Those conditions are not local invention. They are set out in law, they attach automatically to the licence, and getting them wrong is a compliance failure in their own right — separate from, and sometimes confused with, a landlord's electrical and gas duties. This page is about what the mandatory conditions actually say, and where the boundary sits between them and the rest of a landlord's obligations.
Where the mandatory conditions come from
Under the Housing Act 2004, section 67, an HMO licence must include a fixed set of conditions set out in Schedule 4 to the Act. These are described as "mandatory" for a reason: the local housing authority cannot waive them, negotiate them away, or issue a licence without them. Anything else the council adds on top — extra conditions about management, noise, waste collection days — sits alongside these, not in place of them.
Among the things Schedule 4 requires of the licence holder are: an annual gas safety check where the property has a gas supply, with the certificate produced on demand; keeping any electrical appliances and furniture that the licence holder supplies in a safe condition, again with a declaration available on request; the installation and maintenance of smoke alarms; and a written statement of the terms on which each occupier holds their room. These are baseline duties attached to the licence itself, not optional good practice.
The 2018 amendment: room sizes and waste, not electrics
Schedule 4 was expanded by the Licensing of Houses in Multiple Occupation (Mandatory Conditions of Licences) (England) Regulations 2018 (SI 2018/616). It is worth being precise about what that amendment actually did, because it is easy to misremember. It inserted a mandatory condition setting minimum floor areas for sleeping rooms, scaled by the number and age of the occupants using that room, and a mandatory condition requiring the licence holder to comply with the local authority's scheme for the storage and disposal of household waste.
What the 2018 regulations did not do is add an electrical-safety condition. Electrical safety in a rented HMO is governed by a separate piece of law entirely, and conflating the two is one of the more common mistakes we see landlords and agents make when they read a licence pack.
Electrical safety sits in a different regulation altogether
The requirement for a rented home in England to have a valid Electrical Installation Condition Report is set out in the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020, specifically regulation 3. Regulation 3(1)(b) requires the electrical installation to be inspected and tested by a qualified person, and regulation 3(2)(a) sets the maximum interval between inspections at five years. That duty applies to privately rented dwellings generally, and a licensed HMO is no exception to it — but it is a distinct legal regime from the Schedule 4 licence conditions, running on its own clock and enforced through its own route. Our guides to EICR landlord requirements in London and landlord electrical safety standards cover that duty on its own terms.
The gas equivalent is the same kind of overlap. Schedule 4 requires the licence holder to produce a current gas safety certificate on demand, but the underlying duty to have that annual check carried out by a registered engineer comes from the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998. The HMO licence condition is downstream of that duty, not a replacement for it — see gas safety certificates in London for the detail of the annual check itself.
Why landlords conflate the two — and why it matters
The confusion is understandable. A licence application asks for evidence of gas and electrical safety alongside room-size and waste-management commitments, all in the same form, so it is easy to file them mentally as one obligation with one renewal date. In practice they run on different clocks: the gas check is annual, the EICR interval is five-yearly (or sooner if an earlier report required it), and the HMO licence itself typically runs for a term set by the council, with the mandatory conditions attached for its whole duration regardless of when the certificates inside it happen to expire. Treating them as a single compliance event is how landlords end up producing an out-of-date gas certificate at a licence renewal, or discovering a room falls short of the minimum sleeping-room floor area only when an inspecting officer measures it.
What this looks like in a Westminster property
A converted period house in W1, W2, NW8 or W9 subdivided into individually let rooms is exactly the stock this regime was written for, and it is also exactly the stock where the conditions are hardest to meet without proper planning. Partitioning to create a room that meets a minimum floor area, moving a waste store to somewhere the refuse scheme actually collects from, and fitting or relocating smoke alarms are all physical works, not paperwork — and in a Westminster building they usually come with the same practical constraints as any other refurbishment: porter access, a licence to alter from the freeholder if the building is leasehold, and the borough's working hours restrictions for anything noisy. Our page on HMO licensing in Westminster covers the wider licensing picture for the borough; this page is specifically about the conditions that attach once a licence is granted.
How we help
Most of what the mandatory conditions require is straightforward once it is planned rather than discovered at inspection: smoke alarm installation, an electrician's visit to check and declare appliances and any fixed wiring genuinely safe, room measurements checked against the current requirement before a tenancy starts rather than after a complaint. Our electrician call-outs start from £80 excluding VAT for exactly this kind of check, and where a fire door needs replacing or upgrading as part of bringing a room up to standard, fire door installation labour starts from £220 excluding VAT. Both are fixed-quoted before any work begins.
Requirements and standards in this area change, and the exact conditions attached to any specific licence are set by the local housing authority. Nothing on this page is legal advice — confirm your current licence conditions with Westminster City Council, and check anything statutory against your own circumstances with a solicitor before you rely on it.
If you manage a licensed HMO and want the gas, electrical and room-condition side handled as one planned visit rather than three separate scrambles, get in touch with the address and we'll tell you what's involved.