Not so sweet when you rent…

“Remember, tenants should be aware that at any time, in the periodical phase of their tenancy, they can be evicted by landlords – tenants should bear this in mind when standing up for their rights.” 

This telling phrase appears in the Private Renting section of Hackney Council’s website. To be fair, Hackney is on tenants’ side by highlighting this proviso, and supports the removal of Section 21 of the rental housing act.

Fairness is uncommon in Private Landlord and Tenant law. If you are not a mortgagee – or in plainer terms, the customer of a bank or building society that owns your home – standing up for your rights puts that home in jeopardy. Mortgagees are in effect, tenants of benign “lending landlords”, who are happy for properties to be improved because ultimately everyone wins. Lender makes money, tenant becomes home owner.

The deal with Private Rental is that whilst you do not “own” an asset that may gain in value, you do not have to account for sometimes costly maintenance bills. Yet whilst you are obliged to treat the property with respect and effectively pay to be on-site manager, the issues you raise won’t necessarily be attended to.

The problem is that currently the law falls in favour of Private Landlords; simply, they can delay making repairs for all manner of reasons and if you complain, you get kicked out. This, despite certain repair delays leading to damage to the fabric of their asset.

My first rented home of over six years, was owned by a Landlord who fulfilled every aspect of his obligations, appreciating a tenant who cared for his asset. At the end of his fixed rate mortgage, he offered to share the saving, reducing my monthly rent by £100.

The second rental was not so edifying an experience, involving a Landlord who, in response to our complaints over a flooded basement refused compensation and asked what do you expect if you want to live in a nice old house?

Our last privately rented home suffered a number of issues. When we moved in, the house had not been cleaned as promised; we had to scrub floors and fittings before unpacking and found a rodent skeleton behind the (mouldy) fridge. Our landlord denied knowing what “deep clean” meant, even though this was promised after we had viewed the house. The most serious ongoing issue was a leaky gutter directly above the front door; our Landlord took over eighteen months to fail to fix it. We warned him that the brickwork holding the hinges of the external security door would suffer causing one or both of the hinges to come away from the wall. This situation came to pass, compromising the security of his house – our home. Not only this, but this steady stream of water soaked us, our post and any visitors to the house when it rained, creating a dangerous doorstep hazard. All this for over £2,000 per month.

Managing Agents do not come out of this well, either. The agent eventually appointed to that Tower Hamlets’ property also failed to act on any repairs. When, despite assurances to the contrary, we discovered that the Landlord had not met his legal requirement to protect our deposit, the Agent wrongly advised him and us that the long-standing law to compensate the tenant for up to 3x the deposit in this failure, was no longer in force, advising us to leave and let live. The Agent also appointed himself legal counsel to the Landlord and offered us the same service, something not only rife with Conflict of Interest but given his lack of legal qualifications, somewhat misplaced. With Shelter’s legal expertise, we sued and won.

Appallingly, tenants cannot legally withhold rent in situations where their home has health and safety issues and a Landlord fails to fulfil his or her obligations – and there is no way of guaranteeing they will, without risking eviction. We love our current privately rented home; happily, the Managing Agents are responsive and our landlord appreciates the care with which we treat his property, raising the rent a little for the first time in four years, with this year’s tenancy renewal.

If you want to live somewhere half decent in  London, you can end up paying more than a million-pound mortgage repayment. If personal circumstances (such as ploughing every saved penny into your business) mean you do not have the deposit required to secure a mortgage, private rental it is and regardless of a ten-year track record paying that equivalent million-pound mortgage, you will never qualify for a mortgage-for-real – another much needed change to property finance and law right there.

With private housing rental on the rise, something has to change; high deposits, low salaries and a reduction in the cascading of wealth to the next generation mean that mortgage criteria exclude the vast majority of young people – and entrepreneurs of any age.

Landlords notwithstanding, our rented properties have been left in a far better condition than when we moved in, something already evident in our Hackney home. Why? Because quite simply, we want to live somewhere lovely, and if it isn’t when we move in, we’ll make it so. A case, surely for a system that certifies proven Value Added Tenants like us?

Private Landlords need to be held to account, Managing Agents need to be more closely regulated and Private Tenants need to be treated with a lot more respect. The removal of Section 21 is a start. Ultimately a rental home needs to be long term provision, not a temporary stop-gap that benefits Landlord over Tenant.

After all, everyone needs somewhere to call home.

© Giovanna Forte 2023