Nottingham Council loses £95k fight about student room sizes
Council fails all the way to the Supreme Court
Nottingham City Council racked up in excess of £95,000 in costs fighting a judgement on two student rooms in the Lenton area of the city.
The council, which has been a keen supporter of central government’s heavy regulation of the private rented sector, took its case all the way to the Supreme Court.
The case involved two Houses of Multiple Occupancy (HMOs) in the popular student area of Lenton. In each house an attic room had been converted into bedrooms by the landlord.
Attic room sizes
In one of the properties, the attic conversion had a total floor area of 9.75 m2. However, because of a sloping ceiling, only 5.89 m2 of this had a floor to ceiling height of 1.53 m2 or more.
Also featuring a sloping roof, the attic room in the second property has 11 m2 floor area, of which 6.89 m2 has a floor to ceiling height of 1.53 metres or more.
Each house had received a new HMO licence, but the council had imposed conditions that meant neither of the attic rooms could be let as a bedroom.
The original exclusion happened because the rooms did not meet the council’s restriction of having minimum bedroom sizes of 8 m2.
The landlord appeals
The landlord appealed the decision with a First Tier Tribunal, which found that the rooms were adequate spaces for someone to live.
For one property, the Tribunal removed the condition completely. For the other, it adjusted the requirement so that the room could only be occupied by a full-time student for a maximum of 10 months of the year.
The Council appeals
Unhappy with this outcome, the Council appealed to the Upper Tribunal, at the High Court.
This body again rejected the Council’s appeal but applied the maximum occupancy time of ten months to both rooms.
Next stop for the Council was the Court of Appeal. Again, it had its argument knocked back. Meanwhile, the court added its own condition: that each room could only be rented to full time students.
With an admirable tenacity to fight its cause, the council then headed to the Supreme Court.
It’s argument here being that the previous courts cannot use their powers to add conditions that impose restrictions on who can occupy an HMO.
Irrational and unenforceable
Despite the Council’s claim that such restrictions are ‘irrational and unenforceable’, the Supreme Court disagreed.
The Court found that, according to the Housing Act 2004, the purpose of imposing conditions on the use of a property is to ensure it is reasonably suitable for occupation. The licence may include conditions that do indeed restrict who occupies the whole or part of a house.
While the condition that restricting occupancy to students was indeed ‘rational and enforceable’, the imposition of a 10-month restriction made no sense.
Reasoning that, if the room is suitable to live in for 10 months, it will be for 12 months, the Supreme Court removed this condition.
A hefty bill
Freedom of information requests made to the council revealed that this tour around the courts had cost a total of £95,742.
This includes £86,990 for legal costs, £1,405 on travel, and £7,347 on council staff.
As this money comes from Nottingham residents’ taxes, reactions were suitably scathing.
Business Development Manager of East Midland Property Owner, Giles Inman, told the Nottingham Post:
“In these times of austerity we are told the council does not have any money for this or that but they do for a nonsense case. If you go to a tribunal and you lose, okay, you appeal again at an upper tribunal but then you would give up. But they went to the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court and lost. It is just shocking.”
Meanwhile, the Council are bullish about the fight. Nottingham City Council’s portfolio holder for housing and planning, Councillor Linda Woodings, said:
“We believe as a matter of principle and fairness that there should be a minimum acceptable bedroom size that applies to everyone. We were therefore disappointed with the Supreme Court ruling because in effect, it means one group of people are being forced to accept a lower standard of accommodation than others.”
As the council also point out, after the October change to HMO rules, one of the rooms is now too small for occupation.
Which is a victory of sorts for them, albeit a Pyrrhic one.
Lessons learned?
There are two points to take from this.
The first is that councils can’t have it all their own way. The laws regulating bedroom size give individual councils the right to set higher minimums than the nationally mandated 6.51 m2.
However, it’s clear that they will have to balance their generous ambitions with the realities of the housing stock available.
Tenants should have the expectation that they can live somewhere safely and in comfort. If this translates into over-eager regulators placing heavy demands on landlords, what happens is that the same tenants lose the choice of where to live.
It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that both regulators and responsible landlords are after the same result: happy tenants.
The second point is that private housing is the battlefield where Nottingham City Council is prepared to make a stand. No matter what the cost.
Meanwhile, the paperwork mounts
It’s not been a good week in the news for Nottingham Council.
Following its new selective licensing initiative going live in August, everything appears to have choked on the flood of paperwork.
The Nottingham post has reported that of the 32,000 properties that need a licence, the local authority has only received applications for 13,450.
Of these, only 5,993 applications have been processed. Over half of these have been rejected due to paperwork errors.
As you can imagine, the city’s landlords are far from happy.
Private landlord, Mick Roberts, told the Post:
“This is suppose to be improving people’s houses. It is an absolute shambles. It is bonkers. It will just see landlords leaving the city. They will get some bad houses but at the expense of good ones that have just had enough.”
Designated areas in Nottingham for the new licensing scheme include Arboretum, Bestwood, Bulwell, Bulwell Forest, Basford, Berridge, Bridge, Clifton North, Clifton South, Dales, Dunkirk and Lenton, Leen Valley, Mapperley, Radford and Park, Sherwood, St Ann’s, Wollaton East and Lenton Abbey.
More information:
Selective licensing
1st August is D-Day for Nottingham’s Selective Licensing Scheme
Government to extent compulsory licensing of rented properties
Nottingham Council gives mandatory landlord licensing a green light