Snow is on the way to London as I write and I am like a kid at Xmas. I love snow, I love the look of it and even the chaos it brings with it.

I got so excited at the prospect when listening to the weather on the radio the other night that I missed the sink whilst draining my spaghetti and poured boiling water on my foot and ended up In Kings College hospital A&E.

This caused me to appear in Lambeth County court yesterday defending a mortgage repossession case wearing slippers.

They have got used to my last minute, unplanned appearances in Hawaiian shirts and converse but I think the slippers tipped the judges hands, enabling them to finally decide if I actually know what I am doing or am just a confident blagger.

I have of course known the answer to that one for some time.

Oxford gets tough on HMOs

A bitty news week on the housing front, I’m sure you will agree. However the story that struck me the most is Oxford City Council’s announcement, reported in a number of places, that they are extending HMO licensing to ALL HMOs not just those of 5 person or more and 3 or more floors.

They are threatening fines of £20,000 for not licensing and estimate that this will require 5,000 properties to register. Whether a landlord registers or gets done for not registering its a nice little earner all round I would say.

Of course amongst the landlord fraternity this has gone down like Abu Hamza speaking at an English Defence League meeting.

We all know that HMOs tend to have the worst property standards going and the highest rate of social problems amongst their tenants but they are an essential part of the PRS and with the age limit for the Shared room rate of housing benefit raised to 35 in January we will need more HMOs than ever.

A balance must be struck between, on the one hand raising standards and safety in these properties, with suitable penalties for breaches and on the other disincentivising landlords from bothering to rent out HMOs.

I followed a thread on Property 118 about this where many landlords aired their views on HMO licence fees and if those views are extrapolated across the country it doesn’t bode well for the future of HMOs.

As a council worker I have to say I don’t know where they will find the staff or resources to police this project or what Oxford landlords will do in response. Certainly one to watch.

The bedroom tax rears its head

The prospect of bedroom tax has been rearing its ugly head again. For those of you that may have missed this one it isn’t a tax on when you get ‘jiggy in the kissing club’ with your spouse but a fiendish method to save more public purse pounds by cutting benefits where a tenant has more bedrooms than they need.

Government got defeated on this in a vote back in December but they have vowed to push it through again in February.   These plans are being attacked by a growing band of social landlords who are quite rightly pointing out that once again it is the poorest who get kicked in the teeth.

Yes there are the odd cases out there, beloved of the Daily Mail and Express of people doing very nicely on benefits but most aren’t. Could you live on £65 a week JSA? Losing £14 a week from your limited benefits can be crippling for some and the bedroom tax doesn’t take into account people’s more complex individual circumstances.

The bedroom tax in practice

24 Dash ran just one such example. Welshpool tenant Jamie Carter and his daughter and autistic son were moved from their flat by social services as being unfit for their occupation and into a 3 bedroom house.

Under Bedroom Tax rules he would have to choose between losing much needed benefit or downsizing to a 2 bed and forcing his autistic son to share a room with his sister.

Mr Carter, who needs the accommodation and has to provide a certain number of respite hours requiring specific accommodation each week said:

“I love my children, I don’t want to lose them. I don’t know how I would provide a good life for them – I’m out of work and this tax could just cripple me.”

Of course some people will be happy to downsize and free up larger accommodation for others but Jamie Carter’s family are just one example of ordinary people with more complex lives than government plans take into account.

DHP – Councils are losing it

Right, that’s my weekly slag off of government out of the way, now lets have a go at councils.
The tight-arse award of the week goes to Wirral Council as reported in the Guardian  Many people don’t know there is a thing called DHP. Which stands for Discretionary Housing Payment.

This is an extra fund attached to housing benefit, through which a council could decide to top up people’s rent shortfall or make single payments to help out those in difficulty.

As with all council budgets, funding is on a ‘Use it or lose it’ basis. If they underspend by £50,000 on the DHP budget by the end of March they lose it for the following year, so it makes sense to spend it helping your most vulnerable local residents doesn’t it?

So why do so many council underspend on DHP? Wirral topped the league of 6 councils who are reported to have spent less than 50% of their allocated budgets with just 8 weeks to go before the end of the financial year.

You would think these departments think its their own bloody money.

