Selective licensing will be primarily focused on:

• areas of low housing demand, or that are likely to fall into that category;
• other areas suffering from anti-social behaviour

Low house prices in areas of low demand have resulted in an influx of unprofessional landlords purchasing properties to rent. These people frequently show no interest in managing their properties properly, often letting to anti-social tenants who cause a range of problems. This, in turn, can create misery for the local community and cause further destabilisation of these areas.
Although these problems tend to be concentrated in areas of low housing demand, other districts also suffer from the activities of poor landlords and anti-social tenants. Accordingly this power will be available to LHAs to tackle problems of anti-social behaviour in areas that do not experience low housing demand.

The Act provides a discretionary power, subject to carrying out consultation and to the approval of the appropriate national authority, for LHAs to license all private landlords in a designated area with the intention of ensuring that a minimum standard of management is met. In order for a scheme to be approved, such a selective licensing scheme must be shown to be co-ordinated with an authority’s wider strategies to deal with anti-social behaviour and regeneration.

Each LHA, will, if they decide to have such a scheme, provide details of an area or zone within their boundary to which Additional Licensing will operate.
These smaller risk properties will be for 2 storey properties being occupied by 5 or more persons, who do not form a single household (same as above).

For both Mandatory and Additional Licensed properties, the information of the Licence holder will be displayed in a public register containing the name of the Licence holder, the address of the property and the permitted amount of occupiers under the license. It will also display, whether or not the Licence is conditional or not.

The third which is dealt with under Part 4: Additional control provisions in relation to residential accommodation – Known as Selective Licensing
Chapter 1 of Part 4 contains provisions for enforcement action in respect of properties licensable under Parts 2 and 3 and for individual properties where a residential property tribunal is satisfied that a property, which is not required to be licensed, requires the intervention of the LHA.