Portsmouth has been one of the worst places to operate as a private landlord for many years owing to the anti-landlord policies of Portsmouth City Council, but recent events have taken the problem to new levels - forcing many of the poorest tenants out of the city. 

Gerrymandering? Probably not. But could it be? Yes, definitely.

Read our formal complaint to the council. 

So many landlords see PCC as dark overlords who will hit them with massive fines if they so much as forget to check a fire alarm, they go out of their way to give PCC no cause to admonish them.  And what is the result, the landlords in question experience stress and financial pain and PCC add to their incorrect statistics of how  many rogues they have sorted and how many homes they have improved, when in reality all they have done is wasted the time of local people, pushed up rents and been a drain on the local economy 

Portsmouth City Council will no doubt be ecstatic to hear that, having been a student HMO landlord for 20 years (I was one of the first people to join the now defunct PCC Accreditation Scheme) their current policies have killed my business off completely, combined with the increase of mortgage rates, and I am down to my last couple of houses which will also be going on the market. I have also been on StudentPad for all those years who inspected and passed my houses, as did PCC Housing Department when it was run by Bruce Lomax - showing that until recently my properties met all of the standards set by both PCC and the University.

You would think it was not news – but we have been arguing for 3 months since the new licensing application software was introduced that it is badly written, hard to use and asks for too much information. We have members who have spent 2 weeks trying to get a single application completed. The PCC response has been to largely ignore us and tell us it only takes an hour and then it is done – even when members take all the necessary documentation in and sit and watch while PCC staff perform the task it takes them 2 hours per property.

Well, we need to apologise – after 3 months training and extensive practice, one of our members completed their final application in just 59 minutes and 44 seconds. 

Portsmouth landlords have been represented at a newly launched Housing Coalition at Westminster. The group aims to bring together landlord, letting agent and tenant organisations among others to ensure a smooth transition after the Renters Reform Bill is implemented. The Housing Coalition held its first meeting at Propertymark's headquarters in London in November 2023 to launch the group in person following several online meetings.  

We are seeing alarming premium increases of around 17 or 18% from Boswells. This appears to be in line with or lower than other providers and is being applied equally to our homes and rental properties. 'Consumer intelligence' data says "Quoted home insurance prices surge a record 25.7% in a year". The increase in the year to July 2023 in the South East was 28.4%.

The Renters reform bill is now nearing the end of its second reading and will then go to the House of Lords for detailed revision, where there is still time to seek an amendment for a specialist housing court. To find out why this is a good idea follow Alwin's articles on his "substack" (posh blog) account below, but as a spoiler we are asking you to sign a petition, share and write to your MP.

It is funny, they call it a 'Code of Practice'  but it is actually a newly published draft of the list of things a landlord must do to avoid a civil penalty and a list of exemptions that let everyone else off the hook. 

Owners of small HMOs and many 257 properties in Portsmouth will need to get their Additional Licence application in by the end of this month. Be warned that the application process is immensely burdensome and is not something you can quickly flash through at the end of the month.

Also, sadly, once you get your draft licence, you will find the licence conditions to be heavily loaded against you – considering any infringement is a criminal offence, that is not good news. We have asked PCC for clarification but sadly, we have been ignored and thus will need to resolve these issues at greater cost to all involved (which ultimately will feed through to rents and impact even more of the most vulnerable in the city). 

At a Neighbourhood Forum meeting in Milton this month, University of Portsmouth Director of Estates and Campus Services, Tahir Ahmed outlined plans to bring nearly 250 student rooms back into use at their 'Langstone Village' campus at Milton Locks in the city in an attempt to ease the student housing crisis which sees students commuting to Portsmouth from as far as Leeds this year.  

The government has finally seen sense and decided to end the unfair and discriminatory practices of the VOA (Valuation Office Agency) in arbitrarily disaggregating some HMOs into individual units for Council Tax purposes. Congratulations to member and local activist, Daryn Brewer, for championing this issue at the highest levels and achieving this excellent result.  

We wrote last year about the need to get EICRs completed before September if we wanted to avoid the high cost of AFDD's. A member asked recently whether this became law and which HMOs it applies to. I also, somewhat foolishly, asked for the latest on plastic consumer units under stairs. Read the response of member and retired electrician, Graham Castellano.  

At the start of October, new rules on Fire Safety were introduced – post Grenfell, everyone appears to be regulating and regimenting every aspect of fire risk. Obviously, this is good if it saves lives – but how do you know when enough is enough.And who is competent to make that decision?  

With the threat of increased EPC's hovering between 2025 and 2028,  decent homes standards and the like just around the corner and no help for landlords likely, it is with some relief we heard government ministers back pedalling on commitments as 'people could not afford to spend £10-15 thousand per house at the moment, bringing them up to standard.'  - one has to ask, did you only just realise?

Social housing providers have a lot to answer for – poor practice, inadequate systems and undertrained staff leave families living in damp, mouldy properties, whole estates going without necessary gas safety checks and sadly, disasters like Grenfell. Unfortunately, given that most of these organisations do the minimum they need to comply with the rules, each time one of these events happen, new rules are created and each time, the private rented sector gets painted (tainted?) with the same brush.

Fire safety is no exception and the attempt to 'systemise' solutions has led to some daft interpretations of some well-intentioned rules – so here we run through some of them and hopefully, help explain what you should and should not do.