Everyone is strapped for cash nowadays. So if your tenant is failing to pay rent, a bill from your solicitors for eviction work is the last thing you want.
But why not do it yourself? Here are five tips for you:
1. Make sure you are using the right possession procedure for your tenancy type.
For example, if you are a resident landlord, you can’t use section 21 / the accelerated procedure. However you CAN bring a claim based on a Notice to Quit.
2. Make sure you have served the correct possession notice
Once you know what type of procedure you should use, you will know what notice you need to serve.
In most cases this will be a section 21 notice. However for tenants in arrears of rent you will often also want to serve a section 8 notice based on rent arrears.
3. Make sure you can prove service of your notice
Not much point in serving a notice if you can’t prove you served it when your tenant says you didn’t! And often not being able to prove service of your notice will be fatal to your case. So you need to take care.
My preferred method is service by hand with an independent witness.
4. Unless you are using the PCOL service, make sure you issue at the correct court
If you don’t they will just send it back! Which will delay things – particularly if the court use second class post.
They do refund your court fee though so you won’t have to pay twice.
5. If at all possible use the accelerated procedure
There are difficulties with this procedure but if you get it right – there is NO defence available.
Unlike rent arrears claims, which tenants can derail by making claims that they have paid the rent, or that you own them compensation for disrepair.
If you are seriously thinking about bringing your own eviction proceedings
Take a look at my do it yourself eviction kit. It covers both the accelerated and standard procedure claims – including claims for common law / unregulated tenancies.
You can read all about it >> here.
Tessa point 5 is not quite correct.
It has always been open to a Judge to call the parties into Chambers for a hearing if he wasn’t completely 100% satisfied on the basis purely of the postal only system that is APP. In most cases if the tenant entered some sort of defence (begging letter) in the response section of what the Court sends them then often the Judge would call the parties in just to cover his back. Unless what they wrote was complete and utter twaddle.
Now however as I understand it post Human Rights Act if the tenant writes anything in the response section and why they should not be evicted the Judge will often call the parties in.3
The Landlord will still win – but will be delayed. So you are right in the strict sense of no defence – unless they can show some legal impediment in the paperwork
Well one can never physically prevent someone putting in a document which claims to be a defence.
As you say, a Judge may feel on human rights grounds that he has to be seen to be dealing with this. However if the paperwork is correct the ‘defence’ submitted will fail.
The only thing which perhaps we should mention is the shadow of a human rights defence which hovers over section 21. So far private landlords (not being a public body) are not subject to this. However there is an argument that a court is a public body and so should allow a human rights defence even though the claimant is a private individual.
Whether this defence will ever succeed is not known.