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30 July 2021
Interim Results Of The Enfield Landlords Prospective Study On ASB Within The London Borough of Enfield.

​interim results of the Enfield Landlords Prospective Study on anti-social behaviour with the London Borough of Enfield has been released.  The 80-month study show with a 99.9% confidence level that the main cause of ASB in the borough is fly-tipping.
The Study Population


​Sampling in the Enfield Landlords Prospective Study on ASB:

​
The types of people involved and the main locations of ASB in the London Borough of Enfield during the Enfield Landlords Prospective Study on ASB are:

Abbreviations:
ASB = Anti social behaviour;
LBE = London Borough of Enfield
PRSP = Private rented sector properties.

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24 July 2021

Enfield Council Has Obtained Permission To Commence Selective Licensing Of Landlords

The Council has under the cover of the Covid-19 pandemic applied to the government for a Section 80 of the Housing Act 2004, and obtained permission to commence selective licensing of Landlords owning residential properties in 14 wards in Enfield Borough.  This applies to residential properties that are let to one or two people or to families. There was no proper consultation with Landlords or Landlord Groups in the borough before the Council made the application and we were certainly never consulted.  The following wards will be affected by the selective licensing scheme:
  • Bowes
  • Edmonton Green
  • Enfield Highway
  • Enfield Lock
  • Haselbury
  • Jubilee
  • Lower Edmonton
  • Palmers Green
  • Ponders End
  • Southbury
  • Southgate Green
  • Turkey Street
  • Upper Edmonton
  • Chase
 
More details can be found at the council website HERE. 
 
Section 95 of the Housing Act gives Enfield Council the power to exact an unlimited financial penalty from any unlicensed property including recovery of 12-month Housing Benefit/Universal Credit-funded rent already paid and a £30,000 fine. This is a despite the Judgment Orders of HHJ McKenna of the Royal Courts of Justice, London made on 14 December 2014.  In his Judgment, HHJ McKenna ruled that: 
 
 "The implementation and operation of an unlawful designation is a continuing unlawful act which could be challenged by an affected landlord or indeed any other claimant with the necessary standing. Alternatively any landlord could simply refuse at any time in the future to apply for a licence and rely on the ultra vires nature of the designation as a defence if prosecuted ”. 
 
 
Enfield Landlords will challenge this designation for selective licensing in Court and will seek again to prove that it is unlawful. We invite all like-minded  Landlords to join the fight by signing up HERE
 


07 September 2015

Syrian Refugees Are Welcome!

An emergency meeting of the Executive of Enfield Landlords on Monday 07 September 2015 agreed to ask members to provide 300 houses or flats to house Syrian refugees.  

The refugee crisis is the greatest moral challenge of our time and Enfield Landlords cannot simply fold their hands whilst this tragedy unfolds.

We declare that refugees are welcome in the London Borough of Enfield and are willing to provide housing from the housing stock of private Landlords in the Borough to help contain this crisis!  We support the Government's initiative to accept 20,000 refugees into the United Kingdom and urge all our members to sign up to the scheme to house refugees from Syria.




11 March 2015
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Enfield Council Persists In Pursuing Licensing Of Private LandLords In The Borough But The Housing Minister: Brandon Lewis MP Has Rejected Their Application For Permission

Some people never listen and others never learn! But why Enfield Council is behaving so spitefully, nobody can explain. They have lost the matter at the High Court and now the Minister of State for Planning & Housing has refused to give his permission for Enfield Council to re-start the consultation process on licensing all over again.  


Landlords may need to mobilise again against Enfield Council if they do NOT STOP wasting taxpayers' money by pursuing their misconceived scheme to raise money from private Landlords in the Borough of Enfield under the guise of licensing.




11 December 2014

The High Court Rules Against Licensing Of Private Landlords In Enfield.

An Enfield Landlord has won the case he brought against Enfield Council via a Judicial Review that was heard on 26 November 2014 at the Royal Courts of Justice.  Judgment was passed on 11 December 2014 by His Honour Judge McKenna.

The Judgment of HHJ  McKenna can be found HERE.

Judge McKenna quashed Enfield Council’s proposal to commence additional and selective licensing in the borough. This would have required all private rented property in the borough to be licensed from 1 April 2015.

In the judgment, HHJ McKenna stated that: 

 "The implementation and operation of an unlawful designation is a continuing unlawful act which could be challenged by an affected landlord or indeed any other claimant with the necessary standing. Alternatively any landlord could simply refuse at any time in the future to apply for a licence and rely on the ultra vires nature of the designation as a defence if prosecuted ”. 

He found that Enfield Council had failed to consult the 6 surrounding boroughs, did not obtain the consent of the Secretary of State and did not consult for the required length of time. 

He concluded:
"I conclude that the additional and selective licensing schemes were not lawfully designated, nor can they lawfully be implemented unless and until Enfield (a) conduct a lawful consultation as required by ss.56 and 80; and, (b) having done so, obtains approval for a lawfully designated scheme (whether specific confirmation from the Secretary of State or under the General Approval)."

HHJ McKenna also refused permission for Enfield to appeal against the decision.  

