While politicians across the nation shed tears over the escalating housing crisis and declare solemn "housing emergencies," our local authority is quietly engineering the very displacement it claims to fight. TheBigRetort…
In Lewisham, a toxic collision between council bureaucracy and aggressive property management has created an administrative trap for private landlords. Under
the guise of regulatory compliance, Lewisham is using its
dual role as both housing licensor and freehold landlord to wage an unwritten,
unassessed war against private landlords.
The casualties? Young professionals, key workers, and the
private housing supply itself.
The Licensing tripwire
To understand how the system operates, one must examine the
double-edged sword Lewisham Council has forged between its Private Sector
Housing / Licensing team and its Home Ownership Services.
When the Council introduced its wide-scale licensing schemes—blanketing 16 out of 18 wards while carving out select boundaries to skirt national oversight—landlords were told that licensing was designed to raise property standards, crack down on rogue operators, and protect tenants. (Telegraph Hill and Blackheath were left off, allowing them to cook the books.)
Yet, freedom of information disclosures (Reference
33066881) reveal a starkly different reality.
When we applied for a legitimate Additional HMO, the application did not merely sit with licensing inspectors. Instead, it triggered an automated internal alert to the Council’s Home Ownership team.
Apparently council leases contain a
discreet covenant restricting occupation to a "single household
only," from which Home Ownership swings into action.
Rather than assessing the property on its physical safety, space standards, or management fitness - the actual statutory purpose of the Housing Act 2004 - the Council used the licensing application as a tripwire.
In our case, we received a chilling warning that housing three professional sharers under a single joint tenancy constitutes a "breach of lease" and that this would put the entire property title at risk of forfeiture - unless the three sharers were evicted. The property had been let for over a decade to various tenant types.
In Lewisham parlance:
“As you are aware, we are required to carry out a consultation with all relevant persons before we can progress your application for an HMO licence. One of the people we must consult is your freeholder, in this case, Lewisham Council. They have responded by rejecting the proposed HMO Licence… and have confirmed that renting your property as an HMO would put you in breach of your lease and therefore put your lease at risk which can lead to forfeiture.
Following the rejection, there are two options;
1) To withdraw your application and apply for a Temporary
Exemption Notice, which would allow you to regularise your position under the
lease and prevent any enforcement action for your unlicenced HMO.
2) To carry on with your licence application, which could
lead to your lease being forfeit.
To proceed, we kindly request that you let us know your decision within the next 14 days.”
The most damning indictment of Lewisham’s operation lies in
what its own records admit to. According to FOI 33066881:
- Zero policy documents: The Council holds not a single
written policy document, guidance note, internal instruction, or legal
summary governing how officers are supposed to interpret "single
household" lease clauses for licensing decisions.
- Zero refusals: Since April 2022, the Council had issued zero
formal licence refusals on the basis of a single household lease clause.
This concedes a vital legal truth: under housing law, these properties
completely meet statutory standards and are fully licensable.
- 119 warnings issued: Despite having no written policy and
experiencing zero statutory refusals, the Council had targeted 119
leaseholders with lease breach threats, bullying them into withdrawing
applications or forcing tenant-sharers out of their homes, and the borough. They have 5,500 leaseholders.
- Zero impact assessments: The Council’s Home Ownership team
has confirmed that zero Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs) or
housing supply risk assessments have ever been conducted regarding this
enforcement practice.
It would be fair to say that this policy, never publicly
shouted from the ivory tower in Catford, commenced under the wizened hand of its
old Labor administration. It remains to be seen if the new administration will call
an end to this nefarious behaviour.
Manufactured Homelessness vs. Public Rhetoric
The human cost of this bureaucratic overreach is severe. At
a time when private rental stock is vanishing and market rents are soaring, landlords
who act as a social safety net—such as those offering below-market rents to
families or sharers—are being cornered.
When a leaseholder is threatened with forfeiture for housing three working adults on a single joint tenancy, they are left with a stark choice: absorb crushing legal risks or serve eviction notices. The tenants in this instance went their separate ways as the property was then let to a single person.
The
Council’s actions directly contradict its own Housing Strategy, which
explicitly lists "preventing homelessness" and "working
with landlords to prevent them from evicting people" as core strategic
objectives.
Instead, Lewisham is actively manufacturing homelessness.
By forcing properties back into single-family occupancy, bedrooms are left
empty, rental choices evaporate, and young workers and lower-income sharers are
squeezed out of the borough entirely. The Green Party should take note.
The double-dipping bureaucracy
Adding insult to injury is the sheer financial hypocrisy of
the process. The Council collects application fees from landlords for statutory
licensing, only to weaponise that exact data to threaten them with property
forfeiture.
When local councillors are challenged about this, the
standard bureaucratic defence is trotted out: that licensing and freeholding
functions operate entirely independently, and that decisions are made on a
"case-by-case basis". But as the numbers prove, sending identical
threat letters to 119 leaseholders in the complete absence of a written framework
is not "case-by-case"—it is a systematic, unvetted municipal
crackdown.
Time for accountability
Lewisham Council’s clandestine campaign against
multi-tenant sharers cannot survive sunlight. Operating an aggressive property
enforcement mechanism with zero written policy, zero impact assessments, and
zero statutory backing is a breach of public law and a betrayal of the
borough's residents.
It is time for Lewisham’s leadership to halt this backdoor
eviction machine, drop the threats against compliant leaseholders, and align
its private housing enforcement with reality rather than bureaucratic
self-sabotage.
New Mayor, Liam Shrivastava is both a listener and a
doer. It would be wise for him not to sup from a poison chalice handed down by a previous tone-deaf administration.
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