FOI release

HMO Register

Some or all of the information requested was not provided because we determined that the cost to do so would exceed the appropriate limit.

Case reference FOI2023/01458

Published 22 September 2023

Request

Please can you provide me with the following information under the Freedom Of Information Act:-

a) addresses of all Registered Residential HMO properties that are within your councils area;

b) the maximum number of occupants that each property referred to in (a) is licensed to hold

c) the last actual registered number of occupants that each property referred to in (a) holds

d) the date each of the properties in (a) was first registered as HMO

e) the names of the owners/licence holders of those properties referred to in (a) and the correspondence address OR the registered "licence holder address" of the owners referred to

Please share all the above in a PDF, CSV, or excel format.

Response

This information is not held in a form that would enable it to be located, retrieved and extracted within the Appropriate Time Limit which equates to 18 hours as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Details of the last actual registered number of occupants each property referred in in a) holds, and, the date that each of the properties in a) were first registered as HMO's is not information which is recorded on the HMO register. To ascertain that information officers would need to manually check each individual premise record to see when the property was first registered as an HMO, and then would need to read the full inspection notes to see if the current number of occupants had been recorded. It should be noted that details of the current number of occupants is not routinely recorded, however, that detail may have been noted on a proportion of the files. There are 129 HMO property records which would need to be checked in this way and it is estimated that it would take 9 minutes to check each file as described above for this information.

This would at a conservative estimate take at least 19.35 hours to complete. Where the Limit is exceeded Public Authorities are not obliged to supply the information requested by virtue of S12 of the Act. Please take this letter as a refusal notice under S17 of the Act.

Within the 18 hour limit it would be possible to provide you with a copy of the HMO register which includes details of the addresses of all registered HMO's, the maximum number of occupants in each and the name of the licence holder of those properties referred to in (a) and the correspondence address OR the registered "licence holder address" of the owners referred to. Please let us know if you would like to be provided with that information or if you wish to discuss other ways in which your request could be narrowed down in scope to take it under the 18 hour limit.

Documents

There are no documents for this release.

This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.

You can browse our other responses or make a new FOI request.