• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • About
  • My Services
  • Training and Events
  • Landlord Law
Landlord Law Blog

The Landlord Law Blog

Interesting posts on residential landlord & tenant law and practice In England & Wales UK

  • Home
  • Posts
  • News
    & comment
  • Analysis
  • Cases
  • Tips &
    How to
  • Tenants
  • Clinic
    • Ask your question
    • Clinic replies
    • Blog Clinic Fast Track
  • Series
    • Renters Rights Bill
    • Election 2024
    • Audios
    • Urban Myths
    • New Welsh Laws
    • Local Authority Help for ‘Green improvements’ to property
    • The end of s21 – Protecting your position
    • End of Section 21
    • Should law and justice be free?
    • Grounds for Eviction
    • HMO Basics

What are a landlord’s rights to evict a tenant who is underpaying the rent?

This post is more than 10 years old

December 16, 2014 by Tessa Shepperson

rented flatsHere is a question to the blog clinic from Rajiv (not his real name) who is a landlord.

I have a tenant who, during the AST, fell into arrears by 5 months claiming she wasn’t receiving her housing benefit.

She subsequently has gone into a periodic tenancy and has started paying a reduced amount in rent but is still over £5000 in arrears.

I would like to evict her now but I do not know my rights – can I still recover the debt using a collection agency?

Answer

From the sound of it you need to take steps to evict this tenant ASAP as she is unlikely ever to make up the arrears or pay the full rent.  This is the only way you can stop the arrears increasing.

Don’t worry about being harsh by evicting over Christmas by the way. It is now mid December so you are not going to get possession before late February / early March at the earliest.

I am assuming by the way that if you took a deposit, you protected it properly and served the prescribed information. If this was not done you need to sort this out first.

Getting possession

You then need to serve a section 8 notice based on rent arrears and a section 21 notice ASAP. Make sure you do this in a way you can prove if she denies it later. Serving by hand with an independent witness is best. DO NOT serve just by ordinary post as you cannot prove the letter actually arrived.

You then need to issue proceedings in the courts once the notices have expired. The section 8 notice will expire first but the section 21 procedure is more straightforward and less likely to go wrong.

Getting the rent arrears

So far as the rent is concerned, if you use the standard procedure based on ground 8 this will include a claim for a money judgment and you will get a CCJ, whereas the section 21 route is for possession only.

You can issue a separate claim for the rent (for example using the Money Claim Online service) if you decide to use the section 21 ground. However be warned that in my experience landlords rarely recover rent arrears from tenants who are evicted for non payment of rent. Particularly where, as here, the tenants are on benefit so will not have the money anyway.

Landlords often find this hard to accept but if your tenants don’t have any money, they can’t pay your rent, even if you get a Court Judgment (and note that many judgments go unpaid, I think it is about 30%).

So far as a debt collection agency is concerned, unless they are a firm of solicitors (when they will get a judgment for you via the courts), all they can do is go round and bang on the door and talk to the tenant.  They have no special legal powers.  You want to be careful about this as you do not want to be  accused of harassment.

You are best concentrating your energies on getting vacant possession ASAP so you can start renting to a paying tenant.

Rent Arrears

Previous Post
Next Post

Filed Under: Clinic Tagged With: Eviction, Housing benefit, Rent Arrears

Notes:

Please check the date of the post - remember, if it is an old post, the law may have changed since it was written.

You should always get independent legal advice before taking any action.

Reader Interactions

Please read our terms of use and comments policy. Comments close after three months

Comments

  1. Angelina Souren says

    December 16, 2014 at 9:23 am

    An alternative might be to sit down at the table with the tenant and/or the council and/or the CAB and see what is happening with those housing benefits. Sometimes tenants are not as “benefit-savvy” as you may think they are. The tenant may be eligible for 5 months of housing benefits, but not realise it, for example.

    Don’t make your tenant fear you. It does not help. Try to work with your tenants, by seeing them as people instead of cash cows. It benefits both sides.

  2. Tessa Shepperson says

    December 16, 2014 at 9:36 am

    That is very true and I would always recommend that landlords do this with tenants. However the best time to do this is when the arrears first start.

    This tenant has been underpaying for months. £5,000 is a lot of money. I would be very surprised if the landlord has not discussed her arrears with her many times and asked her to deal with them. Obviously she has not done so, or it may be impossible for her due to the level of benefit she is entitled to.

