Clause 80 - Revocation of licences
Housing Bill
3:15 pm
Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test, Labour)
I hope that the Committee will forgive me for pressing this point, but the circumstances under which this clause reads across to part 2 are still not clear to me, inasmuch as I can
envisage circumstances such as those in the example that I shall outline.
Let us suppose that a local authority decides to withdraw a licence from the landlord of a three-storey property with eight people in, on the grounds that it is badly maintained and he is not fit to be a landlord. The local authority then extends its area to a local authority area in which there are houses that do not have three storeys and that have fewer than five people in them. It turns out that the landlord also has houses in that area and is the landlord of those houses, but has not done anything to cause the local authority to question the management of those particular houses. As soon as the local authority extends a licence by national agreement to that area, does that landlord automatically lose the licence in the area that has been so designated because he or she has had his or her licence withdrawn so far as the general scheme is concerned, or is a separate procedure necessary to achieve that purpose? Indeed, could that landlord have a licence, and continue to have a licence, in that particular area with a house with fewer than five people in it and with fewer than three storeys, even though he or she has been deemed unfit under the scheme so far as the local authority is concerned?