Host Body Demands Councils Reveal True Cost of STL Licences
The Association of Scotland's Self-Caterers has begun sending Freedom of Information requests to local authorities across the country, asking each council to disclose exactly what it charges hosts for short-term let licences and what it costs the council to process each application. The trade body says the exercise is meant to settle a question operators have been asking since Scotland's licensing scheme became compulsory in October 2023: whether the fees charged bear any relationship to the administrative work involved.
For hosts, this matters because licence fees under the scheme are set locally, not nationally. A property in one council area can face a materially different bill than an identical listing a few miles away under a different authority, with no requirement for councils to show their working. The association's FOI requests ask each local authority to break down its fee-setting methodology, staff time per application, and total licensing income collected since the scheme began.
What the FOI requests are actually asking for
The requests target the arithmetic behind the fees, not just the headline figures. Councils are being asked to state how licence charges were calculated, whether fees are meant to be cost-recovery only, and how much surplus, if any, licensing income has generated against processing costs. The association says operators have long suspected some authorities are charging well above what administering the scheme actually costs, but until now nobody has forced councils to show the underlying numbers.
Scotland's mandatory licensing regime already gives councils wide discretion to set their own fee schedules, based on factors including property size and number of bed spaces. That discretion is exactly what the association is now probing. Once responses come back, the plan is to compare fee levels and cost justifications side by side across every participating authority, rather than relying on the anecdotal complaints hosts have been raising with the association since the scheme's rollout.
Why this lands now, two years into the scheme
The timing follows two full years of hosts navigating renewal cycles, appeals and, in some areas, lengthy processing backlogs. With renewal deadlines now recurring annually for many operators, licensing costs have become a fixed line item rather than a one-off startup expense, and the association argues that fixed cost deserves the same scrutiny any other regulated charge would get.
Nothing in the FOI exercise changes what operators owe today. Licence fees remain payable as set by each council, and there is no indication yet that any authority intends to revise its charges as a result of the requests. What changes is the evidence base: once responses are compiled, the association says it intends to use the findings to press individual councils, and potentially Scottish ministers, on whether fee levels can be justified or need to be capped. Hosts in England, where several councils are still consulting on their own registration proposals, will be watching the outcome closely, since any precedent set on cost transparency in Scotland is likely to be cited in those debates too.
