Most licensing designations describe their area by naming wards. That is convenient for the council and a trap for everyone else, because ward boundaries are redrawn and designations are not.
The rule
A designation fixes its area at the moment it is made, by reference to a map annexed to the notice. If the council later changes its ward boundaries — through a boundary review, a reorganisation, or a change in the number of councillors — the designated area does not move with them. The name in the notice keeps pointing at the shape that existed on the day.
So a designation covering "Lemyngton and Hastings wards" covers those wards as they were drawn at designation. A current ward map showing "Lemyngton" may show a different shape, and an address that is in Lemyngton today may not have been in the designated area, or the reverse.
The Charnwood case
Charnwood Borough Council operates a selective licensing scheme covering privately rented properties in the Lemyngton and Hastings wards of Loughborough, introduced in 2023. Every privately rented property in those two wards needs a licence, whatever its size or the number of occupants.
Ward boundaries in Charnwood have changed since the designation was made. Our record for Charnwood therefore does not say "Lemyngton and Hastings". It says, in the areas field: "Lemyngton and Hastings wards, Loughborough — as those wards were drawn at designation, not as they appear on a current ward map."
That qualifier is the whole article. Without it the ward names are actively misleading, and a landlord doing a sensible thing — looking up their address on the council's current ward map — reaches a confident wrong answer.
Why this is common
Designations last up to five years, and English local government has been through a great deal of boundary change in that time: unitarisation, ward reviews, and the creation of new councils out of old districts. North Yorkshire's selective scheme refers to "divisions" in Scarborough, because Scarborough Borough Council no longer exists as the designating authority — the designation survived the reorganisation that abolished the council that made it.
A designation outliving its geography is normal, not exceptional.
How to check an address properly
- Start with the designation, not the ward name. Find the notice and the map annexed to it. That map is the legal boundary.
- Use the council's designation map, not its ward map. Councils that run licensing usually publish an address checker or a scheme-specific map. That is the right tool; a general ward map is not.
- Treat a ward name as a search term, not an answer. It tells you where to look. It does not tell you whether you are inside the line.
- Ask in writing if the address is near an edge. Boundary properties are where this goes wrong, and a dated reply from the licensing team is the evidence you will want.
What we do about it
We record ward lists as the designation states them, and where we know boundaries have moved we say so in the area text rather than silently reproducing names that no longer describe the same ground. We do not attempt to redraw a designated area ourselves — that is a judgement about a map we have not seen, and inventing a boundary would be worse than quoting an out-of-date name with a warning attached.
Ward-level detail, where we hold it. Each council page in our licensing index shows the areas named in the designation and links the council's own map.