Tessa pointed me at a story earlier this week of an Oxford landlord, Riasat Ali, who threatened violence against his tenant and illegally evicted him.
The council prosecuted him in the criminal courts, and despite the seriousness of this offence he was fined just £180 for the eviction, £300 for the harassment and £1,000 costs to the council.
Hardly, we thought, an adequate penalty for what must have been a traumatic experience for this tenant.
Spurred on by this hot news I had a look around the internet at other recent cases and came across the case of a Swansea Landlord Sean McManus who back in August not only illegally evicted his tenant but dumped all his belongings on his parent’s drive. Penalty? £105 fine.
Its pointless
Now as regular readers will know this is a personal bugbear of mine. The pointlessness of criminal prosecutions of landlords under The Protection from Eviction Act 1977.
I spent 25 years of my life dealing with idots like McManus and Ali to little effect when using the criminal courts.
The civil alternative
Civil courts? Absolutely. That’s where the deterrents lie. Penalties of £30,000 and £40,000 are not unusual.
The last one I worked on in 2014 in partnership with a local solicitor netted the tenant £51,000 in damages and whacked the landlord £53,000 in costs….now THAT is what you call a deterrent and, unlike fines, the money goes to the tenant/victim.
Civil cases take a third of the time of criminal prsecutions and the judiciary in civil courts clearly take the offences more seriously.
When parking is a more serious offence than illegal eviction …
The penalty under the Protection from Eviction Act 1977 is a possible £5,000 fine and 6 months in nick.
So why do the criminal judiciary repeatedly treat vicious attacks and scandalous behaviour like a parking fine?
In fact my last traffic violation (driving my scooter in a Hackney bus lane) saw me paying £15 more than McManus.
Shelter point the finger
Shelter kicked off the rogue landlord campaign from the back of FOI requests that showed council enforcement teams had received over 11,000 complaints in a given period but had only prosecuted a few hundred.
I criticised this at the time saying the bald statistics did not acknowledge the problems in getting a case to court in terms of evidence and witnesses and also did not take into account the use of public money and officer time when you know from the get-go that the response of the criminal courts is going to be pathetic.
I have not changed my view on this one iota.
I thought it a timely point to let people know the timescales and hurdles of taking out a criminal prosecution for harassment and illegal eviction if the enforcement officer is so minded.
What a prosecution actually entails
Lets work on the basis that a case comes in on a Monday morning, you cant get the tenant back in and a decision is made to go down the criminal route.
These are the hoops a Tenancy Relations Officer has to jump through just to kick start a criminal prosecution.
- Interview the victims
- Track down the landlord and try to negotiate.
- Find accommodation for the tenants.
- Interviewing witnesses
- Type up witness statements and collate evidence
- Get landlord in for cautioned interview
- Write up transcript of interview.
- Meet with legal department to raise summonses.
- Attend court to obtain summonses
- Track down landlord and serve summonses.
Depending on the complexity of the case the above could take a few days to a few weeks.
Work on an average of being knocked out of action for the whole, initial week, not counting further case work as things develop.
A day in the life
Bear in mind also that while you are doing the above the phone doesn’t stop ringing with advice calls and there will be more illegal eviction cases coming through the door while you are dealing with Monday’s case.
In Lewisham Steve and I would often deal with 4or 5 in a week, occasionally 3 in a single day and while you are dealing with the above list, who is helping the new cases? Nobody! Because you are still dealing with Monday’s case.
And when you see at the end of it, penalties like Ali and McManus and you bear in mind that a TRO has to make a judgement call on whether or not a prosecution is in the public interest and within the resources of the council you can see why many enforcement officers look for emergency, quick-fix, alternative solutions, such as breaking the tenant back in so you can get on dealing with the next person in the queue.
The sows ear
You can also count on council press releases to turn a sows ear into a silk purse.
Swansea’s councillor David Hopkins said of McManus’s £105 fine:
“Our role is to ensure that tenants’ rights are protected in cases such as this. Hopefully this latest case will send out a message to landlords that they need to act within the law or face consequences”
While Oxford’s councillor Mike Rowley said:
“Mr Ali now has a criminal conviction on his record and that is right. There is a clear legal process for landlords who want to evict their tenants and the courts have rightly taken enforcement action against those who illegally remove tenants from their homes.”
