Enforcement not legislation – PRS Hit Squads

Well it would be nice to think they are going after the criminals
however considerable past experience would suggest that it is more likely that as usual they will soon forget about the criminals who will be very adept at circumventing the law and hiding their assets and instead chose the soft target of ordinary families who let properties and ruthlessly pursue them for minor infringements and honest mistakes
I am sure ben wants to go after the real culprits and i wish him luck
but after 40 years in this business i know there are those wiith an entirely different agenda
Mark im sorry but you are going to be disappointed these hate mongers will not miiss an opportunity to demonise all landlords and their families expect to see the usual hate fueled propaganda in large doses

Reply to the comment left by "Anthony Altman" at "03/10/2013 - 11:10":

That the criminal landlords I am after will change tack and go deeper underground is not in doubt Anthony.

That we will have a less than 100% hit rate is also not in doubt.

But I would say to you in response to those comments, that a couple of people in my new multi team have also is expressed is this; “F**k it then. Lets not bother. Let’s just take the money, go home at five o’clock and forget about it. Let these criminals do what they want because what is the point?”

That is the only alternative I can see.

I actually understand that cynical and jaded viewpoint, it’s hard even for me to keep my head up after 23 years of minimal success but what I fail to understand is the connection that you make between attempts to target criminal landlords with an inevitable slide into an approach whereby we transfer our resources to target what you call “Ordinary families” to cover up for our failures.

The very reason that I reject Newham’s pan borough licensing and Shelter’s cartoon villain approach is because I want to support those “Ordinary families” who have invested their life savings into a single buy to let investment who are being ripped off by god-awful tenants who treat them as evil just because they are landlords.

And one of the best ways to support those ‘Ordinary families’ is to take out the criminals who are giving them a bad name and pushing back on the Newham and Shelter view that all landlords are in the same camp as those criminals.

Once we have begun to create a zero tolerance for this behaviour in my borough plan B is to then work with those ‘Ordinary families’ to educate and support them wherever we can.

I totally reject the term ‘Rogue landlord’ and always have. It doenst do enforcement officers any favours. Do I treat the amateur who breaks laws they don’t even realise are there the same way.

In my mental model there are 4 types of landlord:-
Criminals, who just happen to be landlords.
Balggers/chancers who skirt on the fringes of ddgy behaviour but can easily be slapped down.
Clueless amateurs who don’t really know what they are doing.
The rest, decent professional types.

My aim is this.
Drive the criminals out of business – pure and simple.
Use those successes and a big stick to make the chancers up their game and behave themselves.
Educate and support the amateurs.
Leave the pros alone.

I cannot understand why you think that enforcement teams would take out their frustration on decent people.

I cant help but notice that P118's normally very vocal landlords are being mysteriously silent on this whole thread 🙂

This tells me a lot

The most vocal (Paul) was banned, the rest are more worried about the mortgages they have with West Brom BS and are on that thread. Where's Mary? Perhaps you could tweet her?
.

Reply to the comment left by "Mark Alexander" at "03/10/2013 - 20:03":

Haha I wondered where Paul had got to

Reply to the comment left by "Ben Reeve-Lewis" at "02/10/2013 - 16:44":

Hi Ben,

Fantastic to read what is being achieved by yourself and your colleagues and I am a firm believer of a 'joined up' approach.

As the resident manager for the block of flats in which I live I work regularly with my local borough in terms of ensuring that the flats in which private landlords place tenants in are fit to live in. I regularly use HHSRS to get the council in when a tenant has come to me for advice and help and to date I don't have any ongoing issues when this has been deployed.

These private landlords are not however on council-led schemes but have simply placed their flats with a letting agent (usually closely affiliated with them) which means that they are not immediately on the councils radar.

Whilst I can change this once I am made aware of it (many tenants are not familiar with their rights and English is not their first language) sometimes the problems go on for a long time without my knowledge. HMO'S and Selective Licencing mean that landlords are on the radar from the outset but in my experience there is a gaping hole when it comes to other elements of the PRS, i.e. landlords operating in blocks such as mine.

This is why I still think that a simple registration scheme pan-wide is essential to enable the joined up approach to be built upon a solid platform, particularly when landlords can operate with impunityacross boroughs in this part of the PRS,

Sharon

Reply to the comment left by "Sharon Crossland" at "04/10/2013 - 09:29":

Yeah that’s the point of multi agency working Sharon. There are 21 different enforcement teams in my borough and you never know who is working on what until you trip over the information by accident and an astonished exclamation “I didn’t know you were doing that” Then it’s like loads of pieces of a jigsaw come together and suddenly you have an open door.

