Mapping Council Tax Exempt student property in the Broxtowe Borough Counccil area

The six maps below have been created using data listing 567 properties I received from Broxtowe Borough Council today. I will add comparative data in a few days.

If I can create these maps (and the earlier Beeston HMO Map below) with my very limited I.T. skills then it should be easy enough for others to do it better than me. For now I publish my maps without comment (click on a map to enlarge):

At best the data has to be taken as a guide and needs more attention than I can presently give it. Compare the map of Beeston council tax exemption properties above with the map of Beeston HMOs below. Broadgate (pin showing 10) and Low Road (pin showing 14) in particular. This may a case of where multiple entries for the same postcode do not show up on the council tax exempt map — in other words my council tax exempt property map for Beeston should have more 'pins' than it does.

Broxtowe Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO) Register and its missing entries.

Today I received an updated copy of Broxtowe's HMO Register and I had been expecting to see a flood of new registrations given, to quote the Council's own website, that 'From 1st October 2018 all HMO's with five or more occupiers forming two or more households regardless of the number of storeys will be subject to HMO licencing. If you own or manage a HMO that meets the criteria for mandatory licencing you must apply for a licence before 1st October 2018'.

I think the above is pretty clear by any measure, yet here we are, over three months later, and just 2 two storey households have been registered! In the absence of an answer to the question how many applications there are outstanding I assume there are none, although I have data from another Council department which suggests there could be a great many unregistered properties with five or more occupiers which should have applied for HMO registration and haven't.

Nottingham city Council say they backdate applications, yet Broxtowe says a ‘renewal cannot be backdated’ despite acknowledging that applications are received without supporting documentation. If landlords/agents know this is Broxtowe’s policy then many will submit incomplete applications! For them it’s a win win situation which involves people has to involve Council employees in more work! As a policy it doesn’t make any sense!

HMO Registration is just one part of a jigsaw Broxtowe Borough Council has, in my opinion, wilfully ignored despite the cost and the extra burden this places upon the wider community.

It is beyond my comprehension as to why there have not been reports to the Council about the matter. Why have so many councillors chosen to ignore the problem?

These are questions which need answers!

I will be disappointed if I cannot do a post on Friday as to income lost because of council tax exemptions and a lax HMO registration p[olicy.

Watch this space. 

The devil is in the detail when it comes to student housing in Broxtowe

Yesterday I received two headline nuggets of data from Broxtowe Borough Council about student housing in the borough, with the street by street breakdown to follow.

As soon as I have it I will compile up-to-date maps and a table comparing 2015 data with 2017 data. Before I publish it I will share it with the Council just in case they have any questions concerning the way I have presented the data (it will the same format as in 2015. You can see the 2015 tables in the right-hand column across from this post).

You only have to look at the street by street totals for 2015 to understand why I say the devil is in the detail. It is going to be fascinating seeing whether the increases are spread across Broxtowe or clustered as in 2015. I have a good idea of what I expect the street by street data to show, so watch this blog for an update, probably towards the end of April.

Broxtowe Borough Council cuts 'consultation'

Today I completed Broxtowe Borough Council's online questionnaire about saving money. I am opposed to cuts which will hit those least able to bear them, be it financially or socially. For 'savings' read 'cuts'. I should add that I am in favour of all public services being managed efficiently and to the best advantage of users, but 'savings' is a different beast. My approach is to provide better services and facilities by managing what money there is better, even increasing council tax and council charges if this can be shown to be beneficial to users and the local community in general.

Before completing the questionnaire, I did, on 7 October, via email, ask Broxtowe Borough Council to tell me the product of a penny rate. I have yet to receive a reply, but I did copy in Borough Councillor Janet Patrick, who emailed me a reply on 10 October:

If Broxtowe raised its council tax by 1p in the £ it would raise £53000. Presently the Government anticipate an annual increase of 2p in the £ and are paying this to councils who are charging 2p in the £ increase a year. The Tories promised not to raise the council tax, consequently we are forgoing £106,000 a year from the government.  Information supplied by Paul Adcock, most senior finance officer after the Deputy Chief Executive.

Given this information, I have answered the question about council tax by saying I favour at least a 2p increase in the Borough Council's penny rate and included Janet's email to show why.

I also added this general comment where the questionnaire asks for comments:

Broxtowe Council needs to introduce tighter controls on Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs)* and Council Tax exempt properties, as these are increasing fast in an around Beeston, with some streets now over 25%. Above this level the balance of the social mix begins to tip and some groups begin to move out (eg. families, older people), resulting in more properties becoming HMOs* and Council Tax exempt. The evidence for how such change negatively impacts on housing occupation can be found in the Dunkirk & Lenton and Wollaton East & Lenton Abbey wards in Nottingham, which adjoin Beeston. Belated planning controls in Nottingham have pushed private landlords into Beeston. Housing and Planning officers, together with borough councillors, knowingly ignore the problem at a social and economic cost. One direct consequence will be Beeston town centre becoming no more than a collection of eateries, cafes, take aways, estate agents and charity shops surrounded by supermarkets. 

Note:* Any property with 3 or more unrelated residents should be classified as a HMO.

