[Ben Reeve Lewis shows us how he does it …]
When I write newsround I keep all my housing news feeds on a holding website called “The Old Reader”.
That way all the numerous publications are in one place, one click away, without me having to google each service individually.
Each week’s offerings are lined up as hundreds of headlines to choose from. This is a snapshot of this weeks :
- Parents spend retirement cash to buy children homes,
- Fears cuts to budget will hit supported housing
- Housing experts criticise ‘political dithering’ on green belt development
- 80,000 children in temporary accommodation
This is a tiny example of a fairly typical week’s list. Difficult to get fired up to write an article when faced with hundreds of depressing entries like this week after week.
Where has the laughter gone?
Where are the people that made me laugh?
- HMO Landlady has gone silent since mid-July and
- Planet Property, home of much of the whackier housing stories shut up shop back in February.
- Renter Girl penned her last joyously provocative article, also back in July
Has the UKs broken housing market gotten so bad that even the funsters can’t find anything to laugh at anymore?
At least we still have Ben Brandt over at Rat and Mouse who somehow manages to dig up some of the more leftfield pieces of news that tickle my fancy.
Mind you, even he might break away from his keyboard now and again to call the Samaritans, who knows.
Small spaces
I did get two laughs out of an article in The Guardian about London Landlord Andrew Panayi – he of the ‘Channel 4 Cash Cows’ fame, who is renting out 19 dilapidated rooms measuring just three metres by three metres.
The first laugh is the brilliant graphic which accompanies the article showing a man swinging a cat and the second laugh in the form of the information that the council have decided to stop paying him anymore, deeming the miniscule size of the rooms to be an HHSRS Cat 1 hazard.
Each of these so called ‘Studio flats’ has the bed space, kitchen, shower and toilet all within the same three metres, so you can have a wee whilst simultaneously and rather handily, stirring your soup on the hob.
One tenant said:
“I have bruises on my legs from constantly pushing the bed around so I can get to the shower or the kitchen. The hot cooking plate is less than 60cm from my bed. I am very depressed. I used to live with dignity… councils are supposed to invest in property and not spend £255 a week on prison cells. It is abuse of the taxpayer.”
A spokesperson for Investing Solutions Ltd who manages these rabbit hutches said they were:
“Very, very shocked” by the decision to declare the flats unfit for human habitation”
Adding:
“The ones I saw were normal studio sized, we don’t measure them. That’s the landlord’s responsibility.”
Panayi with his usual charm commented that the lack of space was the fault of the tenants who crammed too much furniture in.
How much furniture can anyone cram into three metres by three metres? There are Buddhist monks who would struggle with that one.
Minimum space standards coming
Of course government, ever on the side of the tenant have announced plans to introduce a minimum space standard for new build.
The article points out that there has been resistance from developers over this suggestion on the basis that the restriction would increase the cost of homes but all is settled to their satisfaction now, as the article points out:
“Resistance from developers may be more muted due to the fact the standard is not mandatory”.
I’m so relieved for them, glad that one got sorted then. The words ‘Chocolate’ and ‘Teapot’ springs to mind.
Using drones
For some time I have been really intrigued with stories of councils and housing associations using drones to deal with a range of problems.
Some are using them to detect beds in sheds, some for cannabis farms. Inside Housing this week reported on Bromford and Halton, two of the more innovative housing association who are using them to check the roofs of their housing stock.
Why on earth would they do that? You may well ask….I know I did, well apparently it saves tens of thousands of pounds on scaffolding each year. How surprising is that? I like it.
I wish I could persuade my employers to buy me one but I’m not sure I wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to chase people down the street with it, filming the look of horror as they dive into hedges and posting them on YouTube under the ‘Epic Fails’ series, or peer through bathroom windows as it cruises by. Come on….don’t tell me you wouldn’t be tempted.
Assaults on housing staff
Inside Housing also informed us this week that since 2008 there has been a six-fold increase in assaults on social housing staff.
