I have been renting my room from my landlord for 4 weeks now (this is a pay weekly room).  I have completed all of my payments, however this afternoon at about 4pm my landlord came round demanding 8 weeks / 2 months rent by 10am in the morning otherwise he is going to kick me out.

I am pretty sure he is not able to do this, could you please give me some advice on what to do. When I moved in I didn’t sign any agreements or anything however it clearly stated on his advert that there is no deposit necessary. He hasn’t got a reason for doing this as I have asked him.

I have rang up the housing officer and he didn’t help me at all, he just said that I have to go to the council and present my self as being homeless and didn’t let me get a word in on the phone.

Well Levi, if you have a tenancy of your room, and it sounds as if you might have, your landlord is not allowed to do this – the only way he is legally entitled to evict you is after obtaining a court order for possession.  Which generally takes several months.

However having this right is not a lot of help at the time, if your landlord is physically evicting you and chucking your things out in the street.

It is I know hard to find  someone to help in this situation.  The person who is supposed to assist is the housing officer at your Local Authority – if he does not help then you may be a bit stuck.  You could try to find a solicitor who does housing work but they are a bit thin on the ground.

Maybe the best way to find someone local is to ring Shelterline on 0808 800 4444, or try to get an appontment with your local Citizens Advice Bureau (making it clear that you have a housing problem so will need someone with housing experience).

Does anyone else have any suggestions?

The cases came to my notice via my subscription to the Destin case law service (authored by Jan Luba QC).

Manchester CC v Javaid

Manchester Magistrates Court, 6 July 2011

This case involved Mr Mohammed Javaid, of Winchester Road, Hale, who pleaded guilty in Manchester Magistrates Court, to 20 offences relating to defective private rented property that he let to tenants in Ardwick (a suburb of Manchester).

The prosecution was brought by the local authority and the fire services authority as the council’s environmental health inspectors had discovered a serious fire risk and numerous other defects within the property.

According to reports from the Portsmouth City Council and Environmental Health News  the property had

• dangerous electrical wiring
• a missing fire door
• cables dangling from the ceiling where smoke alarms should have been.
• missing spindles on banisters – meaning there were gaps large enough for a person to fall through down to the floor below
• broken windows
• no working heating system in the properties, and
• no working lights in the basement
• an exposed hole in the unlit back yard leading to a 2m drop into the basement.

One of the tenants told the Council Officers that she had to regularly visit the cellar, walking past live electric cables at shoulder height, to flick fuses back on.

The property was so bad that an Emergency Prohibition Order was served after the first inspection. However it seems that not only did the landlord completely ignore this, he also moved new tenants in!

Needless to say, the landlord was found guilty, fined a whopping £33,750 and ordered to pay costs of £8,500.

R v Chyna Gray and Others

Croydon Crown Court, 21 June 2011

My next case is even worse and involves violent physical assault.

The three defendants, Chyna Gray, 23, her brother Spencer, 24 and Omar Parchment, 24 were the landlords of a young couple, a 20 year old woman and her 23 year old boyfriend.

The story starts when they were were moving out to escape their violent and abusive landlords. Here is the rest of the tale as told by the Croydon Guardian:

As they packed their belongings into a car, the jury heard they were attacked by Chyna Gray. The next day, when the 20-year-old returned to collect the rest of her belongings, she was tied up and assaulted by the trio who threatened to kill her unless she took them to where her boyfriend was.

She was driven to a home on Norbury Court Road where the thugs launched a violent assault on her boyfriend. Spencer Gray stabbed him in the back with a scalpel after the trio kicked him in the head and beat him with bottles.

The trio were found guilty at Croydon Crown Court and received prison sentences totalling more than eight years.

Bristol CC v Digs (Bristol) Ltd

Bristol Magistrates Court, 22 June 2011

My third and final case (reported by Letting Agent News here) is less dramatic but still serious.  In this case more serious for the landlord than for the tenants.

It involves Digs (Bristol) Ltd, one of the largest student landlords in Bristol, who were prosecuted for letting an HMO without a license.

The directors and company were fined £4,000 and ordered to pay £1,560 costs by Bristol Magistrates Court. However that was not all.

As a result of this the Bristol City Council is banning the firm and directors from holding any HMO licences, as they are no longer considered ‘fit and proper persons’. Meaning that they will now have to employ someone else to perform this function for them.

Finally the Council has informed tenants they can reclaim rent for up to 12 months up to the court date by taking the firm to a Rents Tribunal. So a bad day all round for Digs (Bristol) Ltd.

