Avril Rennie’s comments are a joke: ‘She says the new licensing regime and costs make the future of her business “very uncertain”.’

As the article says we’re talking about, on average, £514 every three years, so that’s £171.33 a year. If her business is really that precarious that it can’t cope with that level of additional cost then it’s doomed anyway.

I am being a little unfair: there are additional costs on first application, mainly the need to do various safety checks e.g. electrical, but if a landlord is saying they’re happy to rent out potentially unsafe accommodation then I don’t have a lot of sympathy.

For background I’m a councillor on the Licensing Committee of Highland Council and we’ve had about 2,500 STL licence applications so far. Officers guestimated we’d had about 10,000. It’s not clear whether they overestimated the total, that landlords have stopped letting out properties, or that landlords are just keeping their heads down and hoping it will either go away or that the Council won’t notice. My suspicion is that it’s some combination of all of these factors.

Interesting times.