I remember in 2008 training a council in London where the situation had gotten so bad that they were forced to employ mini busses during the afternoon to ferry staff from the office to the tube station because local residents were so hostile.
If they have seen a six-fold increase there then I would imagine they are using armoured cars by now.
The opinion of the various councils and housing associations surveyed was that this development:
“is the latest in a series of mounting evidence pointing to rising numbers of attacks by social housing tenants who are experiencing increased pressure due to welfare reform and the rising cost of living.”
Being, if not exactly a social housing worker but a worker employed by a council to take on criminal activities in the private sector I am understandably interested in these figures.
I have been threatened on occasions too numerous to mention and assaulted in a handful of them, always in incidents when I have attempted to confront people bullying other people.
The hidden cost of targeting criminal landlords
As the fight to tackle rogue landlords gathers apace among the local authority enforcement officer community that I inhabit, these incidents are also stepping up, albeit anecdotally as nobody seems to ask us what we are going through yet.
In the past few months I have encountered environmental health officers who took on the wrong landlords and whose families are now under police protection and officers who were followed home and beaten on their doorstep in front of their family.
We are advised to have our car registration numbers blocked at the DVLA and to use aliases when carrying out standard duties.
This is on top of the routine wearing of stab vests and the exhortations to be aware of booby trapped cannabis farms that can see you in hospital through a variety of medieval Heath-Robinson style contraptions, usually wired up to the mains.
Last year two housing officers were shot whilst attending the eviction of a council tenant
Welcome to housing work 2014.
TRO was an angel
But before any anti-council types think we deserve the abuse that is so often routinely heaped upon us, think on the case this week of one of my fellow TROs Beverley Holdsworth over at Waltham Forest Council.
Her tenant/client named her baby after her following a serious harassment and illegal eviction case which cost the life of one of her unborn twins. The tenant at the sharp end of the stick said:
“It was a nightmare and looking back I don’t know how we got through it. Beverley was like an angel and went well beyond the call of duty in helping us with our situation.”
Beverley commented of the landlords Ogechi and Chanel Anyanwu:
“I find it very difficult to get into the heads of people like the Anyanwus. Elizabeth and George lost a lot of possessions in the turmoil and of course the tragedy of losing one of their babies was just heart-breaking”.
Yes, most landlords are fine decent people but there are still a lot of sh*tbags like the Anyanwus and the Panayis out there and stopping them is what motivates me to get up in the morning and spoil their days, even if people are cynical and sarcastic about what I do for a living.
See ya next week.
Morning, Ben.
Funny how we perceive things differently. On the swing a cat article, looking beyond the ‘controversial’ landlord, the local authority was systematically complicit in this;
1. Why did no one at the council bother to do half an hours research before handing over £250,000 of taxpayers money every year?
2. Why are they continuing to hand over taxpayers money to this man?
3. Why was the ‘development’ given planning permission in the first place?
4. Why wasn’t this picked up earlier on one of the many EH visits?
There is also the deeper question of why unemployed street-cleaners from the Czech Republic (as per the article) are being housed in dog kennels at over a grand a month…
Whoa! I’ve come over all UKIP.
Here’s a topical joke instead;
http://www.tech-forums.net/forums/f6/joke-thread-272544/
A few weeks after having an operation, I saw my doctor about my convalescence.
“What have you been doing?” he asked.
“Just sitting around all day, drinking tea, surfing the internet, texting my mates,” I said.
He got angry and said, “I told you not to return to your job at the council offices for at least two months.”
Oh Ben…. Just what wd we do without people like you.
(don’t go replying and getting all coy)
HB I agree with all your points believe it or not. What were the council thinking at all points in this madness and I love your joke too. It will be doing the rounds in my office next week.
As for UKIP….well we all have our moments, the comments in my office, which is full of people who do the job because they want to help, would make Nigel Farrage blush.
Some brief and hopefully concise points about, benefits and sizes of property.
