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Dealing with Criminal Landlords

August 15, 2019 by Ben Reeve-Lewis

Ben Reeve LewisAs some readers will know, three years ago my ex-Lewisham council colleague Roz Spencer and I started “Safer Renting”

Safer Renting – What we do

Based at Cambridge House in south London, we are a tenant’s rights advice and advocacy service working in partnership as contract Tenancy Relations Officers with licensing and enforcement teams for the London boroughs of Hounslow, Enfield, Waltham Forest, Westminster and Havering.

Acting as TRO across more than one borough puts us in the unique position of daily exposure to sharp practices of criminal landlords in different types of housing stock, from luxury, double glazed beds in sheds in West London, through six-story, off-shore company-owned properties in the West End and Victorian slums carved up into massive multi lets with stud walling in the East End and even the odd 16 cubicle derelict petrol station being used to house victims of people trafficking on the leafy fringes of London where we were last month.

Working with Dr. Julie Rugg

All of which makes us fully conversant with the different loopholes that are exploited by rogue landlords and agents among different client communities.

We are using this unique perspective in compiling a report overseen by York university’s Dr. Julie Rugg, funded by Trust for London to be published next year, called “A journey through the shadow private rented sector”.

Our report on the Shadow Private Rented Sector

The report exposes the mechanics of the common scams used by rogue landlords and agents and charts the experiences of renters, enforcement teams and lawyers, working at the bottom end of the business, accommodating the people that the much relied upon English Housing Survey doesn’t record.

The human beings crammed into lofts and outbuildings, being ripped off for what little they have and forced to live in death-trap conditions, bullied by thugs and let down by a largely unsympathetic and over-stretched judicial system.

Considering recommendations

At this mid-stage we have turned our attention to creating a list of recommendations for the report, which are essentially small (and some not so small) changes to law and procedure that will make it harder for rogue operators to exploit the system and to right some of the imbalances.

Whilst not a lawyer, after 29 years of dealing rogue landlord laws I do know that re-writing a law isn’t as easy as people think.  Which is why we are concentrating wherever we can on tweaks, which are easier to campaign for and to achieve.

For instance, many of the properties routinely dealt with by enforcement teams are of such staggeringly poor and dangerous conditions that they present serious safety threats to the occupiers and on occasion to the neighbours.

Considering the costs of council action

Where these conditions are identified the council has the powers and in some instances, the duty, to set them right, through service of a variety of notices.

In all instances, the landlords running these places are encouraged to put the problems right first and bring the properties up to standard.  But what happens when the landlord’s dismissal of an offer to resolve a problem is batted away and the council has to serve a notice?

The news is awash with such stories, where rogue landlords have ignored serious fire safety issues or simply removed the roof.

1. The Occupier becomes homeless

Firstly the occupiers become homeless as a result. Not such a bad thing when you consider the properties they are being airlifted from but the duty is on the local authority to provide assistance to the displaced family, including provisions of temporary accommodation.

Going through this process alone is no joke for families and to add insult to injury, it’s you the taxpayer that has to pay for this, while the rogue landlord bears no financial cost of the relocation.

2. The Council has to pay compensation to the tenant

Secondly, where a council is forced by circumstance to serve these notices Part III of the Land Compensation Act 1973, requires the council to compensate the tenant with ‘Disturbance payments’ to cover their moving and relocation costs.  Yet other regulations require the council to provide further ‘Home Loss’ compensation to the tenant, with a whopping £6,100 being merely the starting point.

So the council steps in to protect the occupier and has to use public money to pay for doing so, while the landlord running the slums and death traps that the council has been forced to close down, aren’t responsible for a single penny for re-housing the family.

What ought to happen:

Our recommendation on this unfair practice, is to tweak the system, so that when a notice has to be served because the landlord is not keeping up with their repairing obligations to such a degree that a notice has to be served, the offender should be the one forced to pay the Home Loss and Disturbance payments.

Of course, the same rogue landlord can be fined for non-compliance with notices further down the line but why should the enforcing authority, who at the end of the day, is all of us, pay even one penny for the rogue to wash their hands of responsibility?

Safer Renting has a similar public costs recommendation, where a council has been forced to step in following an illegal eviction, to push for damages for the cost of providing temporary accommodation and rehousing. Again, why should public money be used so that the offender doesn’t have to go through the hassle of obtaining a court order like anyone else?

Why we have criminal landlords

The ability to make large sums of money from exploiting the most vulnerable in the worst possible properties is tremendously appealing to criminals, especially when it is so easy to hide illegal conversions and outbuildings by renting out to people without recourse to public funds and on very low wages, against a background of understaffed enforcement teams and the logistical problems of actually finding the properties in question.

Criminal landlords and agents are proliferating not because existing agents or landlords turned to the dark side. The industry is attracting criminals who wouldn’t otherwise be landlords but for the amount of money that can be made at the moment, from the desperate need for accommodation, coupling up with rubbish laws with too many get out of jail free cards and lack of funding for housing enforcement. In the same way that gangsters previously running betting scams and loan sharking, turned to making booze following prohibition.

The way to deal with them

If money is the incentive to play fast and loose, then money has to also be the disincentive. If being punished for every infraction ends up costing them more than the money they were making on the sly then that is the one thing that will push the criminals into other lines of business.

We aren’t so naïve as to think that we will destroy criminal activity but we can help make the rogue landlord game a less attractive one and force the people exploiting the system into a different line of criminality –  such as fake Olive Oil production. Then its Jamie Oliver’s problem, not ours.

