Selective licensing in Doncaster: who needs a licence

The only selective licensing Doncaster Council currently runs is in Hexthorpe. It was designated on 15 November 2021, became operational on 1 March 2022, and was made for five years, which takes it to 1 March 2027. If you let a property inside that area you need a licence for it, and the fact that the scheme is in its last stretch changes nothing about that.

Landlords get caught by this in two ways. Some assume that because Doncaster is a large borough with a lot of rented stock, licensing must apply across all of it. It does not. Others buy in Hexthorpe, find out about the designation weeks after completion, and by then they are already letting without a licence and accruing an offence.

What selective licensing actually is

Selective licensing is a power a council can use to require a licence for every privately rented home in a defined area, whatever the size of the property and whoever lives in it. The council decides the boundary, sets the licence conditions and monitors compliance. The trigger is the address, not the household.

Hold onto that distinction, because it explains most of the confusion. A one bedroom flat let to a single tenant needs a licence if it sits inside the designated area. The same flat, two streets outside the boundary, does not.

Licence conditions tend to cover ground a careful landlord already covers: gas and electrical safety, tenant referencing, a process for dealing with antisocial behaviour, keeping the property in repair. The exact conditions are set by the council rather than by national law, so read the ones attached to your own licence instead of assuming they match what a friend deals with in another borough.

Where selective licensing applies in Doncaster now

Hexthorpe is the only active scheme. The council publishes the boundary and the application process on its Hexthorpe selective licensing page, and that page is the thing to check against your address rather than a rough idea of where the area starts and stops.

Edlington had a scheme, and it ended on 6 February 2023. No selective licence is required for a property in Edlington now. Landlords still ask about it fairly often, usually because they have found an old letter or an out of date page and assumed it is current.

Anything else you hear about is either a proposal, a different kind of licensing, or a misunderstanding. The council's selective licensing information sets out which areas are designated. Check there before you take anybody's word for it, including a seller's and including an agent's.

What a Hexthorpe licence costs

£600 in total for the five year designation. That is made up of a £200 application fee and a £400 compliance monitoring fee. Members of a recognised landlord association get a £50 discount.

It is a scheme fee rather than an annual charge, so a landlord licensing a property part way through the designation is still dealing with the council's published fee structure rather than a pro rata figure they have worked out themselves. If your circumstances are unusual, ask the licensing team directly. They will tell you what applies to your application, and that answer is worth more than a guess from anyone else.

Selective licensing and HMO licensing are not the same thing

This is where landlords most often go wrong, so it is worth being blunt. Selective licensing is about the area. HMO licensing is about the property and who lives in it.

A mandatory HMO licence is needed where all of the following apply:

• the property is rented to five or more people who form more than one household
• some or all of them share a toilet, bathroom or kitchen
• at least one tenant pays rent

That test applies anywhere in the country. Councils can also require licensing below that threshold through additional licensing, which is a separate power again. The government's guidance on a house in multiple occupation licence sets out the national position, and renting out an unlicensed HMO carries an unlimited fine.

The two regimes stack. A house in Hexthorpe let to five sharers from different households can fall inside the selective licensing designation and meet the mandatory HMO test at the same time, and needing one licence does not excuse you from the other. If you are converting a family let into a shared house, work out both questions before you advertise it, not after. The same applies to the wider sequence of letting a property in Doncaster, where licensing belongs at the start of the job rather than somewhere near the end.

What happens if you let without a licence

The council can impose a financial penalty of up to £30,000, or prosecute, in which case the fine is unlimited. That is the headline exposure and it is enough on its own to make the £600 look like a rounding error.

There is a second consequence that landlords tend to overlook. Tenants can apply for a rent repayment order of up to 12 months' rent covering the period of the offence. That is money coming back out of rent you have already banked and spent, and it is separate from anything the council does. A landlord who lets an unlicensed property in Hexthorpe for a year can therefore face both a penalty and a claim for the rent.

Neither of those depends on the property being in poor condition or the tenancy going wrong. The offence is letting without the licence.

If you are buying in Hexthorpe now

The scheme runs until 1 March 2027, so a purchase completing today sits inside it. You need a licence, and you need it from the point you are letting rather than at some comfortable moment afterwards.

Do not assume the seller's licence carries across to you. Ask the council what it needs from a new owner and how quickly it needs it, and do that before completion if you can, because the answer sometimes affects how you want to time the first tenancy. Where a property is being sold with tenants in place, that timing question gets sharper, not softer.

Also ask the seller directly whether a licence is in place at all. A property being sold without one is a property that may already carry an offence, and the sale does not tidy that up for anybody. Your conveyancer is the right person to raise it formally, and any question about liability passing on a sale is one for a solicitor rather than for us.

Whether the scheme gets renewed

Nobody outside the council can tell you that yet. A designation can be allowed to lapse, or the council can consult on a new one covering the same area or a different area. Both happen in other boroughs and neither is a foregone conclusion here.

What that means in practice is that 1 March 2027 is a date to diary rather than a date to relax about. If you own in Hexthorpe, watch the council's licensing pages through 2026 and into the new year, and treat any consultation as worth responding to. If you own elsewhere in Doncaster, the same watchfulness applies for the opposite reason, because a new designation somewhere else would bring properties into licensing that are outside it today.

We keep an eye on this on behalf of the landlords whose properties we look after, which is part of the ordinary landlord compliance work we do across Doncaster rather than a separate service.

What to do this week

If you own in or near Hexthorpe, check the address against the council's published boundary rather than your memory of it. If it falls inside, check that a licence is in place and in your name. If it does not fall inside, note that selective licensing in Doncaster could still reach you later if the council designates a new area, and move on.

Then check the other question. Five or more occupiers from more than one household, sharing facilities, means HMO licensing is in play whatever the postcode.

Licensing sits alongside gas, electrical, EPC and deposit obligations as part of our managed property service in Doncaster, for one all-in fee with no hidden fees. If you are not sure which side of a boundary your property sits on, or whether a licence you inherited is valid, get in touch with the office on 01302 244104 and we will go through the address with you.