Almost 6 years ago to the day I wrote an article that was printed in the Guardian Society Section titled “The battle against rogue landlords is flawed”, pointing up the problem with Shelter’s then shiny new campaign.
I wrote:
“TROs don’t lack the will to prosecute, but in boroughs such as mine we are so overwhelmed by the number of weekly complaints that we cannot possibly countenance any more than basic dispute resolution”.
I also took the view that the term ‘Rogue landlord’ which was a new one, was unhelpful to enforcement officers because it was such a broad brush stroke name.
Who were we supposed to be going after? The baseball bat wielding thug or the clueless amateur who broke laws they didn’t even know were there?
Landlord behaviour comes in shades of grey, not black and white cartoon villains. I still hold this view.
As a result of the article I entered into a long email debate with the campaign creators Robbie De Santos and Antonia Bance who took the view that although they accepted my point about the term ‘Rogue Landlord’ they felt the campaign needed a flagpole to rally people around and this made up for the negative effects.
Six years on what has changed and why?
This morning I woke up to a news story about calls for more robust action against rogue landlords on mainstream BBC breakfast TV.
In the past couple of years I have participated in several TV documentaries about rogue landlords, including Dispatches and Panorama and I’m currently doing some research work for Channel 4 on future topics of a similar nature.
I’ve been told that the series “Nightmare tenants, slum landlords” was a big hit for Channel 5 and a second series currently being put together.
Why is the world and his wife suddenly interested in reporting on the kinds of misery I’ve been dealing with for 25 years?
Changed attitudes
Outside of media interest I have also observed changes in attitudes to licensing schemes.
Recently I attended a workshop where a bunch of people in enforcement world were swapping information about the extension of licensing schemes across London.
Originally it was only Newham ploughing this furrow, but we were informed at the workshop that since April 2015 a further 19 boroughs are in consultation about additional licensing and there are fairly reliable rumours circulating that government are considering lifting the ‘Three or more floors’ requirement for mandatory licensing.
If this goes ahead then a lot of additional licensing schemes won’t actually be necessary as thousands more properties come under the mandatory licensing criteria anyway.
Just two years ago I attended a similar workshop with 100 enforcement officers who were largely against licensing for a variety of reasons but attendees at last week’s meeting seem to accept the notion as part of the inevitable future landscape.
In a month’s time government will be publishing their new housing bill proposing major extensions to rogue landlord enforcement powers to local authorities, suggesting a black list be created for repeat and wilful offenders.
It will also be pushing for greater penalties and for local authorities to be able to keep the fines and penalties to fund the enforcement teams.
It seems clear that the knives are well and truly out.
By public demand
The public want something done, the government wants something done. The notion of rogue landlords in the popular imagination has finally gained real traction.
I still have reservations about the funding and resources as well as the problems in practice, of prosecuting people under the proposed new legislation but hats off, Shelter have achieved what they said they would six years ago.
The genie is out of the bottle and dealing with rogue landlords is no longer solely of interest to a bunch of council TROs officers.
How did it happen?
Celebrity endorsement
The media interest certainly fanned the flames. I recall in the early days the comedian Sean Lock became involved, even speaking at Glastonbury festival about rogue landlords.
Russel Brand’s involvement with the campaign at the New Era Estate, although not technically a rogue landlord problem, suddenly made renting issues sexy and interesting, hence the numerous phone calls I regularly received from TV production companies looking for information about how it was going on the ground.
This shows no sign of slowing at the moment and as the media interest popularises the issues politicians have no alternative but to respond or look hopelessly out of touch.
The politicians
Bear in mind that the extensive proposals for stepping up the war against rogue landlords through the housing bill and other mooted changes came not from leftie campaigners but from Cameron himself. Miliband’s Labour crew couldn’t muster a single useful idea among them.
Although now with Miliband gone London Mayoral hopeful Sadique Khan is widely reported to be putting rent control and restrictions on rogue landlords as a main part of his agenda as does Jeremy Corbyn.