The moral of the story being that you MUST ensure that your HMO properties are licensed, or the Council (Bristol Council anyway) are coming to get you.

Magistrates Court picture by Thomas Nugent on the Geograph site

If I Ruled the World.

I have been posting and tweeting a lot over the past week or so about rogue landlords, rogue agents and Shelter’s campaign. Plenty of others are still discussing these things so I figure it is still within the remit of a news round item……….well that’s my excuse Tessa.

But seriously I feel I am getting a reputation for slagging off when what I should really be doing is saying how I think the lettings business should be operating in the UK, rather than jeering from the side-lines. Give people the chance to jeer at me for a change.

So here is my Manifesto for a better deal for all in the renting world.

Rogue landlords.

As you all know there is no government commitment to regulating landlords. The argument being there are enough rules and regulations in place for punishing offenders. It is certainly true there is a raft of legislation in place, the chief ones being

• The Protection from Eviction Act 1977 – which makes harassment and illegal eviction criminal offences.
• Breach of Covenant for Quiet Enjoyment – A civil way of dealing with the same thing.
• Section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act – is regulation for punishing cases of disrepair.
• Compulsory HMO Licencing

There are also a bunch of ancillary things which plug various gaps, like Section 40 of the Administration of Justices Act, Section 4 of the Landlord and tenant Act, Sections 27 and 28 of the Housing Act 1988, and on and on.

In this I don’t disagree with either the government view or Shelter’s campaign to get council’s to be more pro-active in prosecuting rogues but it is not as simple as that. The theory is great but the actual execution is another matter.

TROs like me can’t act in isolation; we need the back-up of our own legal departments and the support of police and the courts. Most TROs will tell you we get none of that.

Nobody would argue with Shelter’s campaign to prosecute rogue landlords, even those not involved in housing hate bullies but they need to widen their focus, not just look to point score against hated councils. If they would call for judges to impose stiffer penalties and to simplify the prosecution system I would be the first person to sign up.

I find myself leaning towards a short sharp shock technique personally, preferably a civil matter where damages are far more punitive than criminal court and less complex to follow.

Unless you re-categorise harassment I can’t see that getting better, it is difficult to prove and often goes on out of hours where there are no witnesses. Illegal eviction however is another matter and is relatively easy to quantify and for that I think it should be a straight to court matter. A set civil penalty, like deposit protection was supposed to be, of say 3 times the annual rent, payable within 6 weeks to the unlawfully evicted tenant or face forced sale of the property to clear the debt.

That would stop it.

Rogue agents.

Mandatory licencing and compulsory, annual exams for all staff to maintain their licence.  [Exams?  That'll scare off everyone! Ed]

My mate Eamonn is a plumber and every couple of years he has to sit exams to keep his right to fit central heating systems. Why not agents?

Back in the 1990s London was awash with immigration law centres, more often than not operated by some very dodgy characters with non-existent legal qualifications from god knows where. These people usually doubled as people traffickers, sweat shop owners (employing the people they trafficked for £2 an hour) and supplying accommodation that they pushed people around in because most were here illegally, on threat of bubbling them to the home office for deportation.

The government brought in proper licencing for them and they dropped away overnight. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure they just got into other lines of work but they were driven out of housing.

All good agents should have no problem with this. If they are above board and professional they would welcome the rogues being driven out of business and the professionalization of their expertise.

Courts:

Pressure should be brought to bear on the judiciary to impose maximum fines for harassment cases, £5,000 per offence, not a few hundred quid.

Tenancy agreements.

Six month Assured Shorthold tenancies should be extended to a minimum of 2 years to give some level of security and allow communities to grow. Recent figures in the English Homes Survey show a rental community in a constant state of moving, with only a small percentage of tenants being in their accommodation for more than 1 year.

Short lets might be encouraging for landlords but they disincentivise tenants to take ownership of their property and settle in. The transient nature of short lets destroys communities.

Shorten and simplify eviction processes.

An odd one for me to champion but if I am advocating longer fixed term agreements I know you will have to pick up the slack elsewhere. It takes far too long for a landlord to evict tenants.

The time alone provokes illegal evictions by desperate landlords owed money by feckless tenants. Also the cost of eviction makes many rogues weigh up the cost of doing things legally against a paltry fine for illegal eviction.  [It doesn't have to be expensive - Ed]

Housing benefit:

Get rid of bloody LHA and give tenants the choice of direct payments to the landlords. A survey this week confirmed everyone’s fears that rather than lower rents for housing benefit tenants, landlords are moving away from them in droves.

