Lack of Justice in Housing – Legal Blackmail

Reply to the comment left by Chris Daniel at 21/02/2019 - 12:57Are you denying that there are cases of retaliatory eviction where the landlord has fallen out with the tenant for some reason?

Reply to the comment left by Seething Landlord at 21/02/2019 - 13:34
I doubt anyone denies retaliatory evictions happen, but it is a tiny fraction of a percent.
Compare that to the real reasons landlords evict using section 21
- rent arrears, selling up and anti-social behaviour
and it is too insignificant to have a sensible argument about.
(Not that that stops the emotional rantings of the anti's for their own personal gain)

Reply to the comment left by Monty Bodkin at 21/02/2019 - 14:53
I doubt that it is insignificant for the tenants on the receiving end. Unfortunately it is vindictive, unprincipled landlords who spoil it for the rest of us.
Incidentally, the three grounds that you cite as reasons for using S21 are all grounds for eviction under S8 so the real problem is the difficulty, time and expense involved in using that section and persuading the court to exercise its discretion in favour of the landlord in the case of the optional grounds.

In my life I have had tenants who have broken many of the terms of the tenancy, like not keeping the house clean enough, gardens filled with rubbish and I know usually what that means is when they go it will be me who will have to put all that rubbish in my car and dispose it off at a local council tip, making several trips, not adhering to advice on how to ventilate bathrooms after taking a shower, not to leave wet clothes to dry indoors and particularly on radiators, to use bathroom cleaning products to keep mildew from growing around the silicone sealant, between the tile grout, toilet pans so darkened you cannot see the bottom, they do not tend to care much about their own hygiene, yet not one tenant has been evicted on any retaliatory ground by me, even those who actually came close to physically abuse me, cursed me, paid no rent and had a cheek to open a can of beer in my face when I object or protest with them rather quite fairly that they have the bloody money to buy beers and cigarettes yet claim they are hard up and can't pay their ren, according to my view the only most important thing any tenant facing hardship is to save on unnecessary spending, like beers and cigarettes, or other luxuries, first priority is the food and clothes and a roof over your head, luxuries can wait. It is quite insulting to see such tenants claiming hardship yet their beers never stop flowing! proof is open the bins and see they are half filled with empty cans of beers, I will never agree to that in a million years, tenants doing this are irresponsible, they are destroying roof over their own head as far as I am concerned. There are no two monkeys about it, me and my family had lived on rented accomodation back in the 70s, we always made sure that our rent reached the landlord on time. Indeed I have one tenant who pays me rent dead on the date come what may. Retaliatory eviction can occur when tenants are unduly very demanding, especially when they pay you rent, one such tenant once gave me an ultimatum to replace the oven as it is not working, she said she has paid me 6 months rent upfront and so no excuse not to get her a new oven, and do you know what she did not even study the oven instructions which clearly stated the time clock must be first set in order for the oven to work properly.

Seething,
I’m not denying there is a very small amount of anything bad going on in Housing or any other aspect of life, but we already have, as you say. Retaliatory Eviction legislation. ALSO, - Every piece of legislation enacted for years has had restrictions linked to the use of Section 21 ( even the Tenant fees ban coming on 1st of June ) There are crimes committed at night, would you advocate we are all subject of a curfew ?

Reply to the comment left by Chris Daniel at 21/02/2019 - 21:25
Chris, I am not really advocating anything except that we learn to live with the reality that if we do not comply with legislation we cannot complain about the consequences. At the moment retaliatory eviction is only prevented in quite limited circumstances and I was referring to it in the wider sense. There was a quite idiotic post a while ago (maybe not on this forum) from a landlord who said that he would deliberately time a S21 to disrupt Christmas for a tenant who had upset him and it is this sort of statement that fuels anti landlord sentiment and encourages politicians of all parties to lump us together as a problem to be dealt with. There is nothing new about group punishment where the innocent suffer unjustly because of the actions of a few.

Reply to the comment left by Seething Landlord at 21/02/2019 - 22:45
I just don't think it's helpful for ANY Landlord to speak up for the likes of Shelter and Generation Rent etch who want to remove what Landlords see as an Essential tool ( even if a tiny minority abuse it, despite getting around Retaliatory Eviction and all the other 'hurdles already attached to Sec 21.

why everyone hates landlords in UK in particular, ever wondered why this unfairness exists, here is my possible answer, we done well in our jobs and businesses, made a fair bit of money, so we thought let us invest this money in bricks and mortar, the return is greater than if we invested in other sectors, not only the property value goes up on average many time above rate of interest banks and other savings accounts offer, the risk is indeed far less in bricks, properties are insured, your savings are not insured as much, with £85K cap offered by FSCS, if you had £500K you would need at least 6 different unrelated bank accounts to protect that life long savings, so we end up buying properties, and rent them out, but what if we did not buy them, then the price of properties would be well within the reach of average hard working earner, he or she could then afford to buy their own property instead of renting, as property prices go up and up faster than the rate of inflation, and many landlords are greedy bunch, trying to maximise profits instead of keeping rents low and that certainly would calm the situation down with tenants, most who are only a few hundred pounds short of getting a mortgage, so perhaps banks have an equal part in this game, if they offered higher return, and easier mortgage lending then may be the shortage of housing and bad feelings may go away and normality returns, house prices are unsustainable, the house price bubble is likely to break when more and more people can't afford high rents and are made homeless, so the Government starts to churn more legislation for landlords instead of looking at the root cause of this anger between tenants and landlords. This means BTL mortgage should be banned as this gives landlords to purchase more property for them to rent out and less for the ones who want to buy their own, hence the prices are going up ridiculously high, even as a landlord myself, I never needed a mortgage as I worked very hard and ran a business that made profit with which I purchased my rented property.

Reply to the comment left by Mike at 21/02/2019 - 23:32
Mike, your views on btl mortgages pretty much reflect the justification that George Osborne used in support of his section 24 onslaught against leveraged landlords and I do not think that you will find much support for them on this forum!

Reply to the comment left by Mike at 21/02/2019 - 23:32I think you overstate the case against leveraged landlords and, in my view, any desired modification of landlord behaviour could more fairly have been achieved by restriction of interest-only mortgages to landlords at the same time this was done for residential mortgages, coupled with the Osborne tax changes being applied only on future purchases of property to let, rather than being retroactive. Governments have a history of using pecuniary incentives and disincentives to steer behaviour in an effort to right perceived social problems, and this usually results in extreme swings in the opposite direction which then require more changes to modify those extreme. Publicbehavioue responds to incentives which put more or less money in their pocket whether by subsidies or taxation changes. The 1988 Housing Act which initiated legislation to make it easier for landlords to evict undesirable tenants and triggered the introduction of buy-to-let mortgages was intended to encourage people to become landlords in order to correct the dreadful shortage of homes to let for people who could not afford or did not wish to buy.
Incentives for green measures such as solar panels and small wind and water power schemes are a recent example, but I am old enough to have witnessed a similar phenomenon in agriculture where government incentives intended to boost food production after the war resulted in hedges being grubbed out, ditches and marshland drained, small woods and copses cleared and artificial fertilizers applied to pretty much every square inch of the landscape. There was ridicule and vilification of farmers who tried to retain some of the practices which had sustainably produced food for centuries and resulted in the varied landscapes and rich wildlife I grew up with. Now farmers are incentivised, indeed obliged, to take measures which are designed to reverse many of the undesirable extremes resulting from the previous incentives, while being demonised for having created wildlife deserts and taking subsidy payments. In short, I feel that blaming and even bankrupting "greedy landlords" is a lazy response to successive governments' propensity to throw the baby out with the bathwater.