A day in the life of TRO Ben Reeve Lewis.
The case of the Bad Tempered Woman
Explanation: Tenancy Relations Officers (TROs) work for local council’s providing advice on landlord tenant law and investigating allegations of harassment and Illegal Eviction and prosecuting landlords.
All names are false but the stories are true.
One case has dominated my week and took 2 and half days to sort out, and the progress of it is fairly typical of the frustrations involved in getting a straight case to take action on.
Mrs T comes in to reception claiming her landlord, Mrs C has changed the locks to the front door where she lives. Mrs T has rented 1 room since April and her husband and 12 year old son are visiting on holiday from the West Indies when the lock change takes place.
I asked her if the landlord lived in the property and she said no and supplied me with a list of all the tenants names.
As usual I called the landlord to get her version of events. She is abusive and basically shouted at me breathlessly for 45 minutes (a trainer once taught me conflict management and told me to remain calm when a person is shouting because she said “Nobody can maintain that level of anger for more than a couple of minutes” !?!??!?!?!?! – obviously never worked in housing then).
At first she said she didn’t take any rent from her, but when I explained that I had her bank statements showing the rent going into her account as regular as clockwork and a letter from her to the tenant talking about rent payments she changed her story, without pause for breath or a hint of embarrassment about being caught out. – Standard tactics for some landlords is to just shout over you, never letting you answer a question, while they yell themselves into a frenzy of righteous indignation and re-cast themselves as the victim.
She then claimed to live in the property and said all the other people there were her family.
Legal Point: If she doesn’t live there then she has committed a criminal offence in illegally evicting Mrs T, if she does live there then it is likely that no offence has been committed because Mrs T was a lodger who had been told weeks ago to leave.
After I hang up with my ears burning I do a land registry search, an identity search with Experian and a council tax search that showed Mrs C owning 3 properties and listed at all of them as landlord and with various bank accounts and credit card accounts applied for from all 3 at various times – Once again, standard practice, for a landlord not wanting to be seen to live anywhere in particular to create a fog around themselves and avoid officialdom…..particularly the tax man..
I go and visit the other 2 properties first to see if I can talk to any unwitting tenants who will tell me where Mrs C actually lives but get nowhere. Finally I go to Mrs T’s property and one of the tenants opens the door. I take advantage of my good luck and play the innocent and ask him if Mrs C is there and he says no. I then ask him if she lives in the house and again he says no…..BINGO!!!!!! I also showed him the list of tenant’s names that Mrs T gave me and he read them and said they were indeed the other tenants. So now I have a bit of proof that will allow me to go to court for an injunction for re-instatement of Mrs T.
20 Minutes after returning to the office Mrs C calls in a right royal bad mood, shouting again about the injustice of it all and what a liar Mrs T is. I tell her about the result of my visit. She rings off abruptly and calls back 10 minutes later and advises that she spoke to the tenant I spoke to and that I misunderstood his reply and that he was now withdrawing what he said (presumably through fear of eviction himself).
So I have Mrs T saying the landlord doesn’t live there and Mrs C insisting she does and my only witness that could tip things my way has now changed his story. No true paper trail about where Mrs C actually lives because her name and whereabouts crop up at all addresses at different times and in different contexts.
My instant indignation makes me want to dig deeper and really ruin her day but there are only 2 of us TROs and with 16.000 private tenants on housing benefit alone I have to simply shrug, laugh and move on to the next case, which comes in about 10 minutes later leaving the homelessness unit to rehouse the family.
If the government hadn’t ditched the Rugg recommendations we might have been able to look towards preventing these problems across the board instead of relying on constant emergency responses that drain time and resources and don’t go anywhere.
Ben Reeve-Lewis
About Ben Reeve-Lewis: Ben has worked in housing in one form or another since 1987. He has variously been a Homelessness caseworker, Head of Homelessness for a local authority, a Tenancy Relations Officer and Housing law trainer. He now divides his time between doing contract Tenancy Relations work and as a Freelance housing law training consultant for the CIH, Shelter, Sitra and many more.
Great stuff as always. Shows the frustrations one can feel as a TRO when a dodgy landlord ‘gets away with it’, usually because of time/staffing constraints.
Have you seen Shelter’s new campaign?
http://england.shelter.org.uk/what_you_can_do/evictroguelandlords
I have seen it A.T.R.O but I have reservations.
It is easy for people like you and me, with what we see on a daily basis to get the impression that all landlords are Rackmans but the truth, as usual is more complex and half the time tenants dont do much to help themselves with their behaviour either.
I was really behind the Rugg recommendations, in the way in whcih they proposed to professionalise the PRS but it is no use crying over spilt milk.
The Shelter recommendations talk about banning rogue landlords from letting but that would require a national register and the government dumped that with Rugg. And even if there were such a register the worst landlords would still find a way around. They do now by having businesses registered at Companies House under names of relatives and generally creating a paper trail that makes it impossible to pin them down.