Why should landlords be expected to underwrite the government’s austerity drive? Landlords are effectively small businesses. Are they asking Lloyds or Barclays to do it? No they would tell them to get stuffed and walk off to Marbella with their million pound bonuses.

Change the rules for disrepair:

At the moment, under Section 11 of the LTA a landlord is obliged to carry out certain structural repairs. That legal obligation exists even if the tenant owes the landlord £5,000 rent and the landlord is facing repossession.

Other countries have rules whereby if the tenant doesn’t pay their rent the landlord doesn’t have to do the repairs. Similarly though, if the landlord doesn’t do the repairs the tenant can withhold rent. I quite like the give and take simplicity of that.

Grants for small landlords.

We need landlords to invest in property because there is a property shortage and people can’t afford deposits to buy. Start council departments to help people get into landlording with full support, in terms of advice and grants.

Solar panels will wipe out tenants electricity bills, provide extra income for landlords selling the excess electricity on and qualify them for tax relief for eco conversions.

I actually believe all this stuff and at the same time I know I am being provocative.

Vote me in as housing Tsar and I promise I will bring these changes in. Like all politicians, I also promise to fiddle my expenses and employ Glenn Mulcair to hack your phone if you complain.

Ben Reeve Lewis

Follow Ben Reeve Lewis on Twitter for more demented ramblings

This week’s inspiration comes from two sources.

Firstly, nobody in our field of interest could have avoided Jon Snow’s Dispatches documentary on Channel 4 about rogue landlords, even if you couldn’t be arsed to watch it. I did, but with a shrug and a loss of interest in the last 20 minutes because for me it was just like being at work. Which is why I don’t watch the misery-fest of fly on the wall shock docs……I work in it, I confess I ended up turning over and watched a re-run of desperate Housewives instead.

Secondly, I got involved in some post programme outraged twittering, which threw up a bit of confusion between me and a woman called Lisa Orme, (Hi Lisa) who couldn’t understand why I was against the Shelter campaign against rogue landlords, especially given that I earn my living by prosecuting them and, unbeknown to most, since 1998 I have been an occasional trainer of landlord & Tenant law for Shelter.

So why the resistance?

Well, I am not against prosecuting rogue landlords. That Safi geezer in Dispatches is depressingly common. Baseball bats and harassment is standard stuff in my neck of the woods. I know decent landlords, who outnumber the rogues massively hate what the Safi’s of the world do to their reputation but there are loads out there. Sad but true. I have no compunction in taking them to the cleaners but Shelter’s campaign seeks to tar too many people with the same brush.

Leading questions

For a while now Shelter has been asking for information from local authorities about how they deal with harassment and illegal eviction. I have their questionnaire on my desk right now and what irks me is that the way the questions are set out you can’t do anything but either look like you are doing a great job or a shit one.

Put simply, they want to know how many complaints you have dealt with and how many prosecutions you have taken out. As if prosecutions are the only way to deal with complaints, and if you don’t prosecute, you are failing in your duties of care to the community who pays you.

Prosecution is not the only deterrent

I hate to sound like a broken record…..and a Rambo style one at that, but I have dealt with stabbings, shootings, even throat cuttings by landlords on their tenants but the vast majority of cases of harassment and illegal eviction that I deal with are low level stuff, committed by desperate people, amateur landlords ignorant of the law, not thugs.

The thugs I will deal with. As a TRO I can have landlords arrested and personally specialise in taking out injunctions against the most violent ones, which I have to do about 5 times a month, my colleague does the same…..that’s how common it is. I must be good because I still have all my teeth. But most aren’t that bad, so why is prosecution seen as the only deterrent?

Shapps’s crew ditched the Rugg recommendations when they got in, saying there were enough legal deterrents already in place and that the onus was on local authority’s to pursue those aims, Shelter jumped on that pronouncement. But what do you do when a tenant owes £3,000 rent arrears to a small landlord, whose property is about to be repossessed because they can’t meet the mortgage, on the basis of an arguable claim for disrepair? Just take the tenant’s side and prosecute anyway when both parties are about to lose their homes?

Who benefits?

Criminal prosecutions under the Protection from Eviction Act 1977 are what I get paid for but who benefits from this? The tenant? The landlord gets fined but the tenants gets nothing out of it usually, that’s even if you can persuade a magistrate to take it seriously enough to levy a full fine, which they rarely do.

The landlord? An amateur getting out of their depth, are they really cast from the same mould as Peter Rachman and Nicholas Van Hoogstraaten?

