it seems to contain the names of residents and it associates them with incidents of antisocial behaviour and crime for which there is no evidence they were responsible. Are you on this sinister register? Have you been defamed? The Council claims the proposed new licensing schemes are needed because it doesn’t have enough powers to deal with problems. The real problem is they don’t use the powers they have. How often have you made a complaint about noise, nuisance etc. and got nowhere? The Consultation is turning out to be a sham. At the Acton meeting for the public to ask questions and be listened to, the council representative failed to answer an important question when he was interrupted and the last part of the event, the “Plenary Session”, when we were supposed to ask questions and get answers from the Council representatives never took place. Rather conveniently they did not reappear until people had already begun to leave the meeting. Thus the only chance for the public to put their questions and have them answered by the Council was lost!!
vincent paul WRIGLEY ● 3612d0 Comments