Warning, rant coming…..
After 28 years in rogue landlord enforcement, I have been surprised over the past three years at the amount of extra legislation and powers being tossed our way by government.
I think much of it prompted by Shelter’s rogue landlord campaign, which I was critical of back in 2012 for being an unhelpfully vague description.
I still think that of it, given the criminals I deal with, but I can’t deny it did do what it was designed to do – bring the problem to broader public awareness.
It seems these days rogue landlord porn TV programmes have supplanted cookery shows as the nation’s favourite watch. I know……I’m usually in half of them.
The Deregulation Act 2015
This placed a range of requirements on the creation of Assured Shorthold Tenancies that will invalidate a s21 notice which has made defending possession proceedings something a 6-year-old could do. Because the rubbish landlords who don’t bother to educate themselves or cut corners to save money, never get the notices right.
The Housing and Planning Act 2016
This gifted us banning orders, a rogue landlord database and now there is compulsory registration and training in Wales,
We also have or will have
- banning letting agent fees charged to tenants,
- a new HMO definition,
- the right of councils to keep all of the penalties charged, to use for enforcement and of course
- the inclusion of harassment and illegal eviction to the list of things a Rent Repayment Order can be claimed for and the concomitant relaxing of the need for a prosecution before they can be applied for.
But, there is a problem…
Even five years ago people in my kind of job would never have imagined we would be in this environment, spoilt for choice.
Unfortunately, all these new powers came in at the same time that austerity cuts hit public services hard and councils responded by choosing to cut the wages bill to keep services going. Meaning the staff numbers available to employ the powers took a steep downward curve as the powers were moving in the opposite, upwards direction.
Lately, public, government and press alike are asking why things aren’t moving faster in the fight against criminal landlords. A couple of weeks back The Guardian ran a series of articles on the low enforcement figures and I wrote my own response then:-
- Cuts are one reason and a big one.
- The unwieldiness of the regulations, which are in practice fiendishly bureaucratic for the most part.
- An inability of councils to recruit staff as people abandon the sector. One senior TRO of 12 years standing that I know, now runs a coffee shop and two homelessness officers with years of service, now drive busses.
- The fact that the criminals who are the targets of enforcement use aliases, fake companies and obfuscation routinely to avoid prosecution.
- Councils not working smart enough in their efforts to apply a multi-team approach – although I’ve noticed this changing quite rapidly this year as more get into the groove.
The Goremsandu Case
So given these challenges and sometimes justifiable criticisms I was mightily miffed to read in the Guardian the case of rogue landlord Katia Goremsandu, the subject of so much enforcement activity that she has sixty convictions for housing-related offences.
Nobody could accuse the enforcement teams of being slack there and a measure of how bad this woman actually is. Although she accused her tenants of damaging her property and had the temerity to view herself as the victim.
She has a reported portfolio of 17 properties across London, valued at over £500,000 a pop and an annual rental income of £188,000. In 2016 her housing fines stood at £71,000 which she wilfully refused to pay. The fines since then rising to over £143,000 as she carried on regardless of council enforcement.
In such circumstances, the standard procedure is for councils to force the sale of property to recover the debt. I doubt any decent landlord would have a problem with that concept in cases like Goremsandu’s and her flagrant disregard of the law, not to mention giving the middle finger to the courts.
It is after all, what government are encouraging council’s to do in order to tackle the problems and drive the criminals out of the sector.
So what did Highbury Magistrates do?
When they were faced with Ms. Goremsandu’s defence of her multi-million-pound property empire they refused the application to force a sale and gave her nine years to pay the fines.
This woman was banned from managing her own portfolio for ten years, she is that bad. She refused to voluntarily sell one of her properties to pay the fines and yet the courts protected her and gave her time to pay when ordinary people with limited income are fighting off bailiffs for £200 – £300 council tax bills.
The rogue landlord wins again
I don’t know whether this decision was arrived at by a bench or a single magistrate. But whoever it was, they should be ashamed of themselves.
Goremsandu is the embodiment of the kind of person that all this new legislation was brought in to deal with. The sixty prosecutions would have been the result of thousands of hours of enforcement officer time, countless tales of misery from her tenants – and yet the courts took the view that the establishment should support the rights and interests of property ownership and cut her slack that they would not do for a starving single mum caught shoplifting in M&S.
In cases like these, you have to seriously wonder if the decision makers were friends or family or if their bloody medication had just worn off.
Yours sincerely, disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.
“Nobody could accuse the enforcement teams of being slack”
I could. I do.
“Goremsandu’s rental income was around £188,000 a year, including housing benefit payments.”
“The court papers also state that Goremsandu has at least 60 convictions”
Why was the council paying her?
“The sixty prosecutions would have been the result of thousands of hours of enforcement officer time”
So why didn’t just one enforcement officer saunter across to the benefits department during a 5 minute fag break and tell them that paying this person thousands of £’s of taxpayers money is not a good idea?
Cuts in public services isn’t the problem.
It’s an interesting point.
In any other situation, we would be outraged at taxpayer money being funnelled towards criminals.
But logically, the reason is that housing benefit is for the tenant, not the property. The means test does not include the property or the landlord. The idea is to reduce homelessness. Doesn’t seem fair to make someone homeless because their landlord is criminal.
I don’t think Ben is saying cuts to public services are the problem in THIS case. The problem is that the advantages of behaving criminally outweigh the consequences of being caught. At least in London. It looks like if you do get fined, you can just go ahead and ignore that fine.