Of course the system itself is just plain daft. If a company were so efficient that they managed to underspend on a service they would expect to be rewarded but councils get penalised for saving money. It’s a mad world.

And finally the ‘Kick Shapps’ moment.

Housing Excellence ran the wonderfully titled “No dust on Shapps” article.  “the Prime Minister and the Government is determined to put housing centre stage, meaning tangible progress is already being made – with plenty more moves on the way , said Mr Shapps.

The thing is he has been saying this for nearly 2 years but not much is happening.

In the article he makes much of the fact that he is ending the practice of many years whereby councils have to give a proportion of the rent they collect to central government stating “For years, councils have been captives of a centralised system”.

What he is conveniently leaving out is that this boon is only in return for councils taking on billions in housing debt in return for keeping the rents.

One wag posting on a website this week asked when the government would be introducing the ‘Reformation of Reality Bill? When indeed?. Now, where’s my slippers?

Ben Reeve Lewis

Ben’s runs  Home Saving Expert, where he shares his secrets on defending people’s homes from mortgage repossession Visit his blog and get some help and advice on mortgage difficulties,  catch up with him on Twitter and check out his free report “An Encouraging note on Dealing with your Mortgage Lender” and have it sent right to your inbox.

Pasta picture by naotakern

This looks like it will be easy to use and the price cleverly undercuts the My Deposits scheme. As the TDS say, they are a not for profit organisation so this gives them more leeway on price.

You will (unless you know already) be wanting to see the prices. Here they are:

TDS/DepositGuard

No joining fee, other than to join the RLA, which is £75  or £95 pa depending on how you pay.

My Deposits

Up to £300 – £17.50
Over £300 – £30.00

Joining fee £60 or £20 for NLA members.  NLA membership costs £98 for one year, with discounts if you join for up to 5 years in advance.

The DPS scheme is of course free, but you have to lodge the deposit money with the scheme and there is more administration involved.

The TDS/RLA scheme requires special tenancy deposit clauses, and as soon as I get hold of a copy of them I will be providing compliant tenancy agreements on Landlord Law, as I am sure a lot of members will wish to use this scheme.

This is a big thing for the RLA and I am sure it will boost their numbers considerably. I wish them and TDS all the best with it. You can read more about it on the RLA website here

******

Note – I now have a TDS/Deposit Guard compliant AST agreement on the Landlord Law site for members, so if you want to use the scheme but prefer not to use the RLA tenancy agreements there is now a choice.

This is fortunate because come April when the new regulations come into force, they are going to get a lot tougher.

Even with the regulations as they are now, many landlords are still making a mistake which could cost them dear.

This is the failure to serve a notice containing the prescribed information upon their tenants.  Many landlords have no idea that this needs to be done AS WELL AS protecting the deposit.

What can happen if you protect but don’t serve this notice?

Now (pre April 2012) the penalties are:

• a payment of three times the deposit sum which the tenant claims via the courts – although you can serve the notice late and avoid the penalty, and

• any section 21 notice served is technically invalid – although if you serve the prescribed information late, a section 21 notice served after that will be all right

When the new regulations come in, the penalties will be:

• you will not be able to use section 21 AT ALL unless either you refund the deposit, or you offset it against money due from your tenant by agreement, or if your tenant has brought a claim regarding the penalty which has been resolved.  You will no longer be able to correct the problem by serving the notice late

• your tenant will have the right to claim against you for the penalty of between 1 – 3 times the deposit (the exact amount to be in the discretion of the Judge) if you have failed to serve the notice within 30 days of receiving the deposit money.  You will not have any defence to this claim.  Your tenant will be able to make this claim at any time up to six years after the deposit was paid (after which time the statute of limitations will kick in).

The requirement to serve the prescribed information is as important as the requirement to protect the deposit.  You need to do both.

Where do you get the prescribed information form?

• TDS have a form which they provide to their members
• DPS have a template on their website
• My Deposits include the information in the certificate documentation and the leaflet they provide

However landlords, particularly amateur landlords, are often still unaware of the need to provide the prescribed information.  After April, failure to serve the notice will leave them open to a claim they cannot defend for the next six years.

Another potential problem:

What if one or more of the schemes’ forms was found wanting?  For example in a defence to a section 21 repossession claim?  This would leave the landlords who had used it open to a claim from their tenants.