How Beestonians can support municipal enterprise

Today I began the process of switching my gas and electricity supplier from Scottish Power to Robin Hood Energy, the new Nottingham City Council energy company, which started trading today. The only difference between now and the old pre-nationalisation days is that the City Council does not own the power stations, so they have to buy gas and electricity on 'the market', but by any measure it is a welcome, and enterprising, step in the right direction.

My projected annual saving is modest — £176 — but I know that my money is not going to pay directors and shareholders. The City Council's directors will not be paid and RHE is described as 'a not-for-profit' business. There are different tariffs for city council area residents, so I suspect they will get a better deal than me, but I am happy to be supporting a municipal enterprise.

I would like to see a return to municipalism across a whole range of services: public transport, primary health care, all utilities and housing, especially the latter. There is a limited role for specialist housing associations, but they have no role to play in the provision of general housing, and private landlords would disappear overnight if they had to 'compete' with municipal housing on the same terms and lost all their tax advantages.

From 1985 until 2006 I was a supported housing manager, both regionally and nationally, and saw how Thatcher and the Conservatives set about crippling local authority housing and effectively brought about the commercialisation of voluntary housing associations. I saw them 'professionalised' (like the voluntary sector in general) and watched as large pay increases for senior officers were justified on the grounds that to get the best staff the sector had to 'compete'. It was a spurious argument then and still is.

The money wasted by housing associations having to compete for proposed local  'social housing' developments over the years could have been better spent building homes. I have no idea how many housing associations operate in Broxtowe Borough or Nottingham City, but the duplication of services in this way cannot be justified by any measure.

I have already blogged about how Broxtowe Borough Council appears to have no interest in controlling private landlords, as witnessed by its irresponsible attitude towards houses in multi-occupation (HMOs). Perhaps now Labour is in opposition in Broxtowe, it might take more of interest in this issue. I hope so.

My favourite blog, which you can find in the right-hand column and its masthead at the top of this post, is Municipal Dreams. To use the site's own words:

Municipal Dreams celebrates the efforts and achievements of our early municipal reformers.

These men and women dreamed of a better world.  But this was a dream built in bricks and mortar; an idealism rooted in the practical power of the local state to transform lives and raise the condition of the people.

I believe that the legacy of our early municipal reformers is unjustly neglected and often unfairly maligned.  This is a modest attempt to record their story and set that record straight.

But I’m not naive.  There were failures and missteps as well as successes. Mistakes are made, real-world limitations intervene, times change – the road to a better future is never easy.  But at least that road was taken – however falteringly – and a better, fairer future striven for.

This isn’t a crudely party political blog but, at a time when the local state and directly provided public services  are under unprecedented attack, the lessons of the past seem relevant.  In other words, this is not an exercise in nostalgia but a reminder that it doesn’t have to be this way.

For the second time in my active political life, which began in 1959 when I was fifteen, I sense change is about (the first was 1964 and you have only to look at Labour's achievements under Wilson to realise he was second only to Attlee). There are those among us who are determined to destroy what hopes and ambitions we have. We must not let this happen. The best way to win is to be open, to be reasonable and to promote models of ownership and control based on local communities and not state capitalism, for that is what the old model of nationalisation was and remains.

We will know soon enough and Nottingham's Labour controlled city council, for all its shortcomings, is there, once again, showing a better way. 

Some have greatness thrust upon them. If the person I voted for in the Labour Party leadership ballot wins, we will have to stand shoulder to shoulder with him as he faces a media and establishment determined to bring about his downfall at the first opportunity.

Right now, give yourself a lift and get a quote for your gas and electricity from Robin Hood Energy. As someone said 'Every journey begins with one small step'. Let this be yours! a

Council Tax exempt (student) properties in Beeston and Broxtowe by street

In the right-hand column under Pages you can see a complete list of council tax exempt properties by street. I received the information from Broxtowe Borough Council on 23 February 2015 following a request I made to them. I would like to thank the Council and the staff involved for compiling the data.

The map below shows the Beeston streets with the highest percentages of council tax exempt properties (click on the map to enlarge):

At some point I will have more to say about the information I have received. For now it is suffice to say that the streets with a high percentage of council tax exempt properties are presently clustered, for the most part, around Beeston town centre.

At a recent meeting of the Beeston North Community Action Team, a Council officer, Steffan Saunders said that it was a matter Planning had not looked at in any depth and that they would be looking at six unrelated occupants and the property becoming an issue before doing anything, but accepted that three unrelated occupants could be enough to trigger registration as an  HMO if that was Council policy (Steffan, understandaby, qualified his response to my question by making the point that actual registration is not a Planning decision - it rests with Environmental Health).

As far as I am aware this is the first time this information has been published in this format. In the meantime you can find some initial analysis in the right-hand column headed Broxtowe properties claiming council tax exemption by street.

I have also submitted a Scrutiny Suggestion Form to the Council, in which I ask the committee to look at 'the impact of student lets and Houses in Multiple Occupation on the Borough of Broxtowe and, specifically, Beeston'. The form asks 'What outcomes do you expect?', to which I have answered 'That in the absence of continual monitoring and assessment, the balance of local communities cannot be satisfactorily measured or maintained'.