This is a question to the blog clinic from Sally, who is a tenant in England.
I will be living in a shared student house, we each have our own bedroom with individual contracts.
We require locks on our bedroom doors due to the nature of our studies, which requires expensive IT kit. The landlord states “No” he is not doing this, he wants people to have access to all rooms in case of a fire.
The problem is this invalidates our individual insurances, and leaves our kit exposed while out during lectures within the uni buildings.
Your information on this is that the landlord SHOULD have locks on the doors, but this is not a MUST. So can you please validate whether it is something he SHOULD or MUST do? Thank you
Answer
The short answer is that there is no legislation on this or, so far as I am aware, case law. However, my view is that the door should have a lock.
I can understand the landlord’s concern about fire safety. However, I don’t think this justifies voiding tenants’ insurance (or making it impossible for them to obtain insurance) and putting their possessions at risk of theft.
If you are renting out a room in a shared house and sign a tenancy agreement, then during the period of the tenancy, you have control over that room. Under the ‘covenant of quiet enjoyment’ you also have the right to exclude everyone from the room, including your landlord.
Clearly, you cannot do this if there is no lock on the door!
There is no reason why your landlord should not hold a set of keys, and many landlords do this. However, in my view, it is unreasonable for your landlord to expect you to rent a room with no lock at all.
Particularly if you have no control over the other occupiers of the property (as is often the case with HMOs).
Check your tenancy agreement
Before doing anything, you should first check the terms of your tenancy agreement. If it does not say anything about locks on the door and, in particular, does not prohibit locks, then there is nothing in law to prevent you from putting a lock on the door.
If the tenancy agreement includes a clause prohibiting any lock on the door, then I think it is arguable that this is an unfair term and, therefore, unenforceable by the landlord.
But you need to know what your tenancy agreement says on this (if anything) before taking any action.
Speak to your student accommodation office
If the landlord is one of their recommended landlords, they should know about this and may help by speaking to the landlord on your behalf.
However I suspect that this property may not be an approved one.
It may be worth having a word with them about this anyway, though. They may be able to help.
No fault eviction and other problems
I should also mention that so long as section 21 stays on the statute book, you are at risk of ‘no-fault’ eviction if your landlord really objects to the lock on the door.
However if you are a good tenant, look after your room and pay your rent promptly, I suspect he will not want you to leave and face having to find another tenant who may not be as good as you.
Also, evicting tenants through the courts is a long and often expensive business, and I suspect that he will be unwilling to do this. Plus, as you are a student, you will probably have already left before he can obtain a possession order!
There is also the possibility that your landlord may remove the lock while you are out of the building. There is not much you can do to prevent this other than find somewhere else to live with more security.
If you decide to fit a lock to your door
It may be a good idea to keep an extra set of keys and give these to your landlord if he objects (although I know many tenants object to their landlord having a key to their property or room). Providing him with a key may calm him down, if he is annoyed about it.
Although it is possible that his main objection to fitting locks on all the doors in the first place, was actually the cost of this!
And finally – if you are a tenant, note that you can always obtain legal advice via the Renters Guide telephone advice service.
Students typically rent a HMO shared house as a group of friends on one ‘joint and several’ tenancy agreement. Technically, they all have equal right to use all rooms. They do not have a legal right to require a landlord to put locks on doors, regardless of their insurance position – something a student should check before renting the house!
There are good reasons why locks are not allowed on a shared house ’joint and several’ agreement bedroom door. If there was a lock on the door and the last student to vacate the house found a bedroom window open, this would leave the house vulnerable to burglary, if they couldn’t enter a bedroom to close the window. If a student was unresponsive in their locked bedroom and the house caught fire, they could be left to die in the room.
Locked doors in a house that is being burgled, create considerably more damage than those houses where internal doors are not locked.
Shared houses only need one TV licence for the whole house, whilst individual room agreements need a separate TV licence for each bedroom.
The opposite is the case with a shared HMO house, where the tenants have individual agreements. In this case, they should have individual locks on bedroom doors, particularly because they are unlikely to be friends beforehand, however the potential dangers listed above could be an issue.
As a student landlord for over 20 years with ‘joint and several’ agreements and a portfolio of student houses, students sensibly create house rules to ensure privacy in their bedrooms. This is called, ‘learning to live reasonably together’.
Absolutely!
In this case, the students rented their own rooms under separate contracts, but I totally agree that if they had all signed a ‘joint and several’ agreement together, the situation (and my advice) would have been different.