Hopefully this will never happen.  However, we all thought we knew how the existing regulations worked until the Court of Appeal drove a coach and horses through them, with their decisions in the  Tiensia and Gladehurst cases.

I would prefer to see a prescribed form provided by government.  Then there can be no argument.

Danger picture by KatJaTo

So a man is on his hands and knees under a street light looking carefully at the ground.

A copper comes along and asks him what he is doing. “Looking for my car keys” he replies. “Oh I’ll give you a hand, where did you drop them?” and the man points 100 yards away to where his car is parked. The cop says “If you dropped them over there, why are you looking under this street light?” and the man replies “Because the light is better here”.

Life’s a joke …

I met a real life version of that yesterday. A man came into our reception and told me that he had paid £2,500 to a letting agent to move into a property but when he turned up it was already occupied. When he went to the agent they wouldn’t give him his money back.

I said I didn’t recognise the street name and asked him where it was, “Barnet” he replied cheerily, which is about 25 miles north of Catford. I asked him why he had come to South London for help with a problem on the edge of North London and he replied “Well, I was in the area, so I thought…….”.

How dodgy agents do it

I mention this because we have agents in our area who do the same thing as his letting agent. How? You may well ask, when they have a walk-in shop front?

Well they employ 2 way mirrors and CCTV to spot disgruntled customers coming through the door and nip out the back when they come in.

They stay in business for a few weeks, dodging irate tenants whilst raking in huge amounts of cash and then disappear before the council can get their arse in gear.

Looking into subletting

Which is why I was surprised to read in the Telegraph this week  of a massive and proactive project looking into just how many homes may be being sub-let. I stopped being surprised when I read the project was in fact run by a private company, HJK Investigations not a council. That explains it.

For once even I was shocked. I wrote last week somewhere that I thought the government’s estimate of 160,000 unlawful sub-lets was probably on the conservative side but this report suggests the problem could be even bigger than I thought.

HJK ran the details of a mere 27,000 London social tenants in 2 out of the 33 boroughs and 4 housing associations and compared them against things like mortgage accounts, utility bills and active credit accounts and found in 5,300 cases they didn’t match up. What HJK call “Fraud indicators”

Are one fifth of social tenants fraudsters then??

That’s a fifth of the group surveyed, and there are 8 million social tenancies in the UK. Quite sobering huh? [Course it depends on which 27K they checked - was it random? Ed]

One of the useful things of being a front line housing worker, especially when like me you also write about housing, is you become a very effective thermometer of subtle changes in housing world and pick up trends long before many others do.

Writing this column I regularly read shock-horror news stories about something that we have been seeing for the past year. Letting agents and landlords will be able to see the same things, most journalists are latecomers in many respects.

High rents = high risk of default

I have been writing for a long time now about the effects of high rents on tenants and the way that this is setting up problems for landlords in future.

I have been rubbished, ridiculed and attacked on many occasions for either being a party pooper, ignorant of landlord’s true costs or a good old fashioned tenant whinger [we don't do that here though Ben - Ed].  But I interview people everyday, tenants mainly, and I get to examine their finances closely.

Last week I mentioned the Shelter report that showed a third of tenants are cutting back on food and fuel to pay rent and this week I noticed a marked increase in concerns being expressed about rent levels from the landlord press.

Landlord support service website Property 118, who Tessa and I also write for, ran a story “Landlords ready for massive rise in rent arrears”  The article took on board Shelter’s figures as a warning to landlords. I predicted before Xmas that many tenants, sick of living so austerely for so long may well splash out and not worry about the rent. The article says:-

“Landlords are bracing for a flood of rent arrears cases as renters struggle with their bills over the festive period”.

Landlords, not being every tenant’s favourite people, come low down on the list of priority debts for many at Xmas time. The Property 118 article reported figures from Britain’s largest landlord LSL Property Services that rent arrears jumped by 10% from November to December and shows rent arrears are at highest level since 2009.

Landlords mortgage default

This report on “Letting a Property” website quotes Paul Jardine of LPA Receivers Templeman, who would normally take back properties from buy to let landlords, talking about problems with rent arrears and their knock on effect to the mortgage market. Mr Jardine said:-

“The growing level of severe tenant arrears has yet to filter through into mortgage payment problems for landlords. Mortgage rates have kept monthly payments low, but there has also been a change in landlords’ behaviour.