The vast majority of landlords dont have gas safe certificates, and this is a serious matter when people’s lives are at stake but the HSE, which prosecutes lack of gas safe hardly ever bother.
Probably like you I deal with landlords beating, stabbing and even shooting their tenants (yeah I work in South London hahah) and have to drop the vast majority of cases for want of evidence or witnesses brave enough to go the distance. Leigsilation to stop it?????? It’s already there but how many cases do you manage to prosecute in a year out of the hundreds of allegations? two?……If you are really lucky????
Sure you can report the landlord to the HMRC for not paying tax on rental income (which none of them do) you can dob them in it with their mortgage lender for breaking their contract, you can even work with the tenant to max up the quantum damages for Quiet Enjoyment but punishment doesnt work. What needs to change are the attitudes and beliefs that both landlords and tenants hold about the relationship they are in.
I have met some god awful landlords and I have met some god awful tenants too. What is missing is the understanding on both sides of what the landlord/tenant relationship actually means. Even when I manage to succesfully prosecute a landlord for the most blatant of acts they still dont believe they actually broke the law.
One agent I dealt with years ago ran a massive heroin dealing business to subsidise their agency work amongst the 750 bed sit tenants they placed in properties and before they went bust, ripped out all the radiators and boilers belonging to the landlords and flogged them before disappearing to the country and then had the cheek to start a campaigning website blaming the council for hounding them out of business.
Even regulation wont stop people like that but the vast majority of landlords are alright really, and when they do harass it is either because they dont know they are committing an offence or because they feel driven to it out of desparation and frustration because the tenant stops paying the rent and at the same time stops answering thier calls.
Years of regulation hasnt stopped it. Now it is time for a perceptual shift.
Could the lady not have been referred to a legal aid firm housing soliitors to get a without notice injunction?
I suspect that there are no legal aid housing firms nearby. Specialist housing solicitors offering a legal aid service are as hard to find as hens teeth nowadays. I am sure Ben will confirm this.
Absolutely. Not only finding legal aid lawyers but lawyers who know housing law. Thats why I always do injunctions myself these days.
And in this particular case, any lawyer would have had the same problem I did. Tenant states categorically that the landlord doesnt live there……..the landlord states, equally categorically that they do. What evidence do I have? None! I nearly got there until the other tenant changed his story to protect his own status. I have documentary proof of different addresses owned by the landlord and Experian checks showing credit connections to all addresses so how do I prove which one she actually lives at? And if you are trying to prove a breach of the Protection from Eviction Act 1977 it is criminal stuff so it has to be ‘Beyond all reasonable doubt’, and the Experian checks do cast reasonable doubt, even though I would lay money on her not being a resident landlord I cant prove it.
I would say that 10 out of 20 cases I get, on a weekly basis, fail for lack of suitable evidence and another 9 fail because the tenant is hardly squeeky clean themselves, the remaining 1? the court system takes so long the tenant loses interest in being a witness.
Us TROs bluff and bluster but in reality rely on small victories to remain motivated, deposit protection cases, breaking tenants back in, blagging a result. This is why I am championing a cultural shift in landlord/tenant relations and opposed to Grant Shapps and HLPAs emphasis on prosecuting rogue landlords. There are thousands of them out there and most times they get away with it
Ben,
I’ve had experience of trying to evict council tenants for unlawful subletting. I’ve had similar problems about trying to find out where the tenant is really living. The subtenant will hardly ever be given a tenancy agreement or rent book of their own. By the time the case gets to court the subtenant may have vanished and the tenant will be asserting that the subtenant was just a lodger or a houseguest or something. I find a useful thing to do is to get a court order for specific disclosure whereby the tenant must disclose itemised bank statements and itemised phone records and insurance policies and certificates (eg motor, life, buildings and contents, etc, etc). If his bank statement shows that he buys all his groceries and petrol in Kilburn whereas the house he’s supposed to be living in is in, say, Leytonstone then this indicates that he isn’t actually living in the property. A determined TRO might also make enquiries of the Council’s (and other councils’) parking control section to see if the allegedly resident landlord has applied for a parking permit elsewhere or maybe the enquiry might reveal that he’s regularly been picking up parking tickets in some different neighbourhood. If the landlord is of an age where they might have school-age children the TRO might contact his council’s education dept/school admissions officer to see if the children are in any of the local schools. The chances are – I would hope – that the school has the parents’ correct contact details.
Speaking as very “Determined TRO” I did try every usual avenue. There isnt the space in these articles to go into everything done on a case.
The problem is, as I am sure you will have encountered Chris, that when a landlord is determined to go to ground they can often be very difficult to winkle out. I have a case at the moment that involves a landlord of 40 addresses in our borough alone. We formed a task force between oursleves, trading standards, environmental Health, EDF, Housing benefit fraud and the Immigration police and we still cant properly verify their address