Westminster Landlord Licensing — Selective, Additional and HMO

Westminster keeps your £543 if you apply under the wrong scheme. Most landlords don't find out until the rejection letter arrives.

Westminster City Council runs three licensing schemes for private rented homes — selective licensing across 15 wards, borough-wide additional HMO licensing, and mandatory HMO licensing — and splits every fee into two stages. Part A is the non-refundable processing charge. If you submit an application under the wrong scheme, with a missing document, or with an incorrect room measurement, the council rejects it and keeps the Part A fee: £543 for a selective licence, £855 for an additional HMO licence. No refund, no appeal.

You can find every rule on westminster.gov.uk. The problem is that the information lives across three separate web properties — the council's main site, the MetaStreet application portal (which throws access-denied errors and requires account creation before showing document requirements), and the legacy public register (which breaks on minor address formatting differences). Then you need to cross-reference two selective licensing designation notices, the additional HMO renewal notice, the fee schedule with its stacking discount rules, and the document specifications — and turn all of that into a portal submission before anything goes stale.

The Westminster Licensing Assembly Ledger: offline preparation, correct scheme, first time

This guide is not a summary of property licensing law. It is an assembly ledger — a single, dated reference that organises every scheme Westminster runs into a step-by-step process you can work through offline, at your own pace, before you open MetaStreet. You verify which ward your property sits in, determine which of the three schemes applies, assemble every required document, record every room dimension, calculate the exact fee after stacking every discount you qualify for, and prepare your application answers on paper — so that when you log in to the portal, you are copying from a completed worksheet, not working it out in a live session where a wrong click costs you hundreds.

You get a 44-page guide covering all three licensing schemes, a dated compliance checklist, and seven printable worksheets — ward verification record, licence scheme decision flowchart, document readiness checklist, two-stage fee calculator with discount stacking, application progress log, compliance tracker, and renewal planning calendar — all in one download.

What is inside

• Ward-by-ward decision path — start with your property's address and work through the 15 selective wards (Designation 1 and 2), the 3 excluded wards (Pimlico South, St James's, Vincent Square), occupancy count, and household relationships to identify exactly which licence you need, without guessing
• Selective licensing walkthrough — the two designations covering 15 wards, the Part A (£543) and Part B (£452) fee stages, every document required, and what happens at each step of the MetaStreet portal application
• Additional HMO licensing walkthrough — the borough-wide scheme for 3–4 person shared houses, the separate fee structure (£855 Part A, £685 Part B), the extra room dimension rules, and why landlords in the three excluded selective wards still need this licence if they have sharers
• Mandatory HMO licensing — the 5-or-more person threshold that applies in every ward regardless of any local scheme, the national minimum room sizes (6.51 m² single adult, 10.22 m² two adults), and Westminster's discretionary HHSRS standards that can exceed those minimums
• Section 257 converted-block diagnostic — a flowchart that clarifies why a converted block may be excluded from additional HMO licensing while individual rented flats within it still require a selective licence — the single most confusing overlap in Westminster's system
• Two-stage fee calculator with discount stacking — every Part A and Part B amount for selective and additional HMO licences, plus the four discounts that apply exclusively to Part B: 10% NRLA/LLAS accreditation, 20% EPC B or higher, 10% EPC C, and £125 multi-leasehold credit — with worked examples showing net payable amounts after combining them
• Pre-submission document audit sheet — Gas Safety CP12, 5-year EICR, EPC, scaled floor plans in square metres, fit-and-proper declarations, accreditation proof, overseas owner declarations — with a verification worksheet so you confirm every document is current and correctly formatted before you upload
• The Article 4 planning trap — Westminster's Article 4 Direction removes permitted development for C3-to-C4 conversions, so a property licence does not grant planning permission to let to three or more sharers — and what to check before you change the household arrangement
• Fit-and-proper person test — what Westminster assesses for every proposed licence holder and manager, what disqualifies an applicant, and how to prepare a management declaration
• Licence conditions and inspection readiness — what Westminster requires after the licence is granted, from tenant references to safety certificate renewals, with a compliance log template covering the full 5-year term
• Enforcement and penalties — civil penalties up to £40,000 per offence, Rent Repayment Orders covering up to 12–24 months of rent, mortgage lender checks that stall remortgages, the rogue landlord database, and what triggers each one
• Renters' Rights Act and PRS Database cross-reference — how the incoming national duties interact with Westminster's local licensing, and what to prepare for the December 2026 PRS Database rollout

Who this is for

• Self-managing landlords in Westminster with one or two properties who want to apply for their own licence without paying an agent £400–£540 plus VAT
• Accidental landlords who inherited a property or kept a former home in Westminster and have just discovered a licensing scheme applies
• Landlords who received a council inquiry letter or whose mortgage surveyor flagged a missing licence during a remortgage valuation
• HMO landlords in Westminster who are unsure whether their property needs an additional HMO licence, a mandatory HMO licence, or a selective licence
• Landlords with a flat in a converted block who need to understand the Section 257 exclusion and whether their individual flat still requires a 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 designation notice, fee schedule and application form is published free on westminster.gov.uk. We link to all of them.

The problem is not access — it is assembly and sequence. Westminster's licensing information is fragmented across three separate web systems. The selective licensing designations sit on the main site. The additional HMO renewal is on a different page. The fee schedule is separate from both. The document requirements are listed elsewhere. And the actual application lives on a different domain entirely — the MetaStreet portal, which requires account creation before you can even see the upload specifications and routinely generates access-denied errors.

A landlord working out whether a selective or additional HMO licence applies has to cross-reference two designation notices, check a non-interactive ward boundary image, count occupants, verify household composition, look up the specific fee tier, calculate discount stacking, then assemble the documents in the order the portal expects — all before opening a live application session. One missed step and the Part A fee is gone: £543 for selective, £855 for additional HMO.

The assembly ledger 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 Westminster changes when designations expire and are renewed. The guide carries a clear "rules as at" date and separates the current designations — selective licensing Designations 1 and 2 (in force to November 2030), the additional HMO renewal (in force to August 2031) — from upcoming national changes including the PRS Database rollout and the Renters' Rights Act 2025 phases. 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 Westminster 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 assembly ledger — seven printable worksheets, a ward-by-ward decision path, the two-stage fee calculator with discount stacking, document verification, and a step-by-step portal walkthrough — everything a self-managing landlord needs to get the right Westminster licence first time, without losing a Part A fee to a preventable error.