LetLens / About

About LetLens, and how these answers are put together

LetLens tells a landlord what a property in England actually costs to let before they commit to it: which licences it needs, whether planning permission is required to run it as a shared house, what the council charges, and what the local rent really is. This page explains where each of those comes from and how far to trust it.

Who builds it

LetLens is brought to you by the team behind Barnab Limited. The licensing and planning research is done by hand against councils' own published sources, not bought in from a data reseller, and the person doing it has worked on licence applications rather than only read about them.

Corrections go to [email protected] and are the fastest way to change what this site says. Councils change schemes, fees and boundaries without announcing it, so being told is genuinely useful to us.

How the licensing answers are assembled

Every licensing designation is read from the council's own published material: the designation notice or order, the fee schedule, and the licensing pages themselves. Each one is stored with the URL it came from and the date it was read, and both appear on the council's page. Nothing is inferred from a competitor's dataset.

A designation carries its own start and end date, and the answer is recomputed against today rather than served from a stored verdict. A scheme that has run out reads as run out on the day it ends, with a warning that councils routinely re-designate and that the replacement may reach us after it is made. Being told “no licence needed” when one is required is the single worst thing this site could do, so a scheme that has expired is never rendered as a settled no.

Fees are transcribed, never estimated. Where a council publishes a fee we show it with its basis, its bands and its discounts; where a council does not publish one we say the licence is required and the price is not public, which is a real and reasonably common state. A figure far outside the range every other council publishes is withheld pending a re-read rather than printed.

How the Article 4 answers are assembled

An Article 4 direction removes the permitted-development right to turn a house into a small shared house, which means planning permission is needed for something that would otherwise be automatic. It is separate from licensing, decided by a different part of the council, and it is the thing landlords most often discover too late.

Boundaries come from the council's own GIS layer or published order where one exists, and from the national planning.data.gov.uk register otherwise, with the two cross-checked against each other. Where the boundary we hold is coarser than the direction it represents, the postcode is kept but the answer is softened to “confirm with the council” rather than presented as a definite yes: over-covering to avoid a false no is right, but presenting an over-cover as a certainty is not.

Where no boundary precise enough exists at all, the page says it cannot place an individual postcode inside or outside the area. That is a worse answer than a map, and it is the true one.

Rent, and the figures that are not licensing

Rent is observed from live and recently listed properties, aggregated to an area rather than a street, and shown with the number of observations behind it so a thin sample is visible as a thin sample. Where there is not enough evidence for a place, no figure is shown rather than a national average dressed as a local one.

Sold prices come from HM Land Registry, energy ratings from EPC records, flood exposure from Environment Agency data, and population, income and deprivation from ONS. These are national datasets and are named where they are used; unlike the licensing figures they do not link to a council document, because no council document exists for them.

How the pages are checked

Two things run over these pages continuously. A test suite pins the claims we have already got wrong once, so they cannot come back. And a randomised auditor reads whole pages looking for statements the underlying data does not support: a verdict more confident than its evidence, a fee quoted for a property the scheme does not catch, a percentage computed from a boundary nobody could verify, two sentences that cannot both be true.

It has found real defects, which is the point of running it. Anything it flags is fixed before the pages are rebuilt.

What this cannot tell you

• Whether a specific property is licensed. We show what a property of a given size and occupancy would need, not the licence status of a particular address.
• Anything about an individual building's condition, planning history or tenancy.
• The outcome of a planning application, only whether permission is likely to be needed.
• Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. England only, deliberately, because the licensing regimes differ and pretending otherwise would be worse than saying so.

Nothing here is legal, planning or financial advice, and a decision worth money is worth confirming with the council directly. LetLens is built to make that confirmation faster and better targeted, not to replace it.

How often it is updated

Licensing and Article 4 records are re-checked against their sources on a rolling basis, and each council page shows the date its sources were last read. A daily job watches for the changes that go stale silently: a designation reaching its end date, an immediate Article 4 direction reaching its confirmation deadline, a forthcoming direction commencing. Those are the cases where doing nothing turns a correct page into a wrong one.