Greenwich Landlord Licensing — Every Scheme in One Dated Guide

Greenwich's Stage 1 fee is non-refundable. Submit an incomplete application and you lose it.

The Royal Borough of Greenwich runs three licensing schemes for private rented homes — selective licensing in five designated wards, borough-wide additional HMO licensing for smaller shared houses and Section 257 converted buildings, and mandatory HMO licensing under national rules. A public consultation on expanding selective licensing to 18 wards closed in October 2026, so the licensing map may be about to change significantly. Each scheme has its own occupancy test, its own fee structure with a two-stage split and its own set of licence conditions. A landlord who applies under the wrong scheme, uploads a missing certificate or submits an incomplete fit-and-proper disclosure gets the application refused — and the non-refundable Stage 1 fee is gone. For an HMO application that is over £500 you will not see again.

All the rules are published free on the council's website. The problem is that they sit across separate scheme pages, cabinet reports, consultation documents, fee schedules and condition PDFs. The council's two-stage payment structure means you pay a non-refundable application fee before the council even reviews your documents — and the portal does not warn you when something is missing.

The Greenwich Licensing Pre-Flight System: prepare offline, submit once, get it right

This guide is not another summary of landlord licensing law. It is a pre-flight system — a single, dated reference that organises every scheme Greenwich runs into a step-by-step offline workflow. You check which licence your property needs, assemble every required document, verify every fee and discount, prepare your application answers and fit-and-proper disclosure on paper, and work through a pre-submission checklist — so that when you log in to the council portal, you are copying from a completed worksheet rather than working it out in a live session.

You get a 42-page guide covering all three licensing schemes, a dated compliance checklist and six standalone printable worksheets — property classification, document assembly, fee calculator, licence condition compliance log, inspection preparation checklist and renewal tracker — eight PDFs in one download.

What is inside

• Address-first decision framework — start with your property address and work through Greenwich's five selective licensing wards, occupancy count and household composition to identify exactly which of the three schemes applies, without guessing or phoning the council
• Selective licensing walkthrough — the five designated wards (Woolwich Riverside, Woolwich Common, Shooters Hill, Plumstead Common, Plumstead Glyndon), the two-stage fee totalling £905.75, the documents you need and what happens at each step of the application
• Proposed 18-ward expansion — what the 2026 consultation proposed, the new fee structure and the timeline, so you can plan ahead if your property sits outside the current five wards
• Additional HMO licensing walkthrough — how the borough-wide scheme that started on 1 January 2024 works for 3-or-more person shared houses and Section 257 converted buildings, the fee structure and the extra documents HMOs require
• Mandatory HMO licensing — the 5-or-more person threshold that applies regardless of ward, the national room size standards and how they interact with Greenwich's local requirements
• The Article 4 planning trap — Greenwich's Article 4 Direction means converting a house to a small HMO (Use Class C4) needs planning permission as well as a licence. A valid licence does not override a missing planning consent, and the council can enforce both separately
• Pre-flight document checklist — Gas Safety CP12, 5-year EICR, EPC, Fire Risk Assessment, floor plans with room dimensions — with a verification worksheet so you confirm every document is current and correctly formatted before you upload
• Two-stage fee calculator with accreditation discounts — every Stage 1 and Stage 2 amount for each scheme, plus the reductions available for landlords accredited through the London Landlord Accreditation Scheme, so you pay exactly what you owe
• Fit-and-proper person test — what the council checks, what disqualifies an applicant, the spent convictions rules and how to prepare a management declaration for a property managed by an agent
• Licence conditions and post-grant duties — what Greenwich requires after the licence is issued, from safety certificate renewals to occupancy limits, with a compliance log so you are ready when an inspector visits
• Enforcement and penalties — civil penalties of up to £40,000 per offence, Rent Repayment Orders covering up to 24 months of rent for serious offences committed after 1 May 2026, and how the Renters' Rights Act changes the enforcement framework

Who this is for

• Self-managing landlords in Greenwich with one or two properties who want to apply for their own licence without paying an agent £400–£650
• Accidental landlords who inherited a property or kept a former home in Greenwich and have just found out a licensing scheme applies
• Landlords who received a letter from the council about the selective licensing scheme or the proposed expansion and need to understand what it means for their property
• HMO landlords in Greenwich who are unsure whether their shared house needs an additional HMO licence, a mandatory HMO licence or both
• Owners of flats in converted houses who need to work out whether a Section 257 licence covers the building and whether the individual flat needs a separate selective licence
• Landlords using a letting agent who want an independent audit tool to verify the agent submitted the right application with the right documents

Why not free resources?

Every scheme designation, fee schedule, condition document and application form is published free on the council's website. We link to all of them.

The problem is not access — it is assembly, sequence and local detail. The selective licensing designation sits on one page. The additional HMO scheme is on another. The proposed expansion is in a consultation document. The fee schedule is separate from all three. The licence conditions are downloadable PDFs disconnected from the portal. And the two-stage payment structure means you pay a non-refundable Stage 1 fee before the council has even looked at your documents — if something is wrong, you pay again.

A landlord working out whether an additional HMO licence applies has to cross-reference the designation details, check whether the property has three or more occupants from two or more households, compare that against the Section 257 converted building definition, look up the specific fee tier, then assemble every certificate in the exact format the portal expects — all before starting an application that charges a non-refundable fee upfront. One missed step and the Stage 1 fee is gone.

The pre-flight system puts all three schemes in a single document, in execution order, with worksheets you complete offline so the portal session is a straightforward data-entry exercise rather than a research project.

Dated to the rules it describes

Landlord licensing in Greenwich changes when schemes expire and are renewed. The additional HMO scheme runs until 31 December 2028. The selective licensing scheme in five wards runs from October 2022 and the proposed expansion to 18 wards may start during the current scheme's lifetime. The guide carries a clear "rules as at" date, separates the current schemes from the proposed expansion and upcoming national changes, and flags the Renters' Rights Act penalty and enforcement reforms that took effect in May 2026. You can see at a glance which rules apply now and which are on the horizon.

Full refund, no time limit

If the guide does not help you get your Greenwich property licensed correctly, email [email protected] and we will refund you in full. No form, no deadline, no questions.

The free checklist gives you the steps. The full kit gives you the pre-flight system — eight PDFs including the 42-page guide, six standalone worksheets and the compliance checklist: decision frameworks, fee calculators, document verification, inspection preparation, renewal tracking and a step-by-step application walkthrough — everything a self-managing landlord needs to get the right Greenwich licence first time, without losing a non-refundable application fee to a preventable error.