A national disgrace
You can just see the faces of the enforcement officers who spent days, weeks and months of their time to get that kind of result AND what it might do to any future decision on punitive action.
I’m going to be bold here and state that the response of the criminal judiciary to harassment and illegal eviction is a national disgrace. Pure and simple.
The penalties of fines and prison sentences are clearly set out in legislation and yet repeatedly, for 38 years, they insist on treating threats and the sudden loss of a person’s home as a minor annoyance, worth less than a person driving a scooter in a bus lane.
Out of touch and out of order
When you look at the stated intention of the Housing Bill 2015 you can easily see that Magistrates are completely out of touch with even government attitudes to rogues landlord. The legislative trend being to clamp down on them mercilessly and increase council powers.
@Shelter, instead of berating council enforcement officers for failing to robustly poice the PRS through enforcement action how about attacking magistrates for failing to be on message?
Do that and I’ll do everything within my power to support your campaigns.
Ben, this is interesting. Is it easy enough for tenants to pursue the civil courts instead then?
It is never particularly easy to bring any civil claim but as Ben has pointed out, it is probably more worth while doing.
Tenants may, if they are lucky, be able to find a solicitor to act on a no win no fee basis.
We have not found any local solicitors in Oxford willing to take on these cases on a no win no fee basis and our victims cannot afford the fees to take civil action so this sadly is not an option.
You are correct this is a national disgrace!
Speaking as someone who practised as a solicitor until two years ago (when I closed my law firm down to do other things) I can understand why they say that. It is expensive to run a solicitors firm.
The problem is though that solicitors are designed as a ‘rolls royce’ service which most people cannot afford. However there other ways to do it.
For example my Landlord Law site has a DIY Guide for landlords on evicting tenants (because I know how to do that and am so able to write the guide). It is very popular.
I would be willing to collaborate with a lawyer experienced in this area of work to set up a similar online guide to help tenants bring claims of this type. Its not something I can do on my own though as I am not personally that familiar with the procedure, never having brought that type of claim.
But online guides do work well – hundreds of landlords, for example have used my DIY eviction guide successfully.
We bring a number of these claims a month now against landlords. I would suggest seeking out firms who can do it under Legal Aid which would cover the fees and the majority of tenants generally qualify.
This tenant does not qualify for legal aid but inerestingly the criminal landlord with the 5 bed HMO managed to get it!
But if the council has persued them through the criminal courts and won, can I then have a go in the civil courts as well? Would this make things easier to bring/win?
@Matt Yes it would help a lot as you would be able to say to the Judge that the landlord has been convicted of [whatever] which would mean that your case is proved (provided you are claiming in respect of the same issues).
However Councils cannot really spend public money to get derisory fines just to make it easier for tenants to bring financial claims in the civil courts …
I am a TRO working for a local authority. This article has depressed me because of its negativity. “Pointless” absolutely not! We actively investigate and prosecute PfEA offences as well as referring tenants to private solicitors to pursue civil remedies.
Yes, the penalties imposed by Magistrates can be frustratingly low at times but we have also had many “stiff” sentences imposed including custodial terms. Why do we do it? Because it is a deterrent. If we stopped investigating and prosecuting there would be a massive increase in unlawful evictions. The publicity from successful prosecutions is useful and there is no doubt that the word goes round the landlord community that we are here and we take action.
If we didn’t continue to prosecute we would have no credibility when negotiating with landlords who are threatening to unlawfully evict. There is still a stigma attached to having a criminal record! Had a case this week where the landlord had locked the tenants out and I have no doubt that the threat of a criminal prosecution made the landlord re-instate.
By all means let’s campaign to increase sentences, but to effective, that message really has to come from central government to the Magistrates. Obtaining a guilty verdict is a job well done!
I agree. We have no choice but to continue to prosecute criminal Landlords.
We have had 3 custodial sentences here in Oxford as well as some much heavier fines. This result was extremely disappointing for me as the TRO here particularly as the victim was so terrified of the Landlord’s extended family that he very nearly falied to attend the trial.
Ben Reeve Lewis fails to mention the problems with getting witnesses to testify against their Landlords nor does he appear to recognise the huge barriers for victims in taking civil action.