1 HB law does not contain rules about square footage of a property. It is based upon the finance and family unit of the claimant and the HB officer is administering the system based upon income and rental cost. (Eg the bedroom tax rules are not based upon sq footage or the definition ition of a bedroom.
2 The legal relationship between landlord and tenant in respect of rent is not affected by any determination of the Council as to the Hb payable. Landlords often complain that delays on decisions by LAs on HB puts them out of pocket. Rents in some areas under the LHA system rose to the maximum allowed.
3 If size / facility calculations were included in claims an EHO or planning officer would be required to do a site visit on each claim or say every six months in addition to the HB officers admin time. The Taxpayers Alliance considers that there are too many LA staff employed on tasks as it is.
4 I understand that the configuration of rooms is not consistent with
the planning that was granted.
5 Generally there are not any regs in place concerning property standards that can result in a refusal to pay HB to a claimant, except if a property should have a licence but does not have one. Then any HB paid by a LA to a landlord can be reclaimed. However in respect of any rent paid by a tenant themselves can only be reclaimed from the landlord if the landlord should have a licence AND has been successfully prosecuted by the LA.
6 If an LA and police impose a Closure or Emergency Prohibition Order that may result in the contract becoming void or frustrated and therefore the obligation to pay rent ended, although I am not aware of any caselaw on that point specifically related to HB.
……… and lastly the image of the swinging cat caused uproar in the animal rights lobby claiming that it incited cruelty, however the terminology of cat swinging is dervied from the space requirement for an old sea dog (should I use that word) to swing a ‘cat of nine tails’ whip as a punishment on a sailor!
Well Colin HB entitlement is a weird fish when you get it away from the actual legislation and how it is applied in the frontline.
Zebedee’s bible on the matter is huge enough, even with the tissue paper grade pages but as you would expect there are interpretations.
One of the advantages of being a trainer is you get to hear the experiences of different councils and their approaches to dealing with rogue landlords.
Some adhere strictly to the letter of the law, meaning that some pretty dire types still get thousands of pounds from public coffers every month simply because the regulations arent helpful and the councils too risk averse to break out.
Whilst other bite the bullet, show some balls and say “Do you know what? Sue us”.
I think Islington, whilst not exactly legally on the money are in the latter camp and they must be backed up by a pretty sturdy legal team to do what they are doing in making a regulatory correlation between the HHSRS and HB entitlement.
This is to be applauded.
Of course we hear today of the Welsh plans that have received Royal assent re-licensing and regulation. This is really going to be one to watch, particularly nearer the election
It does seem that Islington may have been sitting on their hands for a couple of years since the TV programme was done, but it is not necessarily the officers lack of will with these problems but the political backing to take the risks and make the priority and coordinate planning.
Colin…that is always my point. Frontliners have to work within the parameters set by regulation and legislation laid down by parliament. Often we think the rules are a pile of cack, which lets the criminals walk scott free.
The numerous appeals and review procedures built into the Housing Act 2004, Section 11 Housing Act 85 etc make it virtually impossible to achieve a decisive result against the real criminals out there.
There are simply too many ‘Get out of jail free’ cards, designed to give genuinely clueless and amateur landlords a second chance but which the criminals use to their advantage and cause them to give the run-around to enforcement officers hide bound by cumbersome legislation and spineless legal departments.
What enforcement officers like me need are the equivalent of parking fines. On the spot penalties, devoid of appeals or reviews.
Of course in saying this I will be vilified by the landlord community for suggesting any form of sanction on their god-given right to make a profit but what they often fail to understand is that I am not anti-landlord. I’m just seeking some real-world, workable legal machinery that will help me tackle the criminals whilst leaving the vast majority of decent landlords to go about their business.
Unfortunately I dont seem to have support for this notion from the landlord community itself, who seem to want to be allowed to trade without any regulation whatsoever.