With capital gains falling by the wayside in the past six months, rental income has become the most important component in an investor’s annual return – but it also pays a landlord’s mortgage cheque”.

Tenants have been complaining of being crippled by high rents, particularly in London for some time now but as I have also been urging, there will come a time when tenants inability to keep up with these rents will have a knock on effect to a landlord’s ability to pay the mortgage.

I find it interesting that these concerns are now starting to be raised from the landlord’s side.

And finally a tale to warm the hearts of many a PRS landlord.

Government announced this week they will be piloting the rent bit of universal credit where benefit rents will no longer be going direct to the council or housing association.

They will be running 5 pilot schemes with social landlords for a few months from June this year to see if they go out of business through non payment of rent. Something PRS landlords have been enduring for some time now.

Of course, regardless of the true findings of the pilot scheme, payments will be going straight to the tenants anyway. The government are as pig-headed and blinkered as any government and intent on having their way regardless of any inconvenient negatives that the pilot scheme may throw up.

The big difference however is that social landlords don’t have the option of moving away from benefit tenants, in the way that PRS landlords did to protect their investment, so it has the potential to be even more disastrous.

With just about everything I see our government doing with housing I get a strong image in my head of someone studiously sawing through the branch of a tree whilst sitting on the wrong side of it.

IDS, Gobbels and Stalin

Oh and another finally, and on the same subject of Universal Credit, I listened to Ian Duncan-Smith on Radio 4 the other morning fending off concerns by Evan Davis, who was in effect pointing at the branch and waving, only to be shooed away by IDS and noticed he repeatedly referred to people on benefits “Doing the right thing”. A curiously vague phrase in itself but the fact that he must have used it 10 times tells you someone has told him to.

I am now officially on an IDS “Do the right thing” count in his interviews
If you want to know why he uses vagueness to communicate, read ‘Propaganda’ by Edward Bernays (Sigmund not Lord) Freud’s nephew, written in 1928 on how to hoodwink a nation.

The book was a favourite of Dr. Goebbels and Uncle Joe Stalin and you could always count on them to do the right thing.

Ben Reeve Lewis

Ben’s runs  Home Saving Expert, where he shares his secrets on defending people’s homes from mortgage repossession Visit his blog and get some help and advice on mortgage difficulties,  catch up with him on Twitter and check out his free report “An Encouraging note on Dealing with your Mortgage Lender” and have it sent right to your inbox.

CCTV pic by lydiashiningbrightly, house of cards pic by King of the Ants

Frazzy’s mum lives in their joint owner occupied house on the edge of Bromley, a very leafy and middle class area of South London.

The property next door, a nice corner plot 3 bed house built in the 1920s is still under Lewisham council and new tenants moved in 2 weeks ago. Nice quiet, polite people so I’m pleased for the Mum in law, she doesn’t want the cast of Shameless on her doorstep at her time of life.

I dropped her Sunday papers off at the weekend and smelled something wonderful cooking but it wasn’t me mum in law’s roast, it was the new neighbours in the back garden bent over a wood fire made from old palettes with a cooking pot precariously balanced on the top. Frazzy tells me they have been cooking that way every night, even in the rain and frost.
Can they just not afford a cooker or is this a post apocalyptic sign of the times?

Grim times

My 22 year old daughter Thommo, is travelling for 6 months and is currently in Australia having a whale of a time. She doesn’t want to come back and is busting a gut to get work there. I don’t blame her, no recession, loads of sun the photos look like another world, a carefree 22 year old’s world.

What has she got to come back to? Unemployment, a rise in homelessness a government who cant seem to get a grip and people cooking on palette fires in their back gardens.

Beds in sheds

The Daily Mail this week reported on Greg Farkas of Oxford who advertised a shed for rent in his back garden, no gas, plumbing or electricity @ £450 month.

Mr Farkas cheekily advertised it as “Double room in a garden house” until the council got wind of it and advised him about a little thing called ‘Planning permission’.

Oxford Council board member Joe MacManners said:

‘You do hear anecdotally about people who rent out their sheds or make funny little extensions. It’s difficult to know the exact scale of it but it is not acceptable in the 21st century for people to be living in sheds.’