Civil action (here at least)is only an option for those with plenty of money. I have referred victims of unlawful eviction and criminal harassment to local solicitors many times and they come back saying “I just can`t afford it. They wan’t £500 just to open a file!”
@Tony, thanks for commenting. I think the thing we are concerned about is that very low sentances may give out a message that the crime is not a serious one – which it is!
It must also be very disheartening for the tenants when they suffer from this type of behaviour to have such a low fine awarded. It may make them feel that the law considers them to be unimportant.
The Association of Tenancy Relations Officers (ATRO) have been concerned about the significant & varying level of sentences imposed by some Magistrates & Crown Courts and are in the process of making representations to the Sentencing Council with a view to establishing Sentencing Guidelines.
In addition the Local Government Association recently made a statement about the low level of penalties imposed for breaches of housing legislation – albeit in respect of HHSRS law but again we wish to make the point that losing a home ought to be considered as a more serious offence than some breaches of 2004 Act licensing regulations. £20k maximum fine for a failure to licence.
The TRO at Oxford was very dismayed at the penalty in the case reported although they have previously been successful in obtaining prison sentences in other cases and work in close liaison with the police
Tony, would you like to join ATRO?
(shameless recruitment opportunity)
Tony my response here would probably be longer than the article so I will bullet point my thoughts for the sake of readability.
I am talking specifically here about PFEA prosecutions being a waste of time. I stand by that.There are other routes.
There are more ways to skin a cat and a rogue landlord is rarely just doing one thing.
A multi-agency approach is the only way to really deal with them, even if it means you never get them for the harassment. If HMRC can take them down for tax evasion with your help then that is a result.
Put all your council enforcement officers together and you will find 29 different enforcement powers between you.
Pursue the greatest financial penalty if you want a real deterrent. The PFEA isnt it, but Rent Repayment Orders just might be, as might planning enforcement breaches or tax fraud.
Spend TRO time partnering up with solicitors in a civil claim. The tenant gets significant damages, its quicker.
Do a PN1 check and target all their properties in a multi agency way.
The worst rogue landlords dont care about criminal records, they usually already have them. Concentrate on the greatest financial penalties. THAT is the only true deterrent. It doenst matter where it comes from.
Bust a gut to get housing benefit stopped.Its only ever about the money.
Use council powers to take over management control of a property wherever you can.
Liaise with council tax, there is often high non payment levels which they can be bankrupted for.
Contact neighbouring councils and alert them. Make it difficult for them to work across boroughs.
Get the fire brigade to do inspections.
After 25 years I didnt give up….I just got smarter and learnt not to pursue a pointless legislative route.
I dont advocate giving up at all, just get more creative and avoid the PFEA.
In my council we call it the ‘Al Capone principal’. It doenst matter what you specifically get them on.
In stopping using the PFEA I didnt give up, I chose a more effective route
And I left one off.
Proactive, intelligence led solutions are more effective than complaint reactive responses based on a single piece of legislation.
Jackie thanks so much for posting here. I was trying to track you down for a chat before writing.
There is always more to a story than a council press office lets on.
In the past few years what I did was form close relationships with local, capable solicitors. We worked often on the basis of CFAs (Conditional Fee Arrangements – no win-no fee)
What they needed confirmation of was that the landlord would have enough assets to cover the costs if the case proved successful.
The council could do this because we can do PN1 checks where solicitors cant.
That way we weren’t reliant on legal aid.
Fear of reprisals is one of those things that bolsters my view that Shelter do not understand the practicalities of prosecuting a landlord which also informs my opinion that a council, multi-agency, intelligence led approach is the only sane solution.
Once a landlord has 10 council teams plus other councils and external agencies leaning on them it is difficult for them to target the complainant tenant as the source of the problem. Attention is diverted from the tenant.
I lost so many cases over the years because the tenant folded under investigation, lacked credibility or simply disappeared before the court case
I knew I was getting to the nub of the problem when I was getting threatening emails, texts and having my tires slashed and you only get this once the landlord is bombarded with visits and notices from the Fire Brigade, HMRC, EHOs, DWP fraud, Planning enforcement, Building control, council tax recovery and on and on
Multi agency targeting is where it begins to bite
Thanks Ben. We do successfully employ a multiagency approach here in Oxford. We also carry out PN1 checks, credit checks and work closely with the police. The only thing missing is collaberation with a local solicitor willing to work on a no win no fee basis. Any offers out there?