Let us all hope that Enfield Council has learnt its lesson.

Here are the minutes of the meeting and resolutions passed by the Scrutiny & Overview Committee on 30 April 2014. CLICK HERE.

Enfield Landlords are conducting a study in the London Borough of Enfield to identify the drivers of anti-social behaviour in the borough.  We would be grateful for your responses to the questions that we ask in the survey below:

Research question: Is there a link between tenure type of property and anti social behaviour in the London Borough of Enfield? 

Inclusion criteria:
  1. Resident or working or schooling in the borough of Enfield
  2. Has experienced at least one incidence of Anti Social Behaviour in the borough
  3. Able to give informed consent

    15 April 2014

    Survey Of Anti Social Behaviour (ASB) In The London Borough Of Enfield.
​Research Enfield Council Based The Decision To Commence Licensing Of Private Landlords On.
Enfield Council based their decision to commence licensing of private landlords on a flawed study by an obscure consulting group known as NKM titled "Understanding The Relationship Between Private Rented Properties And Anti-Social Behavior In Enfield".  Here are extracts from a critical appraisal of the NKM Study:

ASB Data Highlights
  1. Data did not verify property addresses of ASB incidents.
  2. Out of 29,481 reported cases of ASB between April 2011 and July 2013 by NKM, only 1,530 were matched to actual addresses.
  3. Reported incidences were compared to properties identified as most likely to be privately rented and categorised as such.
 
Analysis
  1. Model used was “probabilistic” hence did not give a definite answer on whether a property is rented or not.
  2. Model consisted of:
  • 4 probable risk factors with best predictive power giving rise to 16 possible risk factor combinations.
  1. “Goodness-of-fit” of the statistical model used was not calculated or was weak hence was not disclosed by NKM for scrutiny.
  2. P-values not stated for statistical significance of probable risk factors.
  3. Confidence intervals of probable risk factors not stated.
  4. Odds ratio of probable risk factors were not calculated from the data analysis but based on extrapolation.
  5. The report authors clearly state that some of their so-called risk factors may overstate the risk.
  6. The analysis did not include any power calculations in the published report and hence could not make any categorical statements.
 
Sources Of Error In The Analysis.
  1. The predictive power of probable risk factors established by follow-up visits by NKM was unblinded and therefore likely to be biased.  To be bias-free, both the investigator and the study population must be blinded to the study and its effect.[i]  Further, a control population must be in place.
  2. The report authors admit that they had no comprehensive data to base the predictive power of the model they used. To do this, they would have needed to establish new data collections or undertaking large-scale surveys.  In other words, the NKM study lacked statistical power to make any categorical statements.
  3. Risk factor weights that NKM previously identified in the London Borough of Newham, an inner city borough, may not be applicable in a suburban borough like Enfield.
  4. The data analysed may have been subject to manipulation towards a pre-determined outcome as it was never locked and a specific data custodian was never appointed as would have been normal in this type of study to safeguard against the data being “fiddled”.

Weaknesses Of The Study
  1. No research question was asked.
  2. No hypothesis was proposed.
  3. The investigators did not carry out a pilot study in LBE to generate a hypothesis before conducting the main study.
  4. The investigators never asked neither did they obtain informed consent from the people whose data they used in the study.
  5. The data the investigators generated in the study was never locked to prevent manipulation at the end of data collection. 
  6. The investigators never appointed a data custodian.
  7. The statistical model used was “probabilistic” and could not verify outcomes.
  8. The so-called risk factors identified by the investigators have never been identified by any other investigator.
  9. The investigators only studied 1,530 incidents out of 29,481 supposed incidents of ASB in the borough during the study period.  That is 5% of reported ASB incidents. To be able to make a power statement to cover the 128,500 residential properties in the borough of Enfield, the NKM study should have recruited 7,900 verified incidents. 
  10. The figure of 29,481 ASB incidents during the study period contradicts the ASB plus all other crimes in the borough recorded by the Metropolitan Police Service as 28,587 during the same period and published by the Mayor of London in the MOPAC report.8
  11. The report authors did not provide for the differences in the characteristics of Enfield compared to Newham, They treated the 2 boroughs as though they were one. These differences include:
  • Properties in the 3 highest risk categories in Enfield accounted for 3.1% of properties versus 12.7% in Newham.
  • Not receiving Council Tax benefit, which was the cornerstone of the statistical model the authors developed was 69% in Enfield versus 36.8% in Newham.
  • Higher turnover of Council Tax liable persons in 36 months in Newham (high turnover of this index is one of the supposed risk factors identified by the report authors)
  • Higher turnover of Electoral Roll registrants in 36 months. (another supposed risk factor for ASB identified by the report authors despite admitting that the dataset they analysed covered only 27 months)
  1. Standard error or standard error of the mean, which is a measure of how precisely the sample mean approximates to the population mean was not calculated. Thus, the report authors could not construct a key statistical measure known as the “confidence interval” in the study population.
  2. The analysis did not include a funnel plot and as such did not rule out asymmetry due to combining data from multiple sources.
  3. The analysis did not provide for important confounders like:
  • ASB due to missed bin collections.
  • ASB from commercial organisations like betting shops.
  • ASB from late-opening establishments like nightclubs.
  • Street gangs.
  • London riots of 2011 despite its occurrence during the study period.
  1. The report authors admit that they did not uniquely ascribe ASB to individual households.
  2. Neither the Null hypotheses nor the Alternate Hypotheses was tested in this study. [i]
  3. The study was silent on the whether or not any outcome measure reached statistical significance.
  4. The study was not powered to make any categorical statements. This wrongful use of the statistical analysis of retrospective data to estimate the power resulted in uninformative and misleading values.[ii]  A test's power is the probability of correctly rejecting the null hypothesis when it is false. A test's power is influenced by the choice of significance level for the test, the size of the effect being measured, and the amount of data available. A hypothesis test may fail to reject the null hypothesis, for example, if a true difference exists between two populations being compared by a t-test but the effect is small and the sample size is too small to distinguish the effect from random chance.[iii]
  5. When two continuous variables like ASB and privately rented properties are studied, it is usual to calculate the correlation coefficient from the data generated to see if there is a linear association between the two variables.  This is usually a figure between -1 and +1.  This was not done in this study and as such no association was proved.[iv]
  6. The study used nonsensical terms like “co-location” that is more appropriate for warehouses or IT servers  than an unbiased scientific report.
  7. The study was not peer-reviewed.
 
