Worrying…

We recently posted here a discussion about the heavy concentration and ever-increasing number of ‘hotel’ rooms around our area. There have been recent further developments.

Local residents may have seen press coverage last week that Edinburgh City Council is using unlicensed HMOs to house homeless people. This is very relevant to Leith Links area, indeed quite possibly the issue disproportionately affects this area, compared to other parts of the City.

In Scotland an HMO (house in multiple occupation) licence is mandatory for properties that meet the following conditions:

• The property is rented to three or more unrelated people.
• The occupants share basic amenities such as bathrooms and kitchens.
• The property is their primary residence.

So, any property ranging from individual flats shared by 3 or more unrelated people to student halls of residence with hundreds of occupants must have an HMO licence.

There are quite a few HMOs, mostly former hotels or hotels that combine HMO and hotel operations around Leith Links. Where the Council houses people in a hotel for longer than a few days we understand that because this becomes the person’s place of residence and their home, then if there are 3 or more unrelated people living there, the property becomes an HMO.

Yesterday the Council received a report at its meeting which highlighted that ‘The Council therefore remains in breach of its HMO Licensing Duty by maintaining the support of homeless persons and households in some unlicensed HMO properties’. This has also been reported in the local press as ‘Council breaking law ‘on industrial scale’ by use of unlicensed temporary accommodation’ with the numbers involved said to be 30 properties and 700 rooms.

The full report can be viewed here Item 7.4 – Monitoring Officer Report Conflict of Legal Obligations.pdf (edinburgh.gov.uk)

The public register of licences applied for and granted can be found here: Licensing registers civic – The City of Edinburgh Council  It’s a clunky excel spreadsheet on which all applications over time are recorded, so searching for an address will bring up all previous applications as well as any current licence.

We will not list here, for the moment, the exact addresses of the particular properties around Leith Links that apparently fall into the category of premises used by the Council that do not currently have HMO licences (though they may have had such licences in the past).  However, searching the register just for Hermitage Place and Johns Place alone (there are several other locations as well) revealed: 3 large properties (total of 65 occupants) with expired licences; one new application not yet determined (10 occupants); 3 applications for ‘continuation of licence ‘ which have been marked as ‘incomplete’, ‘incompetent’ or ‘invalid’ (60 occupants); and 1 application for continuation that is as yet undetermined, with no details of capacity or occupancy.

So apparently in these properties alone, where data is available from the register on proposed occupancy, at least 135 people are being housed in unlicensed HMOs around Leith Links.

It is our understanding that the Council has called for a report.

Having done a bit of digging recently into HMO standards, we suspect that these properties are perhaps unable to meet the physical standards for HMOs. It is a Licence Condition that ‘The licence holder must ensure that the physical standards for HMO living accommodation assessed as suitable by the local authority when approving the licence application are met at all times.’ (HMO3)  However it so far appears to be impossible to find a copy of the physical standards the Council has adopted against which HMO3 is judged – they can only be found in a pre 2012 Committee paper when read with 2012 guidance from SG.  (By contrast,interestingly, they are easily found for many other Councils as standalone policy documents.)

In response to a recent FOI request on this, the Council said they would improve the information on the website about the standards – but that has yet to appear.  It appears that the Council may have ‘adopted’ without change the suggested physical standards that appear in the body text and Annex A to the Scottish Government’s guidance for Councils on HMO licensing issued in February 2012 Microsoft Word – HMO licensing – Guidance – updated for overprovision and discretionary link – 20 January 2012.doc (www.gov.scot).  Would all these local properties be able to meet the requirements in relation to kitchen facilities and space per person?  Back in 2012, the Council apparently decided to not apply some of the expectations on renewals of extant licences as a ‘transition’ to the new standards, but there seems to have been no end date for that transition. We also noet that, framed in 2012, the requirements for HMOs are actually less extensive than they are for STLs.

This is worrying. We think a review and update is overdue.