In this case we had little hope of getting a “crime appropriate sentence” . The landlord had spread his assets amongst his family and managed to convince even the legal aid board that he was impoverished. The magistrates took him on his word on all aspects of his mitigation and took the view that he was too sick to do unpaid work or wear a tag and too poor to pay any kind of meaningful fine.
Whats really needed now are clear sentencing guidelines and an end to the current practice in Magistrates courts of accepting without question a criminal landlord’s self prepared statement of means and personal health.
You may be interested to know that on the same day of his eviction the victim in this case was brutally assaulted by his Landlord’s son and an unknown assailant with a cricket bat. Tahir Ali is currently serving 7 years in prison for this offence(GBH with intent) but the victim received no compensation and has still not fully recovered from his facial injuries. Plenty of no win no fee solicitors for personal injury work but this victim has no stomach for any more litigation. He is in hiding now.
What really gets me is the fact that the fine for unlawful eviction here amounts to half the cost of carrying out an eviction via due process- even if you do all your own paperwork! Crime really does pay when it comes to making people homeless.
Yes Jackie, I don’t pretend finding a specialist solicitor is easy.
I worked with a brilliant one for many years. He didn’t even wait for legal aid approval. He would make his own assessment and take a gamble and we had many successes, then he moved out of area and it took a couple of years to find another one.
Finding him really was a case of getting out there and pressing the flesh in a most ‘Un-council like way’.
Our legal team weren’t happy so the strategy I developed was to simply not tell them.
The thing to impress is how much work you can pass their way. I sat down with my original guy and we worked out that in a year I had passed his firm £50,000 worth of work.
Appalled to hear of your client. If the family of the landlord were prepared to batter his face in with a cricket bat for a £180 fine imagine what they would have done for £50,000 damages? Is he doing 7 years because of the PFEA or a Police prosecution?
I once had a tenant who complained about his landlord’s threat of eviction who, after I called to mediate, went to the property, cut the tenant’s throat and tried to cut his girlfriend’s ear off.
Luckily she broke away.
They dropped the allegations in fear.
This is day to day stuff for TROs and yet few want to hear.
Ben, my reading of the Act is that as a summary offence the maximum fine is £400. As such, the fines in the cases mentioned do no seem unduly lenient.
Now, £400 in 1977 would be about £2,500 today if it had kept up with inflation. Arguably still on the low side for the most serious cases, but for those there is also jail.
And of course the landlord gets a criminal record.
Yeah the £400 thing is an amendment, back in the day it was scale penalty. The £400 is a downgrade and indicative of how the legal system views the problem.
Recently MP and filibustering expert Philip Davies announced that fitness for human habitation is unnecessary.
If society doesnt take this seriously then the enforcement officer has to get more robust
I’m sure most landlords would not go down this route if it was quicker, simpler and cheaper to evict rogue tenants. When you factor in you factor loss of rent as well I can see why not to mention damage as well.. I guess a phrase I once heard rings so true ‘ Bad landlords abuse good tenants, bad tenants abuse good landlords. The article just shows the law encourages law breaking while punishing the law abiding. Why not quicker,simpler,cheaper to evict/recoup arrears/damage BUT increase the fine for illegal eviction?
Quicker evictions is something that is being considered, but it is not easy in practice to achieve this while still being fair in hard cases https://landlordlawblog.co.uk/2014/03/18/government-plans-to-speed-up-tenant-evictions/
Well, the stories in this thread are enough to put any tenant off complaining! And the point really hits home: that any landlord with a criminal conviction must never be allowed to operate. Every conceivable effort must be made to stop criminals becoming landlords – and licensing schemes have to mandate proper criminal checks. As you said Ben, many of the dodgy landlords will already have a criminal record.
Ben, you also said there that your solicitor just needed to be sure that the landlord had enough assets to cover the costs if the case proved successful. And your council could do this “because we can do PN1 checks where solicitors cant. That way we weren’t reliant on legal” aid.”
