Newham Landlord Licensing Guide — Selective, Additional and HMO

Newham keeps your £400 if you get the application wrong. Most landlords don't know that until it happens.

Newham Council runs three licensing schemes — selective, additional HMO and mandatory HMO — and requires every private landlord in 21 of its 23 wards to hold the right licence for their property. The rules overlap, the fees run into the hundreds, and the council does not offer portal technical support. If you submit an application with a missing document, an incorrect room measurement or the wrong scheme selected, the council rejects it and keeps the non-refundable £400 Part A processing fee.

You can read every rule on newham.gov.uk. The problem is that you need to cross-reference a dozen separate web pages, two designation notices, two fee schedules and the portal guidance — then assemble all of that into the right order before you open the live application. One wrong step and you are out £400 with nothing to show for it.

The Newham Licensing Pre-Flight System: offline preparation, correct application, first time

This guide is not another summary of property licensing law. It is a pre-flight system — a single, dated reference that organises every scheme Newham runs into a step-by-step process you can work through offline, at your own pace, before you touch the portal. You check which licence your property needs, assemble every required document, record every room measurement, verify every fee and discount, and prepare your application answers on paper — so that when you log in to My Newham, you are copying from a completed worksheet, not working it out in a live session.

You get a 49-page guide covering all three licensing schemes, a dated compliance checklist, and six printable worksheets — ward verification, document audit, room measurements, fee calculator, compliance log and renewal tracker — all in one download.

What is inside

• Address-first decision flowchart — start with your property's postcode and work through ward, occupancy and household questions to identify which of the three schemes applies, without guessing
• Full selective licensing walkthrough — the 21 designated wards, the 2 excluded wards, the Part A / Part B fee stages, the documents you need, and what happens at each step of the portal application
• Additional HMO licensing walkthrough — how the 3-to-4 person household test works, the different fee structure, and the extra room dimension requirements that catch landlords who assume it is the same as selective
• Mandatory HMO licensing — the 5-or-more person threshold that applies regardless of ward, the scaled fee structure, and the national minimum room sizes you must meet
• Pre-flight document checklist — Gas Safety CP12, 5-year EICR, EPC, landlord accreditation, floor plans in square metres — with a verification worksheet so you confirm every document is current and correctly formatted before you upload
• Fee calculator with discount rules — every Part A and Part B amount for each scheme, plus the £50 accreditation discount and the EPC C+ reduced fees, so you pay exactly what you owe and nothing more
• The Article 4 planning trap explained — why a property licence does not grant planning permission to convert to an HMO, and what to check before you change the household arrangement
• Fit-and-proper person test — what the council checks, what disqualifies an applicant, and how to prepare a management declaration
• Licence conditions and post-grant audits — what Newham requires after the licence is issued, from tenant references to safety certificate renewals, with a compliance log template
• Enforcement and penalties — civil penalties up to £40,000 per offence, Rent Repayment Orders covering up to 24 months, the rogue landlord database, and what triggers each one
• Renters' Rights Act and PRS Database cross-reference — how the new national duties interact with Newham's local licensing, and what to prepare for the December 2026 PRS Database rollout

Who this is for

• Self-managing landlords in Newham with one or two properties who want to apply for their own licence without paying an agent £300–£800
• Accidental landlords who inherited a property or kept a former home in Newham and have just found out they need a licence
• Landlords who received a letter from Newham Council and need to understand what the council is asking for and how to respond
• HMO landlords in Newham who are unsure whether their property needs an additional HMO licence, a mandatory HMO licence or both
• 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 designation notice, fee schedule and application form is published free on newham.gov.uk. We link to all of them.

The problem is not access — it is assembly and sequence. The selective licensing designation sits on one page. The additional HMO designation is on another. The fee schedule is separate from both. The document requirements are listed in a different section. The portal login is somewhere else again. And the council explicitly states it cannot help with portal technical issues.

A landlord working out whether an additional HMO licence applies has to cross-reference the designation notice, check the ward map, count occupants, verify household composition, look up the specific fee tier, compare it against the selective fee, then assemble the documents in the order the portal expects — all before opening a live application session that does not save drafts reliably. One missed step and the £400 Part A 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 copy-paste exercise, not a research project.

Dated to the rules it describes

Landlord licensing in Newham changes when designations expire and are renewed. The guide carries a clear "rules as at" date and separates the current selective and additional licensing designations (1 June 2023 to 31 May 2028) from upcoming national changes. 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 Newham 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 guide gives you the pre-flight system — worksheets, decision flowcharts, fee calculators, document verification and a step-by-step portal walkthrough — everything a self-managing landlord needs to get the right Newham licence first time, without losing a £400 application fee to a preventable error.