A new NRLA licensing bulletin has highlighted a fresh cluster of landlord licensing consultations and scheme changes across England, with councils including Barnet, Greenwich, Preston, Slough and Scarborough all pressing ahead with proposals this month.
The trade body said the latest round includes fees ranging from £453 in Liverpool’s consultation up to £1,300 for Ealing’s proposed additional licensing renewal, with several schemes closing for responses between mid-September and mid-October.
What stands out is the accumulation of local deadlines. Landlords with stock spread across more than one council area are no longer dealing with isolated licensing rows – they are facing a patchwork of consultations, fee structures and compliance timetables that can shift from borough to borough.
Consultation deadlines and fees are stacking up
The NRLA’s September licensing update lists selective or additional licensing activity across a wide range of areas, including Barnet, Ealing, Slough, Greenwich, Preston, Burnley, Scarborough, Halton and Gosport. In some cases councils are consulting on brand-new designations. In others, they are seeking to renew or widen existing schemes with updated fee levels and revised boundaries.
For landlords, the practical problem is not just the licence price. Each consultation creates a potential future compliance cost, and the schemes rarely line up neatly on timing, exemptions, discounts or evidence tests. That makes it harder for portfolio landlords to plan and easier to miss a change that later affects operating costs or disposal decisions.
The NRLA said its latest update was a bumper monthly round-up, reflecting how many licensing consultations and scheme changes are now landing at the same time across the country.
This follows Residential Landlord’s coverage of Burnley’s three-area licensing consultation and earlier reporting on Liverpool’s latest selective licensing plans. The September bulletin suggests those cases are not outliers but part of a broader licensing cycle that is still spreading.
Portfolio landlords need a live map of local rules
A landlord with one property in one council area might still treat licensing as a local compliance headache. Anyone with a regional portfolio should now see it as a moving policy map that needs regular monitoring. Fee changes, consultation outcomes and widening designations can all feed directly into yield, cashflow and long-term asset choices.
There is also an investment angle. Areas pushing forward with broader or more expensive schemes may still offer demand strength, but the cost of entry and management is becoming more sensitive to local political decisions. That is one more reason landlords are comparing councils more carefully before expanding.
The bulletin does not mean every proposal will survive unchanged. It does mean waiting for a final scheme to appear is increasingly the wrong approach if landlords want any chance to influence the result or prepare for it properly.
Opinion
Licensing has moved beyond a handful of activist councils. It is becoming a standard policy tool, with fee pressure rising alongside it. Landlords who are not tracking consultations in real time risk being governed by decisions they never even knew were being made.
Sources: NRLA
