If you have received an enforcement notice from Brent in relation to a House in Multiple Occupation, or if a planning enforcement officer has been in touch about your property, you have a serious problem that needs handling carefully.
Brent runs the most active planning enforcement service in the country and HMOs are at the heart of its workload. The council prosecutes routinely, secures Proceeds of Crime Act confiscation orders against rogue landlords, and is prepared to pursue cases through to the Crown Court. This article sets out how HMO enforcement operates in the borough and what your realistic options are.
This is the third in a series of practitioner guides on Brent. The wider context on the borough’s enforcement approach is set out in our guide to planning enforcement in Brent. The specifics of the Article 4 direction that makes most C3-to-C4 HMO conversions in Brent unauthorised without permission are covered in our guide to Article 4 directions in Brent. This article focuses specifically on what happens once an HMO comes onto the Council’s enforcement radar.
Why HMOs dominate the enforcement workload
The council reports that many of its enforcement complaints relate to HMOs, and that the planning enforcement team spends a disproportionate amount of time on HMO cases. There are several reasons for that.
The first is that there are simply a lot of HMOs in the borough — around 17,000 according to the council’s evidence base for the Article 4 direction, or about 15% of the housing stock. The borough’s mixed Victorian and Edwardian residential streets are well suited to multi-occupant lets and the rental market is strong. Many of those HMOs are entirely lawful and well managed, but a meaningful minority are not.
The second is that complaints from neighbours drive a large share of the workload. Adjacent residents notice more and messier bins, more comings and goings, different vehicles outside the property and unfamiliar faces. Many of those complaints turn out, on investigation, to relate to lawful HMOs. But a significant proportion identify genuine breaches.
The third reason — and the most important practically — is that the planning question is often unclear at first inspection. The Council’s enforcement officers describe one of their principal investigative tasks as establishing what they are actually looking at. Is the property a lawful single dwellinghouse occupied by a family or a household? A lawful small HMO created before the Article 4 direction came into force on 1 November 2022 and therefore immune from action on the change-of-use point? An unauthorised small HMO created after that date and so a breach of planning control?
Or — as is often the case — has the property been internally subdivided into multiple self-contained flats while being described to tenants as a “HMO”? That last case is a different breach of planning control and one the council pursues particularly hard, because it usually involves substandard accommodation with no proper planning consent for the conversion works themselves. We have won several such enforcement cases, including this one in Wembley.
How HMO enforcement cases typically begin
The most common entry point is a complaint to the Council’s planning enforcement team — often from a neighbour, occasionally from an estate agent, sometimes from the Council’s own HMO licensing team passing information across. Brent operates a borough-wide additional HMO licensing scheme alongside the planning regime, and the two regimes share information.
The enforcement officer’s first step is typically a desk-based review: checking the planning history of the property, looking at council tax records, cross-referencing licensing records, and looking at the property from the outside via Google Street View or a site visit. If that initial check suggests a breach worth investigating, the officer may serve a Planning Contravention Notice under section 171C of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, requiring the owner to provide information about the use of the property within 21 days.
The PCN is a critical moment. Recipients have a legal obligation to respond truthfully within the statutory deadline, and providing false or misleading information is a criminal offence. Responses to a PCN can either head off enforcement action entirely — if it turns out the use is lawful or immune — or commit the recipient to a factual position that will be hard to retreat from later. This is the stage at which professional advice is most useful and most often skipped.
What gets investigated, and what gets enforced
Not every breach gets enforced. The council has limited resources, and its adopted Enforcement Policy applies what it calls a “firm but fair” test: enforcement action has to be both expedient and in the public interest. In HMO cases, that translates into a rough hierarchy of priority.
The cases the council pursues hardest are unauthorised internal subdivisions where the property has been converted into self-contained flats without planning permission and is being let, sometimes deceptively, as an HMO. These cases combine planning breaches with substandard accommodation, fire safety issues and often licensing breaches as well. The council will frequently coordinate with its housing and licensing teams on these and the resulting enforcement action can run across multiple regimes simultaneously.
Next in priority are unauthorised C3-to-C4 conversions in the Article 4 area where there is identifiable harm — local concentration breaching the BH7 “three of ten nearest” test, demonstrable amenity impact on neighbours, or substandard accommodation falling below the Council’s HMO SPD standards. These cases will typically attract a full enforcement notice if a retrospective application is not forthcoming or is refused.
At the lower end of priority are technical breaches without obvious harm. Brent’s policy framework allows the council to grant permission for well-designed, well-managed HMOs in suitable locations, and a landlord whose only problem is that they failed to apply at the right time can sometimes resolve the position through a retrospective application. The council does not, in practice, pursue every technical breach with the same vigour.
The Proceeds of Crime Act dimension
The feature that genuinely sets Brent apart from most authorities is the willingness to pursue confiscation under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 once a prosecution has succeeded. The mechanism is straightforward. Where a landowner has been convicted of failing to comply with an enforcement notice — section 179 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 — the Council can apply to the Crown Court for a confiscation order requiring the defendant to pay over the financial benefit they obtained from the unlawful development.