I have the greatest respect for the work that Shelter do, and I follow their director Campbell Robb whose views I totally agree with but I don’t agree that the rate of local authority prosecutions shows that the problem is being contained.

My individual approach is to get the landlord and the tenant around the table whenever I can. Get them to understand each other’s lives, see each other as human beings.

I have a theory, that there are 2 ways to be a landlord:-

Hands off: These are the property professionals. As a tenant you never meet them but when you call up about a repair it gets done, no quibbles. If you get into rent arrears all the relevant paperwork is in place and everything is done by the book.

Hands on: There is a relationship between landlord and tenant. The tenant hits a bad spot, the landlord cuts some slack. The landlord has a BBQ and invites the tenant. The tenant understands the landlord’s financial situation.

Both of these approaches work, depending on the personality and individual style of the parties involved.

Regular readers will know that I am currently (reluctantly) a tenant. In the past I have also been a landlord. My current landlord is type 1, and that suits me right now, it makes me feel secure. When I was a landlord I was type 2, because that suited my style and my ex tenant, (who for a year, after a relationship breakdown, became my landlord) I now count as one of my closest friends.

The small minority

Shelter are quite right to promote the prosecution of genuine rogue landlords, the Safis of the world, boasting on Dispatches about knocking people’s teeth out and that vile female assistant of his whose views were, if anything, even worse, and that builder/surveyor who professed a dislike of what he was doing but kept saying “that’s business innit?”.

But even in South East London they really do represent a small minority not just of landlords but also of rogue landlords too. Most rogue landlords I meet do daft things out of desperation and ignorance, not a general pre-disposition to violent behaviour.

The real problem

The real enemy in all this is just ignorance of the legalities and complexities of letting, which is ridiculously complicated. Great for my training income but not for landlords and tenants trying to get by. I would love to see my role change from being a prosecutor to a mediator. Someone who occasionally bangs heads together but whose overall role is to help landlords and tenants understand each other.

Ben Reeve Lewis

Follow Ben Reeve Lewis on Twitter for more demented ramblings

Baseball bat picture from lhourahane, teeth from rightee

• Tenants forced out of properties without due process because the landlord wants a rent increase,
• families with young children being moved into substandard and dangerous houses,
• illegal immigrants living in garden sheds.

Hats off to Jon Snow and Channel Four for making the program, we need more of this sort of thing to bring the problem kicking and screaming out into the daylight.  However we all know what the answer is.

More houses need to be built.  A lot more houses.

The program said that there was a shortage of around a million houses, the biggest housing crisis since the second world war, but house building is at an all time low.

With an increasing population (the article from the Smith Institute I reviewed last week estimated that the population is due to increase by 30% in the next 25 years) it is imperative that something be done and quickly, but whether it will or not is anyones guess.  The writer of the Pickles letter rather thought that new housing was going to be reduced as a result of the housing benefit cuts.

Legislation can only do so much

Jon Snow’s program just shows the limitations of legislation.  We have laws prohibiting ALL the problems the program found.

However if Local Authorities do not have the manpower or the funding to prosecute, then the criminal landlords are just going to laugh and carry on regardless.

Particularly if, even when there is a successful prosecution, the fines awarded are so pathetically low.

Tenants rights

Tenants have the right to bring civil claims against their landlords for compensation, for example for breach of the repairing covenants and also for personal injury if the disrepair affects their health (as it did the daughter in one of the properties featured in the program).

However, if there is nowhere for them to go if they get evicted, and/or if their landlords are known to be violent, are tenants going to go to court to enforce their legal rights?  What do you think?

If tenants are two a penny and housing is in short supply, will they risk getting a reputation as a ‘stroppy tenant’ by making complaints?

In his recent article on this blog recently, RLA Chairman Alan Ward suggested that we needed more educated tenants who would challenge landlords thus forcing them to raise their standards.  But this won’t work if there is an oversupply of tenants and an undersupply of rented properties for them to live in.

There has been much criticism in the past of the landlords register suggested by Julie Rugg in her report a few years ago, but it would have helped local authorities keep track of landlords and assist in prosecutions.

The regulation of letting agents recommended in her report is also LONG over due.

Charity landlords

Finally, landlords as a charity.  I trust the Charities Commission are now going to investigate the charitable status of the firm mentioned in the program, the Meridian Foundation.

It might also be a good idea to check up on similar firms too.  Charities get quite a few financial advantages and I am not happy at the prospect of this sort of landlord getting the benefit of them.