Anyone who wants to see the effects of introducing licensing on an area should look at Newham where NatWest is refusing to fund buy-to-let mortgages and at Leeds and Newcastle where RBS is thinking of doing the same.

Also have a look at Manchester who have abandoned their scheme calling it a failure.

In licensed areas rents rise and rental housing stock falls.

It is naive to state that a reduction in the rental market will result in lower property prices, possibly prices would rise as overseas buyers step in and snap up bargains.

In Croydon we need more housing not less, and we need a thriving rental market alongside a thriving purchase market, but what we are seeing already is landlords beginning to sell up and possibly buy in areas where landlord licensing does not operate.

As another correspondent wrote it is not the job of landlords to stop antisocial behaviour, we are not equipped to deal with this problem, and good landlords are not responsible for squalid conditions in other parts of the borough, but are being penalised financially and with red tape.

An example of this is the landlord’s responsibility for ensuring smoke alarms are in good working order.

I have a tenant who repeatedly removes the batteries from her smoke alarm because in a small flat, it keeps going off.

Under the new rules I can be fined for her misdemeanour – where is the justice in that?

MRS A SMITH
by email