[Ben Reeve Lewis has had enough..)
Staring blurry eyed at Breakfast TV over my morning coffee on Wednesday I grew tired of watching Russian jets getting blown out of the sky and Sepp Blatter proclaiming he is as respectable as a hive of retired honey-bees while his nose grows ever longer and switched over to BBC2 to see one of the more bizarre programmes on TV.
Strictly curry
Ainsley Harriot shepherding ‘Strictly’s’ Len Goodman around the UK introducing him to food he had never eaten before. Where do they get these ideas from? Monkey tennis anyone?
They fetched up in Leicester where the 71 year old dance judge had his first curry.
How do you get to 71 and never have a curry?
With every mouthful Laughing Len looked as suspicious as an Ayatollah in a sex dungeon, as if the food was going to explode at any point. I don’t mind people being curious about whether or not they’ll like something but its this childish fear of spice that I have to admit annoys me a bit.
My mate’s daughter can tell if there is a single grain of black pepper in a dish, so when they come over for dinner I have to cook something unbearably bland with a bottle of Jamaican pepper sauce plonked in the middle of the table for me.
They live on the Wirral which coincidentally is the home of one Matthew Gilson, boss of Concept Lettings (UK) who got done for illegally evicting a tenant, to the tune of £2,250 and a 12 month conditional discharge as reported on Landlord Zone.
Civil is better …
I’m not going to moan about the fine. It’s not too bad for once and I don’t want to upset people who don’t agree with my stance on criminal prosecutions under the Protection from Eviction Act…………………..…except to say an award in a civil case would have been far higher and the tenant would have got the money.
There…….I’ve said it……I knew I couldn’t let it lie.
But my eye fell across the comment of Councillor Bernie Mooney who said:
“We are receiving an increasing number of complaints from tenants of private landlords who are taking matters into their own hands by trying to ‘fast track’ evictions.”
Since 1998 my flagship training course has been “The harassment and illegal eviction toolkit”, unsurprisingly given my background but I have delivered it more times in the past 12 months than in 17 previous years put together.
Each time I ask the client why they need the course and they say the same as Bernie Mooney, they are seeing more and more cases of harassment and illegal eviction.
All anecdotal of course and probably simply because there are more private landlords around but an interesting barometer nonetheless.
Interesting also for the fact that more and more I am teaching the skills and knowledge to environmental health officers as opposed to housing advisers or Tenancy Relations Officers, as cuts to council budgets mean there are fewer and fewer of these specialists about and EHOs are being expected to double up on duties.
There are some councils I know who now don’t have any dedicated officers to deal with harassment and illegal eviction at all, so the rogue landlord can dump the woman and her three kids on the door of the homelessness unit with no fear of reprisals whatsoever.
And no! I’m not going to tell you where they are!!!
Should we clamp down on foreign investors?
The Guardian bowled a googly at us this week in reporting:
“Rampant landlordism is dividing Britain into a nation of housing haves and have-nots. Tax breaks for buy-to-lets are still too generous. Tenants are in despair. “
So far, so Guardian, until you read that this is actually the view expressed by right-wing Tory Think-tank “The Bow group”.
Kicking George Osborne’s mid-week spending announcements on billions of pounds for housebuilding right out of the stadium, the report says:
“increasing housing supply can never bring down prices, no matter how much public land and green belt is turned into flats, because the demand for investment returns is almost infinite.”
The Bow Group blame the problem on the unchecked rise in foreign investors who whilst often aiming at high end properties still has the effect of dragging up other property prices with them.
And therein lies the nub of the problem, normal people approach housing from the perspective of the buildings being homes, whereas the current market is obsessed with property as investment. A different set of rules altogether.
The report helpfully informs us that Denmark has a ban on non-EU nationals buying property unless they have been resident for 5 years, while Finland and Malta both prohibit even EU citizens from buying second homes there.
Australia too has clamped down on foreign investors and the Bow Group urge government to introduce similar sanctions.
When a conservative party think tank calls for restriction on business it means one of two things:
- Either things are getting really bad, or
- We’re all on drugs.
The article ends in typical Guardian fashion, saying the report:
“challenges the heart of Thatcherite dogma – that laissez-faire works. In housing, the author concludes, such thinking has failed, and dramatically so”.
I heartily agree sir.
Walk of Shame
The walk of shame this week must surely go to the perhaps inappropriately named Mr Werner Toogood, boss of “Student Lettings Agency” of Canterbury.
He let a house to a bunch of students who had been friends since primary school. One of them died from a brain haemorrhage and was found by his friends, who were understandably too traumatised to continue living in the house and surrendered the tenancy.
Mr Toogood did what the law allowed and chased the tenants and their guarantors for the remaining money on the fixed term, offering them a payment plan to meet the near £7,000 plus interest he is demanding.
Mr Toogood said:
“This young boy unfortunately took drugs and died, and we let the parents off his rent.”
You’re all heart Mr T!
Call me old fashioned but instead of spending so much time and energy chasing the dosh and having your name plastered all over the Daily Telegraph as Mr Greedy of Heartlessville Kentucky why didn’t he just let out to a new group of students?
Canterbury is a student town after all and cant be short of candidates.
But as Tommy Cooper once said having been short changed 10p by a barmaid “Its not the principle, it’s the money”.
However there is a nice bit of Schadenfreude in the story that wasn’t properly reported in The Telegraph’s coverage of the narrative and we are helped out with the legal details by Nearly Legal.
The story gets better in that it transpires that Mr Toogood had himself breached contractual rights in carrying out substantial renovations during the unexpired term which effectively amounted to a surrender of the tenancy, so there was no remaining money left to grab back with his hideous, wizened claw.
The court dismissed his claim and I have no doubt the county court judge enjoyed a warm glow and a nice bit of karma having so done.
What made me smile this week.
A sterling example of people power – The Cressingham Estate in Tulse Hill South East London, 1 mile from me, successfully fought off Lambeth council from demolishing the 300 home estate to sell to property developers, defeating Lambeth’s claim that refurbishment was too expensive an alternative to selling off.
A three year fight with a local authority headed up by single mum Eva Boskorova gets put to bed.
Almost enough to make you believe in democracy huh?
Property investors 0 real families 1.
See ya next week
Hi again Ben Hope you are well.
In my view between the slashing of interest repayments(some say its fair however other G7 countries allow it as an expense also). Then the issue of stamp duty, looks fair HOWEVER if you look into the fine print looks almost certain to make it so corporates or big landlords pay the current standard rates(yet the change in stamp duty was to make cash purchases pay more. So How is that fair? They did the same with income tax where between £100k and £120k ish pay 60p and then drops down after that.
So I think what the tories are going to do is make buy to let off limits/ effectively run by no longer small bands of landlords but HUGE pension fund/corporation run. Some people think rents will go down however once their rid of the small landlords it will go higher, after all they didn’t also bash social housing for no reason. Some will say currently its hard to contact/talk with their landlord but if how some councils operate corporate lettings will be no different. So in my view this is the time if Labour had true ethics to join hand in hand to make the case for social and small scale private letting. One thing you can also bet if even the ‘Left wing’ press hatred of Corbyn is to go by once private landlords are got rid of and ‘corporate’ landlords take there place the same press for years that vilified landlords won’t be reporting problems with the new landlords on the block.
I hope this is not to off topic just trying to paint the bigger picture in my eyes.
PS Hope you get a job with a decent salary soon ben!.
Hi Sam. Tessa and I have been discussing this just this afternoon and I tend to agree with you. The attacks on small PRS landlords shouldnt be viewed in isolation to the wholesale attack on social housing.
As the Doors once sang “There’s something happening here, what it is aint exactly clear”.
But when it comes to that (Alleged) coke head chancellor of ours and the pig lover anything is possible
Gawd its so so depressing it really is. The keep interest rates so low a retiree can’t get any return from savings then this. This country if people from both sides don’t wake up (ie landlord/anti landlord unite) this country is going to be 2 extremes of very poor vs very wealthy/corporates (and I don’t mean even people worth even a few million). Another prediction if they have their way: Just as corporate lettings take over from PRS/Social, somehow tenant rights start being eroded just watch(valid point?). Course if all this happens people will look back on renting to a private landlord as the glory days but the media wont want to know
Judging by wear I live all that is being constructed is flats, people will just live in them in the future. Those currently living in homes by hook or crook will have there council tax hiked (if lucky).
You notice despite the IFS condemning all tax moves on buy to let the media and politicians from any party don’t cite them re these things but did on the tax credits.
Ben: google corporate lettings uk bbc and look at the bbc article. I may be cynical but it would not be as good as the bbc say it would be . (As if say a tenant lost their key they will be there at 9pm for eg). For example look how hard was is get my broadband working months of being fobbed off. The same will inevitably apply to the corporate lettings model.
I forgot to add I bet also these mega corporates will have a black list of tenants they won’t let to. And you can guarantee they won’t let to benefit claimants (if they even exist) Also when it comes to ‘accountability’ unlike private landlord who will be banned from letting/fined for minor infractions(for eg by 2020 they may have to do a tax return 4x a year). In the corporate case it will be just a member of staff that gets the sack). So all in all looks like they goaded/pushed ordinary people into having to go into buy to let for varying reasons these last almost 20 years and in recent years rent going ever higher fueling the anti landlord camp so they will be happy to see them go bye bye thinking they may at last live in their own home. But like classic Judo they will end up in a corporate let instead.
To be honest Sam my money is on this being the driver http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/21/steven-poole-language-power-disarm-concerned-citizen
The tenant in the Wirral case is taking civil action in addition and the conviction will be prima facie evidence of liability.
The landlord’s employer is reportedly not too happy with him. The case involved one of Gillson’s own properties and not those that he manages for others.
When you say the landlord’s employer, it transpires that Matthew Gilson is in fact director of Capital Lettings UK, not an employee http://www.dellam.com/cgi-bin/main.pl
The same ‘It wasnt me but those pesky staff’ trick pulled in the illegal eviction case of Kazadi v. Martin Brookes Agency & Faparusi back in September http://nearlylegal.co.uk/2015/09/all-of-the-wrong-and-then-some-more/
Faparusi himself being director of Martin Brookes.
Glad the tenant is going civil as well.