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About Ben Reeve-Lewis

Ben is a founder Member of Safer Renting, an independent tenants rights advice and advocacy service working in partnership with the property licensing and enforcement teams from a number of London boroughs.

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Comments

  1. hbWelcome says

    August 15, 2019 at 8:46 AM

    Will this be an insightful report highlighting government and local authorities as a large part of the problem or just another lefty landlord bashing, used as ‘evidence’ for ever more draconian legislation only ever enforced on easy target law respecting landlords?

    • Rent Rebel says

      August 15, 2019 at 10:34 AM

      That really is some persecution complex that you’ve got.

    • John Cart says

      August 16, 2019 at 8:39 AM

      Come on hbWelcome, what do you really think it will be?? Of course it will be more Landlord bashing and ammunition for the likes of Shelter and Generation Rant to use. I note BR-L’s article contains the usual whine about lack of staff at LA’s and that they don’t even know where a lot of these appalling properties are located, well, they’re going to have to get off their backsides and look for them, I don’t have an ounce of sympathy for them either, all the time they keep handing out unlawful advice of “wait until the Bailiffs turn up” to tenants, who have gone through the Court process and should leave the property,usually for rent arrears even though S.21 was used because it’s easier. In the mean time they’ll have to work a bit harder won’t they.

      • Tessa Shepperson says

        August 16, 2019 at 8:55 AM

        The type of properties Ben is talking about are properties managed by criminals who have moved into the sector due to the lack of enforcement.

        If there was proper enforcement then this would reduce the criminal element which would in turn reduce the negative perception of landlords. Obviously not all landlords are criminals and they should not all the treated in the same way.

        But these are people’s homes we are talking about.

        So far as Local Authorities are concerned, they are hamstrung as they do not have enough money to pay for staff to deal with things properly. The staff that they do have are often so demoralised by the problems they face that they are leaving the service in droves.

        Which is not good for anyone.

        • hbWelcome says

          August 17, 2019 at 9:26 AM

          “Which is not good for anyone.”

          It’s good for the criminals.

          A sub market created due in a large part to government and local authorities.

          I trust any balanced report would reflect that. As opposed to the usual landlord bashing resulting in more worthless legislation only enforced on and abided by law respecting landlords.

          The perennial excuse of local authorities not having enough money would carry more weight if they spent taxpayer’s money where it is needed;

          https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-11984977

          “A council in east London spent more than £111m on one office block, including more than £1,800 on individual designer lights”

      • Bob says

        August 20, 2019 at 9:43 AM

        Their advice is perfectly lawful.

  2. Peter Jackson says

    August 18, 2019 at 9:21 PM

    My one experience of council enforcement is not direct. The local council took my letting agent to court for not paying the council tax on a property he had never owned nor managed. (It was owned by his sister in law.) So I do not trust council oficials to manage things correctly.

    Whilst councils should be able to demand that criminal lardlords pay for the costs they cause they should not be able to just demand payments. They should have to go to courtt. Yes in the meantime they would have to pay the costs.

    Also as Ben has mentioned before using a limited company as the landlord would make things tricky. How would you propose getting around that?

    • Michael Barnes says

      August 22, 2019 at 3:21 AM

      confiscate the property.

The Enforcement Officer's story

Ben Reeve Lewis

Ben Reeve LewisBen Reeve Lewis has worked for Local Authorities for over 20 years.

First as a Tenancy Relations Officer and now as a freelance Enforcement Officer.

He is a regular writer for the Landlord Law Blog and has also appeared on TV - for example in the first series of Channel Five's Nightmare Tenants, Slum Landlords.

In these posts, he talks about his work trying to help poor tenants in London and track down the criminal landlords who exploit them.

As well as giving his views - based on his experience as a practising enforcement officer - of government policy and practice.

The business models of criminal landlords explained

This is a short series explaining how criminal landlords operate.

  • How tenants are a crop for criminal landlords to harvest
  • Why the real rogue landlords are all about the money
  • Aliases and fake companies in the rogue landlord world
  • How Criminal landlords use dodgy contracts and misdirection
  • The Criminal business model of ‘Rent to Rent’
  • Accommodation models for Criminal Landlords
  • Tackling the problem

An interview with Ben Reeve Lewis (on 18/5/18)

Some recent Posts

(The most recent posts are at the top)
  • Court closures scandal
  • The Shocking truth about criminal letting agents today
  • Property Guardians Revisited
  • Common sense, law and the reality of renting
  • How Rent Repayment Orders work
  • Considering Housing MOTs
  • The New Rugg Report
  • Guardian lettings - is the end in sight>
  • Lessons to be learned from Nottingham Letting Agent Prosecution
  • Signatures and the Companies Act
  • Considering the New HMO Regulations
  • Select Committee Report
  • Tenant or renter
  • Police colluding with landlors in illegal evictions
  • European Renting
  • Fitness for Habitation bill
  • Tenants bins
  • Interim and Final Management Orders
  • Implied Surrender
  • Intentional Homelessness
  • The state of our County Courts
  • What homelessness units say to tenants and why
  • The emerging trend of Meter Tampering
  • Fire Safety in Micro Units
  • The Club Member Scam
  • How do we find slum properties?
  • The startling story of tenants who dare not ask for rent receipts
  • Does licensing landlords really do any good?
  • What do you really know about Rogue Landlords?
  • The Growing Problem of Cannabis Farms in Rented Properties
  • Protecting tenants whose Landlords face mortgage repossession proceedings
  • A warning to new landlords taking over existing tenancies


>> Click here for more posts by Ben.

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