For an HMO landlord, the benefit can be calculated as the rental income obtained from the unauthorised use over the years it ran. The figures are not theoretical. In 2018, a joint Brent and Harrow prosecution against landlord Vispasp Sarkari resulted in a £1.5 million confiscation order from Harrow Crown Court, plus separate fines of £12,000 and full costs. The judge described the breaches as “a flagrant abuse of the Town and Country Planning legislation”. Brent secured a restraint order preventing Mr Sarkari from disposing of his assets before the order was paid, with the power to force the sale of his properties if payment was not made.
The Sarkari case sits at the extreme end of the scale. More routine POCA orders against Brent landlords run to tens or low hundreds of thousands of pounds. But the principle holds: an HMO landlord who has been generating rental income from an unauthorised use, who is prosecuted for non-compliance with an enforcement notice and who fails to comply with that notice through to conviction, can find themselves stripped of the entire rental yield of the unauthorised period. That is in a different league from the underlying fine and costs.
The implication for anyone facing HMO enforcement in Brent is straightforward. Resolving the position before the prosecution stage — whether through a retrospective application, a negotiated wind-down, or a successful appeal — is dramatically preferable to allowing the matter to escalate.
Planning enforcement and HMO licensing — running in parallel
One of the things landlords most often get wrong is treating planning enforcement and HMO licensing as the same problem. They are not. They are two separate regulatory regimes, with separate offences, separate enforcement officers, separate sanctions and separate appeal routes.
A property can be a lawful licensed HMO under the Housing Act 2004 and an unauthorised HMO under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, simultaneously. Many Brent HMOs are in exactly that position: properly licensed, properly managed, fire-safe, professionally run — and operating without the planning permission that the Article 4 direction requires. Holding an HMO licence is not a defence to planning enforcement. The licensing regime deals with the management, condition and physical standards of the property. The planning regime deals with whether the use is lawful, whether it complies with concentration policies, whether it is in the right location, and whether it provides acceptable accommodation by planning standards.
In Brent, the two regimes often run in parallel on the same property. A licensing inspection may flag a planning concern that gets passed to enforcement. A planning investigation may turn up licensing breaches that get passed the other way. For the landlord, the practical implication is that resolving one regime does not resolve the other, and a strategy that addresses only one half of the problem will not be sufficient.
Realistic options when an enforcement notice arrives
If an HMO enforcement notice has been served on you, you have four realistic options.
The first is to comply with the notice — ceasing the HMO use within the specified period, returning the property to single-household occupation, and accepting the loss. This is sometimes the right answer, particularly where the policy obstacles to permission are insurmountable and the risk of appeal failure is high. Compliance avoids the criminal liability and the POCA exposure that follows non-compliance, even if it means losing the rental income.
The second is to appeal the notice. Enforcement appeals in HMO cases tend to succeed on technical grounds — that the alleged breach has not occurred as described, that the matter is immune from enforcement because the use predates the Article 4 direction, that the notice is imprecise or defective, or that what it requires goes beyond what is necessary. Ground (a) appeals — arguing that planning permission should be granted — are harder against Brent because the Council’s HMO policies are well developed and inspectors have broadly supported them. But where the BH7 criteria are met, ground (a) is winnable.
The third is to submit a retrospective planning application. This effectively asks the Council to grant permission for what has already been done. The council will assess it against the same policies it would apply to a fresh application. If permission is granted, the enforcement notice falls away. If permission is refused, you retain the right to appeal. Note that the council has the power to turn away a new planning application where a notice has been served.
The fourth, and most often overlooked, is to negotiate with the Council. Brent has and uses its discretion not to pursue enforcement where a sensible alternative is on the table. We have had cases in the borough where notices have been withdrawn after we have engaged constructively with the planning enforcement team, presented evidence the council did not previously have, and proposed a managed resolution.
The right combination depends entirely on the specifics of the property, the policy position, the strength of the evidence and the council’s particular position in the case. This is exactly the kind of work where early professional advice changes outcomes — getting in front of the case before the prosecution stage rather than reacting to events as they unfold.
Where to find more
For the wider context on enforcement in the borough — the resourcing, the prosecution record, the direct action regime and the council’s overall enforcement strategy — see our guide to planning enforcement in Brent. For the policy framework that makes most C3-to-C4 conversions in Brent unauthorised without permission, see our guide to Article 4 directions in Brent. For a comprehensive treatment of the law, policy and tactics involved in HMO planning across England, Martin Gaine’s book Planning for HMOs is the standard practical guide.
How we can help
We act for Brent HMO landlords regularly — on enforcement notice appeals, retrospective applications, Planning Contravention Notice responses, and negotiations with the Council’s enforcement team. If you have received any form of enforcement correspondence about an HMO in the borough, contact us as early as possible. The earlier we are involved, the more options remain on the table — and given the Council’s willingness to pursue POCA confiscation, the financial stakes are too high to leave to chance.
