I’ve been writing for Landlord Law Blog for 3 or 4 years now but we’ve never been formally introduced.
How do you do?
Tessa, Graeme and I formed Easy Law Training Ltd over two years ago. Under the company’s umbrella I have been interspersing my day job as The London Borough of Lewisham’s Tenancy Relations Officer, seconded into the Rogue Landlord Enforcement Team, with jaunts up and down the country delivering training.
Its been a stretch and meant that most of my annual leave was used up doing so but I’m rather chuffed to announce that from the 3rd August 2015 I am full time for Easy Law, having finally broken free of my mad day job.
I began my housing life working in direct access night shelters for the street homeless before becoming a homelessness case worker for a local authority then Lewisham’s Tenancy Relations Officer. Sometime around 1998 I started being a trainer of housing law on the side.
I’ve also been a homeowner, a tenant, a landlord and even a letting agent for a very short period, so there are not many areas of housing I haven’t had experience of.
My role in Easy Law Training Ltd is to design and deliver training packages for my old colleagues in the public sector end of the market, so housing advice workers, homelessness officers, housing management staff, voluntary sector people, hostel workers and support staff are the target market I am responsible for while Tessa takes care of all you private landlords and letting agents.
Apart from 3 years when I was a professional rock musician in the 1980s, 6 months as a bus conductor and steel erector, the public end of housing service delivery is pretty much all I’ve worked in, so the people in that sector are people I know well.
I understand the pressures they work under, the legislation, the performance indicators and the culture and all the training courses we develop come from the place of decades of experience.
I’m also responsible for the roster of trainers we are adding as associates and as with Tessa’s side of the business they are all legal stars in their own right and experienced trainers who know the public sector inside out.
We have some exciting plans for the coming year that are going to be keeping me at full stretch as we develop new courses and delve into multi-media work too, so watch this space. And the video below …
Ben Reeve Lewis speaks:
(This video was filmed just after our Wales conference in May 2015)
By the way, he’s not really 73 …
