[Ben Reeve Lewis is getting used to self employment…..]
Last Friday marked my final day working for Lewisham Council.
If any of you saw the TV series Nightmare tenants, Slum Landlords, which ended two days before I left, you will have seen the kinds of nonsense I’ve been involved in for years.
I thought it would feel strange after all this time, but it didn’t, not straight away. We all decamped to the Catford Constitutional Club after work and got bladdered whilst complaining about our mad and often stupid clients.
So far so normal.
I even got embroiled in an illegal eviction on Saturday afternoon following a panicked phone call from a tenant and had to get the police involved, drop my shopping trip and shoot around to the property to go nose to nose with the landlord…..in my own time if you please.
So a pretty normal weekend too. Being a TRO was never a 9-5 thing.
The new life
It was only on Monday that the reality sunk in that I didn’t have to go in anymore, although I got a few phone calls as a follow up to Saturday’s shenanigans and have to write a witness statement.
First day of self-employment was a hectic round. I walked the dog, Watched an old Bogart film, pored over a cookbook and made dinner. Think I quite like this freelancer malarkey.
By Tuesday I was back in the game however, attending a meeting for the Department of Communities and Local Government at the Home Office about the new rogue landlord proposals and the astonishingly mad extension to the Right to Rent fiasco, making landlords immigration inspectors, which will end in tears, mark my words.
Frazzy’s law
I gave my two pennerth and look forward to a possible addition to October’s Housing Bill, that where a landlord’s actions have caused the local authority to spend money rehousing the tenants the costs should be enforced upon the landlord.
It seemed to go down well and was an idea dreamed up the night before by my missus Frazzy, a travel agent with no experience at all of housing law but with a hefty dose of old Caribbean common sense and if it gets in we shall forever after refer to it as ‘Frazzy’s law’ in our household.
But while the government are again rushing through another back of a fag packet law and attacking dirty foreigners, what else was going on this week?
Good for the Quakers
Well the Quakers have been in the news (I shall resist childish jokes about porridge) with their backing of a house of Lords attempt to prevent the increasingly vile Cameron from selling off housing association homes at a discount.
The proposed amendment reading:
“The Charity Commission shall ensure that independent charities are not compelled to use or dispose of their assets in a way which is inconsistent with their charitable purposes.”
Quaker Housing Trust boss Jenny Brierly saying;
“This would be of considerable help in protecting homes created and provided by the kind of charitable projects that Quaker Housing Trust funds.”
I’ve always had a lot of time for the Quakers. I like their stand up and be counted activism. I would probably be one myself except for a trifling, paltry detail that I don’t believe in God, so I can’t take the Quaker Oaths (Yes I know, I couldn’t leave it alone)
Still….fair play to them.
And it’s not just the Quakers who have their knives out (of course they wouldn’t would they?) for the proposed sell off of housing association stock.
More against the madness
The ever excellent Mr Dave Hill reported this week on several key leaders of different political persuasions speaking out about this madness, from my old Boss Sir Steve Bullock, Labour mayor of Lewisham to Wandsworth’s conservative leader Ravi Govindia.
Not normally people who would be picking out curtains together.
Croydon MP Steve Reed saying bluntly:
“The Tories’ plan to seize and sell off housing association homes will make the housing crisis worse. It will lead to fewer affordable homes and there is no plan for replacing those sold off. The secretary of state must sit down with London council leaders and engage with them constructively – they have legitimate concerns and he must take his fingers out of his ears and listen”.
As usual, the world and his wife are screaming at government for not getting their heads around the housing crisis but Rome burns while Café Nero and a Lemon Poppy seed muffin fiddles.
Something bad on the horizon
Now I make no bones about it. I’m mister housing. I decided a few years ago to drop my pop star, funk/soul bass guitarist dreams (the required Afro was out of my league) accept that all I know is housing stuff and to advance myself on that front.
Having spent 25 years at the coalface I can see shit coming down that isn’t immediately apparent to the casual observer, even if other see people waving instead of drowning.
One such RNLI flare is the suggestion from the Bank of England that mortgage interest rates are to rise soon.
Having spent 5 years and hundreds of court appearances negotiating people out of repossession and into a precarious hold on their homes, margined only by a couple of quid I can see this rise tipping many over the edge.
Tenants at risk
The CAB have also cottoned on to this looming crisis by predicting that 6,800 tenants may be at risk when their landlords, teetering on a knife-edge get repossessed.
The CAB predicting:
“The charity looked at the number of people evicted due to landlord repossession as well as predictions for how much repossessions will rise as interest rates increase. The analysis shows that by 2017, up to 8,160 private renters per year could be evicted because their landlord’s property is being repossessed.”
A sobering reminder that for many, far from having millionaire portfolio landlords safeguarding tenants homes with a stable cash flow, often the tenant’s stability is allied to a couple with one property that they are using as an alternative pension, with little backup if the merde hits the ventilateur.
One to watch.
What made me smile this week
I upgraded from an old iPhone 5 to a 6 Plus. Lovely machine with a screen that I can actually see.
And the news that Frazzy is off to the Dominican Republic on a travel agent’s jolly for a week, meaning I have a week free of housework, can scatter the flat with tale away cartons and beer cans until about 2 hours before she comes back from Heathrow, when I’ll be running around in a panic with the kitchen rolls and bleach, cursing myself for not having done a little each day.
See ya next week
The CAB predicting:
“The charity looked at the number of people evicted due to landlord repossession as well as predictions for how much repossessions will rise as interest rates increase. The analysis shows that by 2017, up to 8,160 private renters per year could be evicted because their landlord’s property is being repossessed.”
My prediction is that number will pale into insignificance if the budget tax changes come in as announced.
A conservative (small ‘c’) estimate is 500,000 rented properties will be affected.
HBW is right there Ben.
The budget changes will potentially dwarf all other current effects, and especially in London.
For mortgaged properties with higher rate taxpayers it amounts to deeming interest payments to be income then taxing them at 50%, even where there is no income. Or a cost of £600-800 per year for each £100k of mortgage.
In the Midlands/North where there is a margin these LLs will be able to absorb part of the extra expense and cope.
In London where they rely no capital growth, it may not be pretty.
From your perspective that is probably worth thinking about.
What happens if, for example, the PRS shrinks in London and its environs by 10-20% over 3-5 years?
It would doubtless please the various landlord spankers, but what happens to the Ts?