Clause 67 - Designation of selective licensing areas
Housing Bill
10:15 am
Ms Yvette Cooper (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister; Pontefract and Castleford, Labour)
The clause sets out the designation of selective licensing areas—the types of areas that can be licensed and what the basic requirements for making a designation are. It provides that a local housing authority can designate an area of its district as subject to selective licensing if either one or other of
two sets of general conditions specified in the Bill are fulfilled: Subsection (3) provides:
''that the area is, or is likely to become, an area of low housing demand''.
and that
''combined with other measures taken . . . by the local authority''
the designation will help to improve
''the social or economic conditions in the area.''
Subsection (6) applies to areas that have significant antisocial behaviour problems. That subsection was added because we heard from many people that problems that are often concentrated in low-demand areas are not exclusive to those areas. Significant problems of persistent antisocial behaviour that are rooted in poor management by private landlords can arise in other areas as well.
Subsection (7) allows the appropriate national authority to add to those two sets of general conditions. Subsection (9) requires a local housing authority to consult locally and satisfactorily on its scheme for selective licensing before it makes a designation under the clause.
Amendment No. 289 would amend subsection (1), which provides that a designation under part 3 can relate to a part of a local authority's area or to all of it. The current drafting of the Bill does not prevent selective licensing from operating in different parts of a local authority area. Some local authorities will want to license more than one part of their area and it would be crazy if they could only license either one small corner, or the whole of. their area. That is obviously not the intention of the Bill, and I am assured by the lawyers that that is not its effect. The Bill provides that all of a local authority area can be licensed, but we do not expect such a situation to arise given that the scope of the regime is focused on low demand and antisocial behaviour. Licensing should be used only where it is necessary, so the general expectation is that it will not apply to all of a local authority area.