Cd a tenant approach their council / TRO, and ask them to pursue a PN1 check on a landlord, if that tenant made clear their intention to prosecute? So that the tenant may approach solicitor off their own bat I mean.
Would that it were so simple Reb.
YOu can do a PN1 on a company no problem but for an individual you have to be a cop, a tax inspector etc. If you are a council enforcement officer you have to make a case to Land Registry for why you want the information.
Usually no problem as you are pursuing investigations under criminal legielsation but a bit more faff.
I attended the consultation meeting at the Home Office on the new Housing Bill back in Augst and suggested they make housing enforcement officers automatic PN1 candidates. They liked the idea at the meeting but it wasnt in the Bill and I dont know if theyve taken the idea up.
I spent 23 years prosecuting landlords for harassment and illegal eviction and the final 2 years in the rogue landlord enforcement team where we did PN1s routinely and even after all those years I was shocked to find that the worst of our rogue landlords tended to own 20 – 40 properties all over the southeast, affecting the lives of hundreds of tenants at any one time.
What will also help is the forthcoming Housing Finance privavte members Bill which proposes making it part of the council tax forms that tenants will supply name and contact details of the landlord. I cant tell you how useful that would be in tracing and identifying landlords
Thanks Tessa for the link. Nothing since though (2 years old almost)
The thing I hate is the media and general perceptions. With the exception of the channel 5 show ‘nightmare tenants slum landlords’ I have hardly heard of bad tenants in the media. For instance I read of a landlord was killed by a tenant a while back wasn’t reported much but I bet it if it was reversed it would have got more.
What I hate is the public think private landlords make a lot (and true some do) but at least we pay tax on rent where as the lefts favorite social landlords pay not a penny (if I am not mistaken?) so no wonder they are cheaper. Plus the rhetoric of Universal credit/Housing Benefit is subsidizing private landlords yet the figures show no more than 40% does. If I am correct on both points can you imagine the fury if reversed.
Now this could be made up but someone I have spoken to said when he was at the YMCA he paid a 100-200 per month MORE in rent for a psychiatrist and all he got for a YEAR was 2 half a hour appointments. Now I am sorry if thats true its appalling . If a private landlord did similar it would be condemned. No one ever talks about standards in council housing yet I happened to one such person who said among other things her central heating did not work DESPITE 2+ years of asking the council for the works to be done. Again if this was private? Then I was told by someone (whom I have not seen since) He paid rent to the council on time for 15 years now unemployed, due to benefit delays was facing eviction. Again if that was private it would be seen as a heartless landlord.
I reckon all this is because tenants from councils are afraid if they speak out the council, they will find some excuse to evict.
With the budget changes, law, regulation. I suspect what is afoot is private landlords on the wane BUT not what left want social housing taking it’s place but corporate/institutional landlords. So now all those who didn’t like giving rent to private landlords will face giving it to a institution but as now re social/council homes the media won’t be around to hear the horror stories.
I applaud all your great work Ben; I really do. These criminal landlords are like a virus by all accounts.
Your last para is helpful, cos I wondered where we’d got with that. I’m conscious that an awful lot of bad letting agents are still not divulging the landlord’s name and address though, and I would urge every tenant – in that event – to pay £4 to the land registry and find that out.
Money laundering aside, it’s a step in the right direction.
Ben – thanks for your reply to my previous post. Of course we do all of those things you mention. I guess we will have to agree to disagree on the effectiveness of PfEA prosecutions! Jackie – I echo everything you say in your post yesterday. How do we start the campaign to increase sentences? Ben is willing and I know ATRO are?
Thanks Tony. I think we start by making representations to the sentencing council via ATRO (soon)and then possibly other bodies too(Shelter? CIOH? CIEHO? Local Authorities?).
PFE Act offences are more serious than most other housing offences in law (hence the possible 2 year prison sentence) as well as in terms of implications for tenants who often loose their homes and all their worldly goods . Yet we regularly get fines ranging from £7,000-£10,000 for Housing offences such as failure to license an HMO, breach of HMO license conditions and even for failure to return a requisition for information!
I think this needs pointing out to the sentencing council when we request clear guidelines. Magistrates appear to have properly recognised the importance of many housing offences..just not this one yet.