Mark Alexander, over at Property 118 invited me to pen a piece about targeting rogues whilst leaving the normal landlords alone about a year ago and I was pilloried for it.
And sorry, what I meant to add was that the vast majority of landlords are fine. I truly acknowledge this but they fail to grasp how bad the rough end of the market is, nor how many of these criminal landlords are out there, nor how many people’s lives are affected by it.
I am currently working on one landlord who owns 39 properties, all multi occupied and we are talking 19 people in a 4 bed house, including people paying rent to live under the floor.
All properties are rent inclusive of electricity and all meters are dangerously hotwired so the landlord is making extra income for bills he isnt even paying.
Overall we have roughly 300 people living in death traps under this one guy and what stops me taking him down is the vicissitudes of the legal machinery that the naysayers tell me is sufficient to deal with the problem
Dare I ask for a link to your 118 article Ben?
I just tried to find it but I cant. Maybe it has been taken down. To be fair Mark Alexander of P118 encouraged me to do it and is himself a big fan of the approach of targeting rogues whilst leaving normal landlords to carry on unimpeded, but the comments were luke warm and far from supportive.
The whole thing made me wonder what landlords want. The dont want regulation, they dont want licensing, they dont want more legislation but they do want councils to take the bad boys out that give them all a bad name and yet, as never tire of telling through my articles, the legislation we have doesnt work in it’s present form. It is cumbersome and there are too many ways around it. plus the judiciary rarely impose penalties that are hefty enough to be a deterrent. Add council staff cuts and what you have is a limp rag of a weapon.
So the best way to deal with the problem is to hunker down, work in a joined up way and target the rogues with everything you can bring to bear.
But it is evident from the numerous replies to my articles that landlord’s dont want that either.
The general tenor of comments is beginning to seriously swing me in favour of Licensing
Ben, I don’t think you can say that the comments you have received online necessarily reflect the opinions of the ordinary landlord.
Most landlords will probably not read articles online anyway (many landlords still do not have access to the internet).
Then the vast majority of people who do read blogs do not comment. They just ‘lurk’. (Which sounds more unpleasant than it is – after all why should they comment?)
What you have experienced is the opinion of the landlords who choose to post online. Which is different.
I hasten to say that I would baulk at a system that was “devoid of appeals or reviews” that would seem to be counter to normal legal principles.
In one of the many reviews of the private sector in the last couple of years there was a proposal for minor breaches of HHSRS Cat 2 regs an authority could impose a fixed penalty fine. (What is minor?) However, like parking fines, TV licences etc. it must be subject to a review and ultimately a Mags Court. As a former lawyer my training was about two sides arguing facts and the merits of a case and then an adjudicator making a decision about a matter. Landlord would be justified in stating LA staff were “little Hitlers” if fine could not be appealed.
It is not possible to have a regulatory legal system that only targets “bad landlords”. That would lead to a “good landlord” being able to be absolve themselves of perhaps some wrong doing or merely be reminded of the law whereas a “bad landlord” could face the full rigour of prosecution for the same act.
Breaches of the Housing Act 2004 are increasingly being regarded as serious with some magistrates imposing heavy fines and Proceeds of Crime Orders. Some Protection from Eviction cases result in imprisonment (although may be suspended although perhaps the majority result in fines. We work within a less than satisfactory system but it must be applied fairly across the board and if there are spurious appeals then it is up to practitioners to argue that point and that will warn others that such arguments are not legitimate. Press publicity is key in getting the message out there to both landlord and tenant.
I used to laugh. It all stopped being funny. Keep up the excellent work! http://rentergirl.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/that-joke-isnt-funny-anymore.html
I have found that Islington has issued Prohibition Orders to ‘close’the flats. And yes, Ben, the landlord does have a right to appeal to the First Tier Tribunal but it seems likely that he would decline to do so.
This landlord has boasted previously that as a business practice he converts property then asks for retrospective planning permission.
Maybe Ben’s alluding to all the comments he gets offline aswell, Tessa.