Does this study stand up to scrutiny?
  1. No, it does not.
  2. This is the scientific research was not subject to peer review and yet was publicly funded.[v], [vi]
  3. We submit that the appearance of misleading statistical analysis is not surprising considering the existence of data irregularities and the other biases that may have occurred in the process of locating, selecting and combining data from multiple unverified reports. [vii], [viii],
  4. Given the glaring inconsistencies in this study and its conclusions, it is very likely that this is not a simple failure of research governance but a case of fabrication of data and analysis - research fraud. [ix], [x]
 

References
[i] Ellis PD. The Essential Guide to Effect Sizes: An Introduction to Statistical Power, Meta-Analysis and the Interpretation of Research Results.  Cambridge University Press. 2010


[ii] Cramer D.  Advanced quantitative data analysis.  Open University Press, Maidenhead. 2003
 

[iii] Hoenig JM, Heisey DM. The Abuse of Power. The American Statistician 2001; 55:19-24
 

[iv] Ellis PD. The Essential Guide to Effect Sizes: Statistical Power, Meta-Analysis, and the Interpretation of Research Results. Cambridge University Press 2010; p. 52.
 

[v] Altman DG. Practical statistics for medical research.  1st Edition. Chapman & Hall 1991
 

[vi] Mulrow CD. Rationale for systematic reviews. BMJ 1994; 309: 597-9
 

[vii] Bacchetti P. Peer review of statistics in research: the other problem. BMJ 2002; 324: 1271 – 1273
 

[viii] Eysenck HJ. An exercise in mega-silliness. Am Psychol. 1978; 33: 517
 

[ix] Huque MF. Experiences with meta-analysis in NDA submissions. Proc Biopharmaceutical section. Am Statist Assoc 1988; 2: 28-33
 

[x] Egger M, Davey Smith G. Misleading meta-analysis. Lessons from “an effective safe, simple” intervention that wasn’t.  BMJ 1995; 310: 752-4
 

[xi] Egger M, Davey Smith G, Meta-analysis: bias in location and selection of studies. BMJ 1998 316:61-66
 


 



Missed Bin Collections
Enfield Landlords are consulting Landlords and tenants on the issue of missed bin collections all across the borough.  Neighbourhoods are blighted by the plethora of missed bin collections and the intransigence of refuse collectors and their managers in addressing the issue. Householders are continuously at war with refuse collectors, causing the breakdown of social cohesion in our once peaceful communities. In the past year alone, there has been 59 reports in the local newspapers on this matter.

As our elected Councillors are quite ineffective in dealing with this matter, the Enfield Landlords Organisation is NOW CONDUCTING A SURVEY on whether to call for the privatisation of refuse collection in the London Borough of Enfield.

    Survey On Privatisation Of Bin Collection

    "17% of Council Tax is spent on bin collection." States Spencer Feldman, a notable waste management expert. "Privatisation could see this slashed by 50% for householders.

    Already councils and local authorities all across the land have not only found this to be true, but in all cases have seen a reduction in number of complaints of up to 60%. This maybe because the privatisation contract is tied to the number of complaints received.  For instance, if 33,000 complaints are received from householders in the borough, then the contract will be automatically withdrawn and passed on to a second bidder.

    This has resulted in no more arguments about colour of bin bags and waste between householders and bin collectors as most householders are sensible and know what bin bags to use.  But importantly, bin collectors do the job council tax pays them to do.

    The following councils currently run private bin collection schemes:
    1. Sheffield City Council.
    2. Watford Borough Council
    3. Birmingham City Council.
    4. Cheshire East Council.

    The people of Enfield should shun confrontation with Enfield Council and bin collectors, and vote for privatisation of bin collection. To vote now, please click one of the buttons below: