Here is a question to the blog clinic fast track from Kathryn who is a tenant
Four of us signed a tenancy agreement in December after 8 days 2 of us moved out due to unreconcilable differences. We informed the agents of this and continued to pay a portion of the rent. We were instructed to pay this into the lead tenants account.
About three months later we were phoned by the agents asking if we knew the whereabouts of the two who were still in the property. We were then told that they had absconded with 2 months rent unpaid.
The landlords have seized a van and refuse to release it unless we sign a second agreement taking ownership of the debt. The other two have gone to France and left us with this debt and a possible court action.
Answer
I have good news and bad news for you.
The bad news – your liability for the rent
The bad news is that if you all signed the same tenancy agreement you are all liable for the rent.
It is knowns as ‘joint and several liability’ which means that your landlord can sue all of you or just one of you for the arrears.
So if Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all sign a tenancy together at £400 pcm and Matthew and Mark don’t pay their rent – it is up to the landlord whether he sues just Matthew and Mark, all of them together, or he could even sue just John if he wanted.
The fact that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John had agreed to pay £100 each will not affect their liability to the landlord for the whole lot.
This is why it is so important that tenants only sign a tenancy agreement with people they know and trust.
The good news – the van
The good news is that your landlord is not entitled to seize the van. In some situations, people who are owed money are entitled to what is called a ‘lien’ over the debtor’s goods.
- So, hoteliers have a lien over their guest’s possessions if they don’t pay their hotel bill, and
- Agents have a lien over their principal’s property if they don’t pay the agent’s commission
However, it is established that landlords do NOT have a lien over tenants property if they don’t pay their rent. So your landlord is acting illegally.
But bad news overall
The bad news overall though is that your landlord does not need to size the van as you are both liable to him for the unpaid rent anyway now, you don’t need to sign a new agreement. Sorry.
Kathryn says that the landlord has “seized a van”. I do sort of wonder how this has come about if Kathryn has moved out of the house. Have they just gone round the ex-tenant’s house and taken it?
It doesn’t seem out of the realms of possibility that the landlord has committed a crime here. Either theft, TWOC, or clamping (which is an offence under the Protection of Freedoms Act).
Also, the fact that the landlord is insisting that the ex-tenant’s sign a document confirming that they are liable for the rent suggests that he doesn’t have any sort of clue what he is doing.
I would want to go and have a sit down with a solicitor and draft a suitably threatening letter as the potentially criminal actions of the landlord may well give some leverage here.
I would also be looking at whether the deposit was protected properly.
Was the contract with a company? Were the company’s representative’s signature witnessed (on both the contract and the deposit documentation)?
This emphasises the prudence of joint tenants signing an agreement (deed?) setting out their individual responsibilities to each other.
Maybe, but if one of them does a runner this won’t affect the other tenants’ liability for that rent to the landlord.
If they have signed a joint and several tenancy, they can’t change this by an agreement among themselves.
Joint and several?
I thought I had explained this in the article.
If several people sign a tenancy agreement together, their liability to the landlord is ‘joint and several’. This means that they are all liable together and individually for the whole of the rent.
So if you have four tenants and one of them fails to pay £100 of their share of the rent and the landlord decides to sue them for it – they are ALL liable, not just the one who did not pay. It is up to the landlord who he sues. He can sue all of them together or each of them individually.
I look at the legal background to it in this post https://landlordlawblog.co.uk/2018/05/30/owning-property-other-people-rules/