The climate of public and political opinion is a world away from when I wrote that Guardian article in September 2011.
The landlord community response
The landlord community have also been a factor in the escalation of licensing and toughening legislation because as a community they did nothing to help eradicate the problem but complain that their business would suffer at the suggestion of any possible regulatory changes.
The common response being that any additional costs that might be incurred by decent landlords in an attempt to tackle rogue landlords would simply be passed onto their tenants, effectively creating the renting equivalent of a human shield, a strategy that did little to rally supporters for their cause.
On the BBC recently the NLA’s Richard Lambert said he supported tougher penalties on rogue landlords but is this too little too late? Certainly to stop the spread of licensing it is and the increased penalties are already on the table so the NLA are simply stating the obvious.
Also despite supporting tougher penalties Richard says in the BBC News article
“Courts needed to have the discretion to impose fines that were not beyond an offender’s ability to pay.”
Evidently still trying to protect rogue landlords who have been convicted of an offence.
Fines and penalties are meant to be unpleasant to deter people from doing it again, why should rogue landlords be in a different category from a car thief on £75 a week Job Seeker’s Allowance?
To correct Richard’s factual error there as well, the laws changed a while ago regarding penalties for housing offences. Judges now take into account the serious of the offence and the assets of the landlord when deciding on a level of penalty as opposed to the old fixed scale system.
A time for licensing
For the past 6 years in both my old day job and in all my articles, I have promoted the idea that licensing was not inevitable. Arguing that it required lots of funding and staffing levels to do properly whereas targeting the rogues and leaving decent landlords alone was more achievable from a resource perspective but we would need tougher, easier to use laws.
In the end that idea was not as attractive to elected council members and government as licensing and bringing out the big guns. Now both licensing and tougher laws are coming in.
As one delegate at last week’s workshop commented “Licensing has its problems and pitfalls but from a purely enforcement perspective it makes our job a bloody-sight easier”.
“I have promoted the idea that licensing was not inevitable. Arguing that it required lots of funding and staffing levels to do properly whereas targeting the rogues and leaving decent landlords alone was more achievable from a resource perspective but we would need tougher, easier to use laws.
In the end that idea was not as attractive to elected council members and government as licensing and bringing out the big guns”
Spot on, Ben.
TROs have been saying for years that they lack resources, and councils and the government can’t or do not want give them.
The main aim of licensing is to raise money and to increase councils’ reach and, for some, it is really an ideological battle against private landlords in general.
And thus perhaps there is an interest in inflating a number of issues in order to make it happen,
This was a good read Ben.
What do councils need to find and fight the rogues? Money. But so-called good landlords can’t bear to fund licensing schemes cos “it aint my problem”.
David Smith (of Anthony Gold and now RLA) tells us that landlords really are in this together though. Self regulation is his actual suggestion. He wrote recently that:
“The RLA proposes a system known as co-regulation. The majority of law abiding, decent landlords should be able to operate under a robust, legally recognised, industry run self-regulation scheme. Clear branding would provide tenants with certainty and confidence that their landlord meets their legal obligations. This would let local authorities use their resources to deal with those looking to hide sub-standard properties.”
http://bit.ly/1NXRiMe
Good to see him getting the point and missing it all at once.
@ Romain and Rent Rebel.
I’ve been doing landlord enforcement since 1990 and the problem has always been exacerbated by the fact that the enforcement laws have always been the preserve of local authority, EHOs, TROs, Planning enforcement, Building control, Trading standards etc.
No problem there in principle but in practice local authorities have been under systematic attack for decades, regardless of whether or not the prevailing government was Labour or conservative and the vote winner is always council tax.
Trouble is you cant reduce council tax without cutting services and trivial things like rogue landlord enforcement was always seen as a minor issue…until now.
Co-Regulation is a great principle but the problem is, as I wrote in the article, the landlord community rejected every single suggestion to regulate their industry and so additional licensing and increased local authority powers are the inevitable result.