    She may still be able to do something, but probably only if she thinks that eviction is a real option – otherwise there is nothing to stop her staying there and underpaying forever.

    This would be very unfair on the landlord. It is not the function of private individuals to house needy people at their own expense.

  3. Ben Reeve Lewis says

    December 16, 2014 at 9:59 am

    £5,000 is a lot of money but a lot of councils have money to either lend interest free or combine with DHP (Discretionary Housing Payment.

    These facilities arent there because the council is kind but because the costs of rehousing through the homelessness system will be far in excess of £5,000. In many councils there is an unadvertised policy to avoid picking up at all costs, even if it means clearing rent arears.

    Rent arrears dont automatically mean a person is intentionally homeless or even if they are so deemed then it doesnt always mean the council will refuse assistance

  4. Industry Observer says

    December 17, 2014 at 9:48 am

    Nothing wrong with first class post delivery Tessa as long as a certificate of service is completed at the time and witnessed.

    I agree personal delivery is always best, personal service even better, but what if the property is distant?

    The tenant of course also cannot prove they never received the notice either!!

  5. wayne carson says

    December 18, 2014 at 8:39 pm

    I love all of this The council will pay the arrears! only ever heard of this once in the past 4 years. I agree about open and transparent communications at the start, experience shows this is only successful 30% of the time. so do not dawdle on this phase. But it is a warning of things to come so i always encourage landlords to be positive in their decision making. This may sound harsh but ultimately, especially in benefit tenants, the chance of the debt being settled is practically non-existent. The law is very tenant biased and getting more so. Tenants need to realize that landlords are not millionaires and cannot afford to lose money on their properties.

    I have a question, I would like to confirm if the money order is actually a CCJ as you claim or merely a legal recognition of debt not listed on any register? it is my belief it does allow you to skip a CCJ and proceed to enforcement options. can you confirm this please.

  6. Tessa Shepperson says

    December 18, 2014 at 8:50 pm

    If you get a possession order based on the rent arrears grounds it will include a CCJ for the rent. However this will not go on the register of CCJs until you have taken steps to enforce it.

    The rent arrears with the possession order here is a proper CCJ but most landlords don’t bother to enforce it as there is no point. There are costs involved in enforcing CCJs and if the tenant has no money this is a waste of the landlords time and money.

  7. Angelina Souren says

    December 19, 2014 at 7:44 am

    There is something else to consider. Sometimes… a council pays housing benefits into the landlord’s account but they don’t actually end up with the landlord (because of a typo or the like). The tenant won’t even be aware of it if that happens.

Primary Sidebar

Sign up to the Landlord Law mailing list and get a free eBook
Sign up

Post updates

Never miss another post!
Sign up to our Post Updates or the monthly Round Up
Sign up

Worried about insurance?

Alan Boswell

Sign up to the Landlord Law mailing list

And get a free eBook

Sign up

Footer

Disclaimer

The purpose of this blog is to provide information, comment and discussion.

Please, when reading, always check the date of the post. Be careful about reading older posts as the law may have changed since they were written.

Note that although we may, from time to time, give helpful comments to readers’ questions, these can only be based on the information given by the reader in his or her comment, which may not contain all material facts.

Any comments or suggestions provided by Tessa or any guest bloggers should not, therefore be relied upon as a substitute for legal advice from a qualified lawyer regarding any actual legal issue or dispute.

Nothing on this website should be construed as legal advice or perceived as creating a lawyer-client relationship (apart from the Fast Track block clinic service – so far as the questioners only are concerned).

Please also note that any opinion expressed by a guest blogger is his or hers alone, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Tessa Shepperson, or the other writers on this blog.

Note that we do not accept any unsolicited guest blogs, so please do not ask. Neither do we accept advertising or paid links.

Cookies

You can find out more about our use of 'cookies' on this website here.

Other sites

Landlord Law
The Renters Guide
Lodger Landlord
Your Law Store

Legal

Landlord Law Blog is © 2006 – 2025 Tessa Shepperson

Note that Tessa is an introducer for Alan Boswell Insurance Brokers and will get a commission from sales made via links on this website.

Property Investor Bureau The Landlord Law Blog


Copyright © 2025 · Log in · Privacy | Contact | Comments Policy