A local authority controlled by the Green Party says it’s issued 550 per cent more fines against landlords in the past year than in the previous 12 month period.

In a statement, Brighton and Hove council says that between April and December last year it’s housing officials “stepped in” to request improvements to 462 privately rented homes.

Of the 462, 13 required Statutory Notices or Civil Notices to be served in order to bring about the necessary improvements.

Around a third of homes in Brighton & Hove are privately rented – that’s around 45,000 properties.

The council claims to have invested an extra £200,000 in private sector housing enforcement staff and now it is undertaking a review to see if further beefing up is required.

The review will, among other things, look at measures to reduce the risk of what the council calls ‘revenge evictions’ by serving improvement notices and emergency remedial action notices at the earliest opportunity.

And it adds: “Where there’s a history of landlords carrying out revenge evictions following repairs reports, we will serve a pre-emptive improvement notice to protect the tenant.

“We encourage any tenants to inform us as soon as possible if their private rented home needs improving, and we can discuss the steps that can be taken prior to us contacting the landlord.

“If the necessary improvements aren’t made, we will then explore taking enforcement action.”

Councillor David Gibson, co-chair of the Housing Committee, says: “We have a lot of decent landlords in the city who provide much needed homes, but we also know there are properties where standards fall short and which need repairs and improvements.

“Our priority is to raise standards in more privately rented homes in the city and make sure that tenants in the sector can live in safe, healthy and well-managed homes.

“We will always want to work with landlords to bring about improvements in the first instance

“In most cases, once our private sector housing team intervenes, landlords undertake to carry out the necessary work and we ensure they do so. If they fail to comply with what’s needed, we will then take enforcement action.

“We have already issued 550 per cent more fines this year so far compared to the previous year.

“The review of our Private Sector Enforcement Policy will enable us to look at how we can further improve our work to help tenants.”