Moderate voices like mine failed to gain traction with senior council officials looking to get the same kind of publicity that ‘Rockin Robin Wales’ garnered for the Newham model.
Frankly, the NLA and similar landlord organisations need to get ahead of the curve. If they leave it to the government to crack down on the vaguely defined “rouge landlords” they will make a complete hash of it, making life harder for landlords and probably tenants as well.
The NLA etc should be actively investigating and pursuing the real bad apples (slum landlords, threatening landlords, deliberate poor repair landlords etc)and launching private prosecutions against the few who are spoiling things for the many.
If the landlord groups can clean house themselves it will reduce the need for the government to stick it’s cack handed paws in.
Probably a pipe dream though.
Bee Bee yes this is right and evidenced by Richard Lambert’s comment about being concerned about the level of fines for rogue landlords.
Steadfast to the last.
BTW I just received a tweet message from Shelter’s Antonia Bance pointing out that 2011 is 4 years not 6, so read the above and knock two years off of everything I said.
If only I was better at maths……I’d not be a tenant
Unfortunately, a combination of the editing between recorded interview and the report on the website and subsequent Chinese whispers meant some important integral facts and points were lost in the process. If you listen to the full interview with Richard Lambert, both on BBC News and BBC Radio 5 Live, you will hear that the NLA does not condone the behaviour of ‘rogue’ landlords. Why would anyone would assume that a professional landlord association would protect ‘rogue’ landlords since they are the ones who give the sector a bad name, undermining all legitimate and law-abiding landlords?
The point Richard was making was that it’s important the courts have discretion to ensure the punishment fits the crime and the offender, rather than binding them up with sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum penalties. They need to be able to hit those who view fines as an occupational hazard hard enough to make it hurt, to have an impact and act as a deterrent. Elsewhere in the 5Live interview, Richard supports the LGA’s call for an either/or system, where jail sentences might be more appropriate in the worst cases, and calls for a system that banned outright criminals who persistently flout the law from ever letting property again. Saying a fine should not go beyond the individual’s ability to pay might sound odd, but actually, if you fine an individual too much, then the Courts are going to have problems collecting the money if the offender hasn’t got it. Equally, you want to set a fine at a level that ensures that a “clueless amateur” who hasn’t done something they should have done to the property is not fined so much that they’ve then not got enough money left to fix the problem.
As a fairly frequent contributor to national papers, TV and Radio I am no stranger myself to editing and clumsy quoting. It goes with the territory I’m afraid.
Thank you for clearly stating that the NLA is totally behind stronger attempts to deal with rogue landlords.
But back February the NLA raised concerns about then proposals to bring in a law on retaliatory eviction where you said “we have yet to see any credible evidence of a problem significant to justify the need for additional legislation and we strongly believe that the changes announced today represent a politically timed reaction to fear and anecdote, rather than a confirmation of commonplace poor practice within private housing”
This call was echoed by many in the landlord community who simply refused to accept that the problem existed when anyone who works in frontline housing enforcement would have confirmed that it was a regular occurrence.
All the advisers I know would ask a tenant who was complaining about their landlord, if they wanted us to contact them in case matters escalated for bringing in the council
I feel you are still missing a point when you say ” if you fine an individual too much, then the Courts are going to have problems collecting the money if the offender hasn’t got it.”
The whole point of the new penalty system already in place is that the fine IS linked to the ability to pay, in the form of the assets held by the landlord. If the landlord owns 30 properties then the fine will be higher than it would be for the same offence committed by a landlord with only 1 property.
Late last year a landlord I was pursuing for twice illegally evicting the same tenant within a single week owned 34 properties. The courts froze his bank account and put seizing orders on 5 of them until he paid up.
If the assets are there then forcing payment isnt a problem.
Next month’s Housing Bill proposes allowing councils to keep these fines, presumably this will mean the council has to chase the money but this is also easy enough in the form of a registered charge which can then be used to force sale if the money isnt forthcoming.