A Peterborough landlord has been ordered to pay £13,936 after a magistrates’ court found he failed to deal with serious safety hazards at one property and ran other homes in a selective licensing area without the required approvals.
The case centres on Zahid Hussain, who Peterborough City Council says ignored improvement notices at a Stone Lane property and also managed homes in St Paul’s Road without licences under the city’s selective licensing scheme. The authority says it will now seek to place him on the national Rogue Landlord Database.
For landlords, the message is that councils are still willing to use older housing powers alongside the post-Renters’ Rights Act regime. Licensing failures, missing safety evidence and delays in dealing with damp or heating problems can now combine into one expensive enforcement file.
Peterborough case combines safety hazards with licensing breaches
According to Peterborough City Council’s case summary, officers found damp and mould, electrical and fire hazards, inadequate heating and no supporting evidence that gas appliances, the boiler or electrical installations met current safety standards.
The council said Hussain failed to carry out the required works after improvement notices were served. It also said he was operating properties in St Paul’s Road that needed licences under Peterborough’s selective licensing scheme but had not obtained them.
Councillor Christian Hogg, cabinet member for regulatory services and enforcement at Peterborough City Council, said the authority was “fully committed to maintaining safe and well managed housing for residents” and would use its enforcement powers where landlords “flagrantly disregard the law”.
The court imposed a £2,000 fine for failing to comply with improvement notices, £3,000 for each licensing breach, plus a £3,200 victim surcharge and costs. That total matters because it shows how quickly multiple smaller failures can stack up once a council pursues both condition and licensing offences together.
This follows Residential Landlord’s recent report on a Southend landlord ordered to pay £25,224 after a prohibition order breach, and its analysis of rising licensing and enforcement risk across London. The Peterborough prosecution adds to the same pattern: councils are not only chasing headline rogue cases, but also using licensing designations and property-condition powers in tandem.
What selective licensing now means for landlords
For investors with stock in designated areas, the Peterborough case is a reminder that selective licensing is no longer a box-ticking issue. Once a council has mapped an area, failing to licence a home can sit alongside wider allegations about safety management, record keeping and tenant welfare.
Landlords should be able to produce up-to-date gas and electrical evidence, deal with damp and cold hazards quickly, and check whether any address sits inside a live licensing boundary. Those are basic controls, but they are also the documents and decisions councils tend to test first when a complaint lands.
The bigger risk is strategic. As councils prepare for tougher HHSRS enforcement and sharper scrutiny of standards in the private rented sector, landlords who leave repairs unresolved or miss local licensing rules may find that one inspection opens several lines of enforcement at once.
- Check every property against current local licensing maps
- Keep gas, electrical and heating records easy to produce
- Act on damp, mould and excess cold complaints before formal notices arrive
Opinion
Peterborough’s case is not notable because the fine was huge. It matters because it shows how ordinary compliance gaps can build into a serious enforcement problem once a council joins up licensing, hazards and missing paperwork. Landlords who still treat selective licensing as an admin nuisance rather than a live legal risk are taking the wrong lesson from cases like this.
