London Mayor and council leaders call for mandatory registration system for short term lets amid enforcement concerns

May 2, 2019

The leaders of a number of London councils have co-signed a letter from the Mayor of London to the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government calling for the creation of a mandatory registration system for those who wish to do short term lets for less than 90 days each calendar year.

The letter to James Brokenshire acknowledges that short-term lets supported London as “open and truly a global city”, and allowed Londoners to meet new people and earn extra money.

But it warns that these benefits must be balanced with the need to protect long-term rented housing, and to ensure that neighbours of those renting their properties short-term were not negatively impacted by a high turnover of visitors.

“In principle, the current legislation should achieve this balance by requiring planning permission to let out a home short-term for more than 90 days cumulatively in a calendar year. London local authorities, particularly those with high numbers of short term lets within their boundaries, have invested significant resource into enforcing the current legislation and great effort into lobbying for changes to legislation that would enable them to enforce the 90-night limit. However, ultimately, they have found the law very difficult to enforce, particularly given the lack of accessible data on lettings,” the letter says.

It notes Airbnb’s willingness to work towards self-regulatory measures by voluntarily implementing a limit in 2017 on properties used for short term lets over 90 nights in a calendar year. However, despite repeated requests from City Hall, other platforms “have so far been unwilling to commit to this measure, and discussions regarding the introduction of a cross-platform information sharing protocol have been unsuccessful”.

The letter calls for a system of sensible, light-touch registration of short-term lettings in London. Any such system, it adds, should:

be simple to use;
be low or no cost to the host;
include penalties for non-compliance;
function as a single database that is accessible online and hosted by one organisation; and
ensure that data provided by hosts enables local authorities to enforce the 90-day rule.

The letter from Sadiq Khan is co-signed by: Cllr Darren Rodwell, Executive Member for Housing and Planning, London Councils; Hadi Moussa, General Manager for Northern Europe at Airbnb; Cllr Nickie Aiken, Leader of the Council, Westminster City Council; Cllr Elizabeth Campbell, Leader of the Council, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea; John Biggs, Executive Mayor of Tower Hamlets; Philip Glanville, Mayor of Hackney; Cllr Georgia Gould, Leader of the Council, London Borough of Camden; and Cllr Richard Watts, Leader of the Council, London Borough of Islington.

Camden Council said that it estimated that 7,000 properties in its area were currently used for short term letting (STL). "Some of these are lawful and being used for less than 90 days a year, but many are unlawful,” it suggested, adding that this resulted in the loss of permanent housing at a time of significant need in the borough.

“Since the Deregulation Act (2015) came into force the council has seen an increase in the number of enforcement complaints about this issue, rising from 35 in 2016 to 123 in 2018, with the reality that the number of cases reported is probably a fraction of the unlawful STLs [short-term lets] in the Borough. The council’s planning enforcement team seek to take robust action but the legislation can make that hard. A mandatory register would significantly improve the ability to address this issue for the benefit of our residents.”