Assured shorthold tenancies and section 21 – make your life easier

A review of Tessa’s new ebook  –  on sale now

‘Assured Shorthold Tenancies – your complete guide to section 21’

from Ben Reeve-Lewis

Nearly everyone in the country has heard of Assured Shorthold Tenancies. Most readers of Landlord Law Blog will also have heard of the Section 21 notices that are used to bring them to an end.

Working in housing advice I encounter them on a daily basis, and I probably see more than most. Either my own clients or my colleagues run them by me to see if they are valid or not.

Do you know what? 90% of them aren’t, including sometimes those issued by solicitors and even a couple of well-known online eviction specialists.

I’ll let you into a secret. When working in a busy advice or homelessness office, where hundreds of tenants every week come with tales of woe and threats of eviction, the job is to prevent the loss of the home, and do you know what the first port of call for us is? The notice. If the notice is invalid you’ve prevented homelessness straight away.

Section 21 notices have been with us for 22 years now, you would think that getting them correctly filled in, served and actioned would be a piece of cake. In reality, what seems a fairly simple process on the surface is actually fraught with pitfalls and legal details that it can be easy to get wrong.

The landlord that gets it wrong will find themselves spending a small fortune of getting problems sorted, as well as having the tenant in residence for a hell of a lot longer than they want.

Tessa Shepperson long ago spotted this problem and in response has written the definitive guide to S21s. In writing it she has also pulled off that rare trick in legal publications, making it jargon free and understandable to non-lawyers like most of us.

I have been giving advice on S21s since they were introduced in 1989, I even train people on them.  Yet just a few pages into reading Your Complete Guide to S21 I found myself repeatedly saying “I didn’t know that”.

It succinctly and logically takes you through the background laws and a little bit of rental history to set the picture for you, before walking you through the procedure from start to finish. Throughout the publication she points out the pitfalls at different stages, illustrated handily with case laws simply explained and real life examples from her clients.

Everything I have ever seen go wrong with a Section 21 is covered and you even get sample documents of S21s and Notice to Quit and a certificate of service, so no need to buy them from Oyez anymore.

• If you are a private landlord this will save you time stress and money.
• If you are a housing advice/homelessness officer this will allow you to block possession action and prevent homelessness more effectively.
• If you are a social housing officer this will prevent cases blowing up in your face further down the line and save you that unpleasant bollocking you get from your manager.

Every housing solicitor and adviser will tell you that there are a couple of ‘Industry bibles’ that are never far from reach.  For instance “Quiet Enjoyment” and the seminal “Defending Possession Proceedings”. Time to add “Your Complete Guide to Section 21”.

I now have a copy in my top drawer at work, hidden from the eyes of colleagues so they won’t realise that after 22 years I still need to look things up that I previously thought I knew inside out.

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Note that the ebook is available for sale – >> click here to find out more.