Folkestone & Hythe HMO Licensing Gap: 312 Estimated Shared Houses, 63 Licences

Folkestone & Hythe says HMOs with five or more people in two or more households need a licence. Yet the latest MHCLG housing return points to an estimated 312 mandatory-licensable HMOs in the district and only 63 licences in force. That doesn’t prove 249 landlords are breaking the law. It does show an apparent gap large enough to demand an explanation.

There are some council numbers that sit quietly in the corner and mind their own business. This is not one of them.

Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s HMO page says “The public register for mandatory licensed HMOs is not available to view online” and that anyone wanting to inspect it “must visit the Civic Centre between 10am and 3pm” or ask for a list by email. In this case, that position reflects a later safety-driven change after far-right attention focused on HMOs. Fair enough. But once you move from the register to the council’s own official housing return, the real issue isn’t the filing system. It’s the size of the apparent gap in the numbers.

Our analysis of the published 2024/25 Local Authority Housing Statistics workbook, reproduced in the downloadable chart-data workbook below, shows Folkestone & Hythe recorded an estimated 1,466 HMOs in the district overall, including 312 estimated mandatory-licensable HMOs. The same return records 63 mandatory HMO licences in force. On that basis, the apparent gap is 249 properties and the apparent coverage rate is about 20.2 per cent. That’s not the same thing as proving 249 landlords are operating unlawfully. It is, however, a very awkward-looking mismatch between the council’s own estimate of how many shared properties should need a mandatory licence and how many licences it says were actually live.

That caveat matters, because this is where people either become careful or become very silly. The 312 figure is an estimate in a national statistical return. The 63 figure is the reported number of licences in force. MHCLG’s technical notes say LAHS is an accredited official statistics collection, that local authorities must sign off their returns, and that the data is subject to validation checks in DELTA and further checks by MHCLG statisticians. Those same notes also say the series carries a medium data-quality concern because the data comes from individual local-authority systems and it’s “not always possible to resolve all issues.” So the honest reading is not “249 illegal HMOs.” The honest reading is that FHDC’s own return points to a large apparent gap which now needs explaining properly.

The legal backdrop is not especially obscure. The government’s HMO licensing reform guidance says it should be read alongside the Housing Act 2004, the Licensing of Houses in Multiple Occupation (Prescribed Description) (England) Order 2018 and the Licensing of Houses in Multiple Occupation (Mandatory Conditions of Licences) (England) Regulations 2018. The same guidance also says, plainly, “This guidance is non-statutory. It doesn’t provide an authoritative interpretation of the law; only the courts can do that.” In other words, the law is real, the licensing duty matters, and the statistics still need to be handled with care.

FHDC’s own public wording could hardly be clearer. Its HMO page says: “All HMOs with five or more people making up two or more families will need a licence to operate.” The council’s enforcement policy says that, from 1 October 2018, mandatory licences are required for HMOs of any storey height that are occupied by five or more people forming two or more households and sharing facilities. It also states that a person commits an offence if they manage or control an HMO which should be licensed but is not, and that prosecution can result in unlimited fines or, instead of prosecution, civil penalties of up to £30,000. That’s fairly muscular language. The trouble is that the statistics sitting alongside it look a lot less muscular.

One reason this matters is that councils don’t necessarily get much say before an HMO appears on the radar. FHDC’s own planning material explains why. In a 2020 Victoria Grove committee report, officers said “The Use Classes Order 2015 allows for a change of use from C3 (dwelling) to C4 (House in Multiple Occupation) for three to six people without the need for planning permission.” For “more than six people”, planning permission is required. In plain English, small HMOs can arrive through a route that largely bypasses ordinary planning control. That helps explain why licensing data matters so much: by the time a council is scrutinising the position, it may be doing so through housing powers rather than planning powers.

The wider Kent and national context makes that even more important. Elsewhere, councils have been complaining that they can end up learning about properties very late in the day. Portsmouth says the Home Office has “no legal obligation to notify the council about new properties being used” for asylum accommodation and that the council “has no say” over placements through the dispersal scheme. The LGA has gone further, warning that where asylum accommodation contracts are managed by the Home Office, councils may have “no ability to directly redress poor standards or safety issues” and that enforcement could become “more complex and slower than the current locally led HMO licensing regime.” That doesn’t prove anything specific about Folkestone & Hythe’s 312 and 63. What it does show is that HMO oversight now sits inside a wider system that can be opaque, fragmented and not especially local.

The Kent comparison doesn’t rescue the district either. Using the same 2024/25 workbook, Folkestone & Hythe’s apparent licence-coverage rate comes out as one of the weakest in Kent and Medway. Ashford, Dover, Thanet and Maidstone all look substantially stronger on this narrow measure. FHDC is not hovering around the respectable middle hoping not to be noticed. It’s down near the wrong end of the table, waving a spreadsheet and insisting everyone keep calm. The chart below shows the countywide ranking.

Then there’s the trend, and the trend is where this starts to look less like a clerical wobble and more like a long-running administrative yawn. Our analysis of the published 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24 and 2024/25 LAHS workbooks shows Folkestone & Hythe’s estimate of mandatory-licensable HMOs sitting at 312 in each of those four returns, while the number of licences in force stays stuck in the low-to-mid sixties. That doesn’t prove the estimate is wrong. It could reflect a stable local market. But four years of the same estimate, alongside a licence count that barely budges, invites a very obvious question: is the estimate being actively refreshed, or has the licensing picture effectively stalled?

FHDC’s own policy hints at one possible answer: capacity. The Private Sector Housing Enforcement Policy says a licensed property “will be inspected fully at some time within the five year licence period” and, if no earlier visit is needed, “the visit will be carried out as and when resources allow, within the five year period.” That’s a revealing sentence. It doesn’t explain away the apparent gap. But it does suggest a service operating in the real world of finite staff, finite time and more work than neat systems diagrams tend to admit. In plain English, the council’s own policy already assumes a backlog-shaped universe.

There’s a political backdrop too. FHDC’s annual report of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee says that, following opposition business at full council on 2 October 2024, a presentation in February 2025 “reviewed private sector housing enforcement and considered a selective licensing scheme.” So the council was not asleep to the wider private-rented-sector issue. It was already discussing stronger tools and active enforcement. The problem is that the official return still leaves it looking as though the licensing net has not caught up with the size of the market it says exists.

At this point there are only a few broad explanations. The estimate may be too high, too old or too crude. The licensing regime may not have caught up with the market. Properties may have moved in and out of scope. Or the truth may be an uncomfortable blend of all three. That last explanation is probably the kindest one available. It’s still not flattering.

What the numbers don’t support is complacency. If FHDC’s own official return says 312 estimated mandatory-licensable HMOs and 63 licences in force, residents are entitled to ask some blunt questions. How is the estimate calculated? When was it last refreshed? How many suspected unlicensed mandatory HMOs has the council identified in the past five years? How many were licensed, penalised or prosecuted? And if the estimate is stale, why is stale data still being signed off into an accredited national statistics series?

This isn’t just a nerdy row over a spreadsheet tab. It’s a district-level accountability problem. If the estimate is broadly right, the licensing gap looks serious. If the estimate is wrong, the council’s data looks poor. Either way, the problem lands back at the council’s door.

The Shepway Vox Team

Dissent is NOT a Crime