When you go to external agencies you find the same thing but they don’t have access to the same information that we do. So partnering up with them improves their powers as well, we now have links to tax fraud, mortgage fraud, police etc.

If we cant get them for harassment we’ll settle for tax evasion, if we cant get them for running dangerous properties we’ll dig up their outstanding arrest warrants for other offences.

Reply to the comment left by "Ben Reeve-Lewis" at "03/10/2013 - 19:53":

"I cant help but notice that P118′s normally very vocal landlords are being mysteriously silent on this whole thread"

As a slightly vocal landlord, I've remained silent because what is there not to like?
Not much point discussing something I'm entirely in agreement with.

My only comments are YTF hasn't this been happening already? It's just common dog.

I can understand the cynicism of Anthony but the upside far outweighs the downside. The blasé answer to councils targetting landlords for minor infringements and honest mistakes (and they will do to an extent) is for landlords to make sure they do everything right.

One thing Ben, that has always puzzled me, is why is it so hard to go for criminal landlord owners? (I understand the problem with sub-letters)

Buildings are such an easy target for enforcement, it's not as if criminals can physically disappear into the night with them, it should be a piece of piss. It should even be a self funding growth industry
- Where there's a blame, there's a £1/4M asset to claim.

Clearly I don't understand the complexities of the problem!

Hi Ben
sorry about my intermittent input but im a bit snowed under at the moment just to clear up any confusion im 100% behind what youre trying to do
i know from my experience that that there a lot of good well meaning TRO,s and environmental health officers out there but they are often undermined by councilors who sometimes have a highly political agenda and are regrettably sometimes motivated by political expediency and a sound bite mentality the simple fact is putting 50 landlords in court on technicalities earns them more kudos than 1 landlord in court for persistent life threatening offences
When i give a talk to landlords i often start with saying when i was a tenant i thought most landlords were a bunch of miserable sour faced cynical old gits and now the wheel has turned full circle and i am a landlord and i still think some landlords are a bunch of miserable sour faced cynical old gits ! the difference is now i know precisely why !!!

Reply to the comment left by "HB Welcome" at "04/10/2013 - 16:25":

“One thing Ben, that has always puzzled me, is why it is so hard to go for criminal landlord owners?”

Thank you so much HBW for asking the $64,000 dollar question.
There isn’t a single reason but what it actually boils down to is:-
• Most of the routes open to enforcement officers are criminal convictions, which means that every single allegation must be proven ‘Beyond all reasonable doubt’
• Tenant/witnesses often lack credibility.
• Tenant/witnesses often can’t stand up to cross questioning.
• The vicissitudes of law can knock so many cases out on technicalities.

Case studies by way of illustration.
1. Hungarian family. Landlord rips up the floorboards of their 1st floor accommodation over a rent argument. They can’t walk in kitchen without risking falling through the floor. I can’t get continuity between interpreters. The law of evidence says the person who interprets at the statement taking must be the same as the one translating at the trial, which will be two years hence….forget it.

2. Just this year a landlord evicts a tenants and destroys all of her personal possessions. I have independent witnesses, ready to go but 1 month before crown court trial the tenant, my chief witness, says she can’t attend because on that date she is ion trial herself for fraud. Chief witness gone.

3. Gang of four men turn up and beat the crap out of tenant. He has been so badly beaten he is bleeding through his eyes. He doesn’t know identities of assailants. I have no evidential connection between them and landlord and even if I did I have no “Reasonable doubt” proof that what they did was at his instruction.

4. EHOs pursue landlord for not having an HMO license. Landlord intimidates everyone into leaving. Not an HMO anymore so no license needed. Landlord leaves the property empty for 6 months, by which time the HMO licensing team have moved on and landlord re-lets as HMO until we find him again, so he just clears it out again.

5. 72 year old man gets notice from landlord. 1 week in an unknown guy lets himself in with a key and says “You’ve been given a month to leave, this is a persuader” and proceeds to beat him about the shins with an iron bar. The old guy ends up in hospital too knackered and scared to be a witness. No witness, no case. Criminal standard of evidence. I don’t know who the assailant was and I can’t prove that the attack was carried out on the instructions of the landlord. I call the landlord, a well-known local gangster and he laughs at me. He says “I don’t know what you are talking about mate”. I have to drop the case.

This is my 2013 folks.

And these are the kinds of reasons why we find it difficult to take these guys out and why I have just today been told officially that I am no longer my council’s TRO but their enforcement coordinator.
Be a criminal landlord in the London borough of Lewisham…………I dare ya…….I double dare ya