Have your say to improve Nottingham student accommodation standards
This is a joint response from NTSU and UoNSU to a council consultation on rented accommodation.
Nottingham City Council currently have an open consultation on accommodation standards in the city. As a student, you have an opportunity to have your say and make sure students' opinions on accommodation are considered by the council. This is an effective way to make positive change to student accommodation in Nottingham. Read on to learn more about how you can do this.
How do Nottingham accommodation standards work?
Every rented property within Nottingham City Council is required to have one of three types of licenses available from the council, two of which cover Homes of Multiple Occupancy (HMOs), where two or more unrelated people live together in the same flat or house.
All other rented accommodation is covered by the selective licensing scheme. This scheme sets a minimum standard of conditions you can expect as a tenant in a privately rented flat or house in the city, and what you can expect from your landlord.
What is the selective licensing scheme?
Key conditions of the Selective Licensing Scheme are:
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- Adequate maintenance of the property: having a process for dealing with maintenance requests quickly and for proactively inspecting the property for issues at least twice a year.
- Waste management: having a plan to deal with all the waste from the property, including provision of adequate bins and space to store them where possible.
- Fire safety: Smoke alarms should be provided and where there are electrical or fire safety appliances, they should be kept in a proper working order.
- Anti-social behaviour: A plan for how the landlord will deal with complaints of tenants’ anti-social behaviour.
The landlord/letting agent is required to provide new tenants with information about these plans, as well as the procedures and targets for maintenance requests.
Essentially, this is the council’s way of ensuring that your landlord provides and maintains high standards of compliance. It also encourages landlords to be accredited with one of the “Nottingham Standard” of accommodation schemes such as Unipol or Dash, or ANUK for private halls, by offering them a lower fee.
Is the scheme good for students?
We think the Selective Licensing Scheme is a good idea because this will hopefully improve the quality of accommodation students can expect from their landlords in HMO.
We would like and expect to see the council carrying out more inspections to ensure that the license conditions are met, and for the council to provide more information and support for tenants to understand what they should expect. This should complement the work of our own advice teams.
We also have some concerns that landlords may not be the best people to investigate complaints of anti-social behaviour, and that it may be used as an excuse to raise rents.
What should I do?
Over 700 landlords have already responded to the council's consultation. It is important that as many students as possible also complete the survey to get our voices heard by the council to ensure students' needs are considered.
NTSU and UoNSU have already submitted a response to the survey, highlighting the student perspective. You can add weight to our position by also submitting your own response to the council.
To make this simple, feel free to use our responses, but please add your own comments as well. The most important thing is that students are loudly represented when the council is considering the scheme.
How do I have my say?
Complete the survey before Sunday 22nd August. You can learn more about the consultation on Nottingham City Council’s website. You can check if your property is currently in a selective licensing area here. (This will also tell you who your local MP or councillor is, as well as your bin day.)
Article authors
Daisy Forster (UoNSU Community Officer), Zahra Saley (NTSU Vice President Community & Welfare). Edward Towers (Nottingham Students’ Partnership Coordinator)