Letting agents who get caught being naughty just declare bankruptcy, run off with their client’s money, and begin trading under a new name.
Enforcing monetary judgements is difficult, even if they’re granted. You probably know this because you’ve probably had a tenant abscond with rent arrears or damage a property beyond what the deposit would cover. It cuts both ways, and it’s infuriating because you’ve done everything properly, you’ve won in the court of law, and it still feels like the guilty party has just walked away scott-free.
People like Katia are a problem for all of us, because the government just thinks, “More regulation!!!” when these stories become popular, despite the fact that no matter how many rules the government introduces, people like her aren’t going to follow any of them anyway. Do you think she was serving her tenants with the How to Rent document? EPCs?
Yet you and I have to do all these things (which are of dubious value for most tenants, considering they tend to ignore this stuff entirely anyway) while making sure our properties are safe (ie legionella assessments, PAT testing) and that we don’t trip on GDPR etc.
Ikram, thank you for having the intelligence to understand the complexities.
In the past couple of years I have participated in a range of TV documentaries on the point of rogue landlords driving around in Porches being supported by state benefits.
The problem is often the regulations the councils have to operate under, created by government who fail to understand the way criminals exploit the system, sitting as they so often do, like Private Godfrey from Dad’s Army, completely clueless.
Government legislation dictates how a rogue landlord is tackled and who can be denied rental income, if the situation doesn’t fit the regulations then they can continue to operate. We cannot invent our own regulations.
Ms Goremsandhu has been hit 60 times and is also subject to a 10 year ban under a Criminal Behaviour Order and yet still the courts protected her.
I was once involved in the shutting down of a property with 23 occupants under 6 separate magistrates court warrants, the property was that dangerous. We had removal vans, taxis and police on site while we relocated the people to stop them being killed by the property collapsing on them.
One cabbie asked me what the backstory was. I told him and he said “Why don’t the council just stop paying him housing benefit?” A perfectly sane question but the regulations, created by government, not the local authority left this particular offender outside of the frame.
The same people who would complain if enforcement officers were, police, judge and executioner, will also kick off for following the rules imposed on us.
In Scotland they have Rent Penalty Notices. In Wales they Rent Stopping Orders. Both of these legally permit the tenants to continue living in the property but stop paying rent and both would serve to stop any drip feed of housing benefit. England should have similar, but (of course) it doesn’t. Westminster lawmakers would rather keep paying all that money and then try to recover it after the event. Cos that’s what incompetence looks like.
They dont even try to recover it Reb, they dont have the staff.
Same with council tax. They go after people who pay regularly and miss a few payments, on the basis that they are easy targets, while people owing several grand are written off as too resource draining to go after.
One thing I have learnt about criminal and fraudulent behaviour, having sat in countless meeting with police, DWP fraud etc and from working with these people for years, is that if you are going to do it, do it big, because the bigger it gets the less likely any enforcers will have the resources to get you.
I once had a meeting with officers of the National Crime Agency about a particular landlord. They were very interested before the meeting but when they asked how many properties and occupants were involved and I replied 50 properties and 400 tenants, they threw up their arms and confessed that they didnt have the officers to deal.
All branches of public service have been so stripped bare by austerity cuts that most of what you see is a facade, where everything is in the shop window but there’s nothing in the shop.
I’ve just got back from a week in New York and was amazed at the amount of police on the street compared to London where the Met has just 3.3 officers per 1,000 population
They go after people who pay regularly and miss a few payments, on the basis that they are easy targets, while people owing several grand are written off as too resource draining to go after.
So pure and utter laziness and a lack of ability to do anything that stretches them too far away from the easy target. Typical bone idle Local Government.
If only Goremsandhu had ended up in Harrow court instead of Highbury
https://metro.co.uk/2018/12/05/rogue-landlord-fined-1500000-converting-houses-illegal-tiny-flats-8213118/
Hardly a first time offender, a quick search reveals loads of previous. Yet the council still paying him housing benefit from the public purse;
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/05/rogue-landlord-in-harrow-faces-jail-if-he-doesnt-pay-15m-fine
“He subdivided suburban homes into what council officials described as “substandard box-room bedsits” in which whole families would live, paying hundreds of pounds per month in rent, often coming from the public purse through housing benefit.”
Clearly the bleeding obvious conclusion and solution is far too complex for non-council types to understand and the problem is all down to cuts in council funding.
Trouble is, if the hopeless Local Council did anything, and made these people homeless in the process, its a load more work for their mates in another department, you can be absolutely certain that won’t want to do that.
Not the same situation and not on the same scale.
But a former tenant of mine never pays his parking tickets.
After he left my rental I had a gap of 2 months – and in that short period there were 40 parking enforcement letters from the local council and a neighbouring council (where his ex-partner lives). I’m sure they still come through on the same scale.
He drives cheap dodgy cars which he replaces when they break down (every few months) so there is no car to repossess.
He works (part time) legitimately as a delivery driver for one of the supermarkets and claims various benefits to supplement this – he is a single dad to two young daughters.
He must owe thousands of pounds in parking fines.
As a Council Tax payer, it makes me cross.
He just doesn’t worry – what is the worst they can do?
I recall years ago being told that the most that can be clawed back from benefits was £8 pw. If that is still true, it would be less than the parking tickets he gets each week.