Are our leaders to blame?

Walk into any branch of Waterstones these days and look in the business section and you will see hundreds of titles written by the CEO’s of MacDonalds, Toshiba, Walmart etc, all espousing the same views that what goes on at the top trickles down to the bottom. The best, most successful CEO’s know this and lead by personal example, embodying the values and mission statements at the heart of today’s big players.

In the less successful companies the leaders don’t lead and this trickles down to the bottom too, so is our current situation of renting sheds and cooking in gardens resulting from the trickle down of our leader’s and their lack of coherent ideas?

Shapps’ little ideas

Shapps has ideas, sure but they all smack of desperation don’t they? It started with his daft houseboats idea and he has been slowly becoming a joke ever since.

The Telegraph gave Shapps a podium for his latest desperate idea to release homes for families by encouraging the elderly to downsize into smaller more suitable properties, leaving the council to rent out their old homes.
He said:

“With nearly a fifth of our population expected to be over 65 by 2020, radical and urgent change is needed to ensure the nation’s housing needs are met.”

Another good one? Or maybe …

His latest scheme was inspired by a pilot project that ran in Redbridge on the edge of East London. Shapps said of the project, called “FreeSpace”;

“They can live independently for longer and enjoy more disposable income without selling their home, and other families can benefit from living in an affordable home”.

What a fantastic idea wouldn’t you agree?………until you get behind the political flim-flam and look at the actual report.

I don’t claim any lead on this one, an excellent bit of whistle blowing was done by Joe Halewood on his blog “Speye – keeping an eye on supporting people”  who did a bit of research on the report in it’s fullness and found it doesn’t paint a clear cut picture at all.

Shapps trots out FreeSpace’s ideas as a one size fits all scheme on a nationwide basis but Redbridge’s report actually states;

The pilot scheme is showing that ‘the devil is in the detail’ when it comes to implementing the scheme. Legalities around agreements and unusual financial situations, personal requirements of individuals and of course finding alternative accommodation for the owner all have to be addressed and are unique to each case.

The report acknowledges that circumstances in Redbridge are different to many other areas, with a high level of home ownership and the fact that it is not an inner city borough. It also comes with several case studies that hardly shine as completely satisfactory examples, some elderly taking advantage of the scheme having to be rehoused out of borough.

As with so many of the housing schemes we are being presented with they look great in the shop window but, like a 1980s Moscow department store you only have to go through the doors to find very little on the shelves.
And while Shapps has been busy putting chocolate sprinkles on a turd Cameron has been indulging in his own bit of desperation.

And so to Housing Benefit (again)

Announcing to Parliament that housing benefit cuts are proving to be a success in what they were designed to do, push down rents in the PRS.

This frankly astonishing piece of mis-information was not lost on anyone working in housing.

Inside Housing were one of the many publications to report on shadow housing minister Jack Dromey’s incensed reaction to the mendacious 6th form prefect’s claim  Dromey said:

‘Either David Cameron was being deliberately misleading or he is clueless about the day-to-day struggle many families are facing in paying the bills.’

He has demanded an apology and a correction from the Prime Minister. This article will go to Tessa before Thursday’s parliament session so I don’t know what the fall out is at the time of writing.

Are government so desperate for good news that they have to make it up now?

The Irony

And so to the irony. The other day Frazzles and I went shopping at Borough Market. For those non-London, Non-Foodie types among you, Borough market is a frighteningly expensive produce market on the edge of London Bridge where Jamie Oliver does his shopping. The quality of the produce and the range are astonishing but you need to take out a secured loan just to buy a single carrier bag’s worth of stuff.

I bought some Sardines (Cheap) as I’ve never cooked them before so was quite excited. I have a Sicilian recipe where they are grilled with raisins and lemons but Frazzy said she didn’t want the flat stinking of oily fish for weeks, a good point …. what to do?….. so I built a small fire in the back garden ……………………..

Ben Reeve Lewis

Ben has started Home Saving Expert, to share his secrets to defending people’s homes from mortgage repossession Visit his blog and get some help and advice on mortgage difficulties and catch up with him on Twitter and check out his free report “An Encouraging note on Dealing with your Mortgage Lender” and have it sent right to your inbox.

Posh shed pic from Shedking