A Cardiff magistrates’ court gave a flavour of what damp-and-mould enforcement looks like when it reaches an ordinary unlicensed HMO rather than a headline social landlord, a Surrey borough took its first step toward closing the permitted-development route into small HMOs, and two housing-data releases landed on the same day with a story that only makes sense read together. Underneath all four is the same theme: the paperwork and the numbers keep tightening, quietly, while everyone was watching something else.
What a £7,400 fine buys you: an unlicensed HMO with every hazard on the list
Cardiff Council secured a conviction this week against a landlord who let a three-storey Victorian terrace in Canton — ground-floor mini-market, ten unrelated occupants sharing six bedrooms above — without ever applying for the mandatory HMO licence. As Landlord Today reported on Friday, a council inspection found exposed live electrical wiring within reach of occupants, no working fire alarm system, an out-of-date fire extinguisher, inadequate structural fire separation, damp and mould, unsafe stairs, insanitary kitchen and bathroom facilities, a rodent infestation, poor lighting and ventilation, and missing handrails — with all six bedrooms sitting as inner rooms behind an escape route officers judged unacceptably long. Environmental health assessed an imminent risk of serious harm and served an Emergency Prohibition Order in July 2025, forcing every occupant out overnight. The landlord, Delwara Choudhury, pleaded guilty to fourteen offences and was fined £700 each on five counts — the lack of a licence, the missing Rent Smart Wales registration, and three of the fire-safety failures — plus £2,500 costs and a £1,400 victim surcharge: £7,400 in total, handed down on 27 July.
My read: set that £7,400 against a decade of unlicensed rent from ten tenants and it is not a deterrent, it is a rounding error. The only thing that actually stopped this property being lived in was the prohibition order, not the prosecution — and that only happened because an inspector walked through the door. The damp and mould sat on the same hazard list as the exposed wiring and the missing fire alarm, which is the point Awaab’s Law is slowly making everywhere: mould is a life-safety hazard, filed and enforced alongside fire risk, not a separate, softer category a landlord can leave for later.
If you are buying or advising on a licensed HMO, the register check that would have flagged this — a five-minute search of the local authority’s public HMO licence register — costs nothing and most buyers still skip it. If you already manage HMO stock, this is as good a hazard checklist as any to self-audit against before a council does it for you.
A Surrey borough starts closing the door on small HMO conversions
Reigate and Banstead Borough Council opened an eight-week consultation on Thursday on an Article 4 direction that would strip permitted development rights from small HMO conversions — the three-to-six-occupant kind that currently need no planning permission at all. The council’s own consultation notice points to a rise in the number of HMOs on its register and a matching rise in complaints as the trigger. Cllr Kate Fairhurst, executive member for place, planning and regulatory services, was careful to frame it as a planning-quality measure rather than an anti-HMO one: “HMOs can provide an important source of lower-cost housing for people who need it, and these proposals are not about preventing them… we want to put planning checks in place to help us make sure that future HMOs are in appropriate locations, are well designed, and do not have a negative impact on local communities.” The consultation runs to 24 September, and even if confirmed, the direction would not bite until 30 July 2027.
My read: a year’s notice sounds generous, and directions like this rarely move faster than the timetable a council first announces. But Reigate and Banstead is not acting alone in tightening the rules around HMOs this summer — Greenwich is separately consulting on stretching its selective licensing scheme from five wards to eighteen, Harrow started two new selective licensing schemes on 6 July, and Croydon and Slough both have schemes of their own progressing. Those are licensing moves rather than planning ones, but the direction is the same: for anyone running HMOs across more than one authority, the compliance map is now genuinely borough-by-borough, and the boroughs that haven’t tightened something yet are increasingly the exception rather than the rule.
If a small HMO conversion is on your plans anywhere near a borough that has already flagged rising HMO numbers, get it designed and lodged well before any Article 4 consultation closes, not after — a scheme that is a permitted development right today can become a full planning application, with all the design and parking scrutiny that brings, twelve months from now.
Two quiet data releases said more than the headline this week
Nationwide and HMRC both published on Friday, and neither made much noise on its own. Nationwide’s House Price Index put annual growth at 1.8% in July, down from 2.2% in June, with prices up just 0.1% month on month to an average of £277,542. Chief economist Robert Gardner said market activity and prices “have remained soft in recent months, in part reflecting the uncertain economic backdrop,” pointing to the Iran-US conflict pushing energy prices and mortgage rates back up after they had briefly settled in early July. On the same day, HMRC’s transaction statistics showed 98,700 seasonally-adjusted UK residential transactions in June, 2% above June 2025, with non-residential transactions down 4% over the same period.
My read: prices flattening while transaction volumes tick up is not a contradiction, it is what a market clearing last year’s stamp duty distortion looks like — more deals completing, at prices that are not going anywhere. That is a different story to the one either release tells in isolation, and a more useful one for anyone pricing a sale this month: buyers who are transacting are doing so at flat prices with room to negotiate, not chasing a market that is moving away from them.
New-build registrations are still falling — and that pipeline takes years to turn around
NHBC’s Q2 figures, published last Tuesday, showed 29,162 new homes registered to be built across the UK, down 4% on the same quarter last year, with private-sector registrations down 5%. The regional spread was stark — the South West down 42%, the East Midlands down 36%, Wales down 34% — against a 170% jump in London that NHBC’s chief strategy officer Daniel Pearce cautioned against reading too much into, since “registration volumes in London are often more volatile than elsewhere, with large developments frequently registered over short periods.” Completions, notably, edged up slightly to 32,973 from 32,617, and Pearce welcomed new prime minister Andy Burnham’s council house-building pledge while calling for “accelerating planning reform and easing regulatory burdens” alongside it.
My read: registrations lead completions by a year or more, so this is a preview of a thinner new-build pipeline in 2027 and 2028, not this year’s problem. It matters for practice in a specific way — fewer new-build completions means fewer new-build EPCs and NHBC warranty inspections coming through over the next couple of years, right as existing-stock EPC volumes are already softening on the numbers I covered last week. A political ambition announced this week does nothing to a pipeline that was set in motion eighteen months ago.
What I’d actually do
- Buying or advising on a purchase involving an HMO? Check the local authority’s public HMO licence register before you get anywhere near exchange — it is free, takes five minutes, and would have flagged the Cardiff case before completion.
- Planning a small HMO conversion in a borough that has flagged rising HMO numbers? Get it designed and submitted now — permitted development rights that exist today are increasingly likely to be gone within a year.
- Pricing a sale this month? Price to Gardner’s "soft" market, not last spring’s asking prices — more transactions are completing, but not at higher prices.
- Relying on new-build stock easing local supply pressure? Don’t bank on it arriving quickly — this week’s registrations data points to a thinner pipeline for at least the next year or two, regardless of this week’s political announcements.
If this week’s Cardiff case has you wondering whether a property you own, manage or are about to buy would pass the same inspection, the practice offers full building surveys and Buy to Let Surveys across the South East, alongside ventilation assessments for damp and mould concerns. Get in touch.
Small print. General commentary, not advice for your specific circumstances — regulations, schemes and deadlines change, and your property is not the average property. Sources linked were accurate when read on 1 August 2026.