Thurrock Council’s selective licensing scheme can continue after the High Court rejected a renewed attempt by local landlords and agents to stop it, leaving affected owners facing a £1,034 fee for a five-year licence.
The latest ruling follows the court’s written decision in March to dismiss the original judicial review claim. Claimants then sought an oral hearing, but that too has now failed, and the council says £7,500 in legal costs has been awarded against them.
For landlords, the immediate point is practical rather than political. Once a scheme survives two rounds of court scrutiny, the argument usually shifts from whether it can be stopped to how quickly owners need to licence properties, gather certificates and avoid enforcement risk.
Thurrock scheme survives second court setback for opponents
According to the council, the scheme requires a licence for properties covered by its selective licensing rules and applications must include core compliance documents such as a gas safety certificate, an electrical installation condition report, an EPC and a tenancy agreement.
The case matters beyond Thurrock because licensing challenges have been one of the few routes landlords have had to delay or overturn new local schemes. Here, however, the court has again left the council’s position standing. That makes the borough another example of how hard it has become to knock out a licensing regime once it has been formally adopted.
This follows Residential Landlord’s reporting on Brighton’s wider selective licensing push, which showed councils are still extending licence coverage even as landlords complain about rising costs and uneven enforcement. Thurrock’s court win suggests that legal resistance is not, by itself, slowing that wider trend.
A second point for investors is that licensing disputes rarely freeze the compliance burden for long. Even where landlords believe a scheme is badly designed or too expensive, the paperwork, fee deadlines and fit-and-proper checks still tend to land once the challenge falls away. Landlords who wait for a political reversal often just end up closer to penalty territory.
Why landlords should treat the ruling as a compliance deadline
Thurrock says the costs recovered from the claimants will go back into local services. More importantly for landlords, the operational page for the scheme makes clear what the council expects from applicants and what documents must be ready before a licence can be granted.
That means owners with stock in the borough need to focus on records, managing-agent responsibilities and whether every let actually falls within the right licensing category. Where the licence holder is not the day-to-day manager, the council also wants roles to be clear. Loose management arrangements can become a problem quickly once licensing enforcement starts to bite.
There is a broader warning here for landlords in other towns. Councils considering new schemes will read decisions like this as evidence that their own licensing plans are more defensible than critics claim. That does not mean every scheme is proportionate, but it does mean landlords should not assume court action elsewhere will produce an easy route out.
That fits with Residential Landlord’s earlier coverage of licence deadline penalties, where the issue was not whether landlords agreed with the scheme, but whether they had left the admin too late.
Opinion
Landlords do not have to like selective licensing to recognise when the legal road is closing. Once a second challenge has failed, this stops being a protest story and becomes a paperwork story. The landlords who cope best will be the ones who switch from objection to compliance before councils start counting missed applications.
