New funding from the government to tackle criminal landlords is just not sufficient according to the Residential Landlords Association.

It has been revealed that 65 councils are to share the government’s £5m fund - roughly equivalent to £80,000 per council.

The RLA says it obviously welcomes efforts to root out criminal landlords but says many local authorities waste resources on broader licensing systems instead of targeting “the minority of landlords who cause misery for their tenants.”

The association says a pioneering co-regulation scheme announced this month - in which the RLA is working with Liverpool council and bodies such as ARLA - effectively frees up the council to target the hard-to-find criminal landlords.

To support this, the RLA is calling on the government to use the Housing and Planning Bill, currently going through Parliament, to compel councils to ask tenants for details of their landlord on council tax registration forms.

This would make it much harder for criminal landlords to evade scrutiny, the association believes.

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