Sir – The trouble with extending the HMO scheme is that it is charging good landlords a great deal of money for being good and responsible enough to sign up to the scheme, whilst failing to penalise and seek out the bad landlords who will dodge registering and go underground, pretending to be extended family homes.

Any landlord who is not already long-established, struggles to enter the market as it is, such are the prohibitive costs of a Buy-to-Let property in Oxford with exorbitant mortgage rates, let alone to afford regular high-quality maintenance/upgrade works, agency fees and all the other costs involved, plus make a modest profit margin, not least in a smaller property (which HMOs are now targeting).

The older landlords who can bear this more easily as they have paid off most of their property which they bought at a far cheaper price years ago will eventually sell up or retire; net result; a shortage of quality private affordable rented housing in Oxford.

Moreover, it is overkill when there is already an Accredited Landlord Scheme in Oxford also run by the council, so why the need for two schemes?

Why not offer a website for tenants or neighbours to shop bad landlords who can then be investigated?

Or another where rented houses could be rated/reviewed in the style of Trip Adviser, so that any scoring only one or two stars could be investigated?

This would also encourage the poorer landlords to raise their game if they wanted to avoid bad reviews and attain glowing five-star rated ones.

Either website could easily be financed using the money raised by prosecuting bad landlords and maintained by a much smaller staff then HMOs require.

I have read only one newspaper article about the prosecution of a bad local landlord so far this year. Surely he cannot be the only one?

Laura King, Sandford-on-Thames