Left-wing Labour member wants mandatory PRS damp and mould inspections

Course we can. Who’s paying?
No, who’s really paying for these £150 £13pm on top of the rent checks?
Along with everything else.
Can a tenant not spot mould?
What about checks to see if the tap is dripping?
Or the light enough lumens?

Any welfare & advice checks for the tenants? Oh, we’ll sort that too then.
Tenants have got enough with the below, I’ll add this £150 pa to the list too then.

Dear Tenants,
Govt has just bought in yet another charge £65 per year EACH house for property database fee. So you got to have rent increase for that £6pm.

All this information needed for the property database, the Council already have for your Selective Licensing, who already charge £1000 every 5 years, so £200 per year, so you got £20 pm rent increase for that.

Previously we could just agree between ourselves if rents were £1000 & you were paying £750, you could agree verbally to £775 or £800. Well Govt has put a stop to that costing you again. Govt has said all rent increases must be done by Section 13. Letting agents cost £75 to do this, so that’s another £7pm.

So before we even get a little rent increase to pay for all inflationary increased costs, you’ve got £33pm which is going straight on the Govt charges.
This is without the extra admin we’ve got 4am office starts 9pm finishes. So no longer small rent increases I’m afraid, we got minimum £83pm before we start.

I could go on & on if some Media outlet would finally tell the truth & put it all out there, cause tenants that had no problem (80%) are really hit hard by all these Govt & Council changes.

More evidence of antipathy towards private sector LLs? To avoid discrimination, would such a proposal include the social sector too? After all, that’s where Awaab’s law originated.
If such a measure was introduced and was mandatory as gas safety checks are, would the ‘checking’ staff be able to report mould which was clearly down to tenant lefstyle? It might even change the narrative a bit. If implemented properly, the proposal could even deliver positive outcomes for the PRS.

OK,,, in my experience many, many council and social housing properties have chronic damp and mould too, which until a new law came in were totally ignored.

And what about the poor souls who had government recommended cladding stuck on their houses and now many are totally unfit to live in because of the incoming damp???

Many of these people have no choice but to put up with these abismal conditions because either they won’t be accepted in the PRS due to their credit records or they simply are too poor to move on.

And what about people living in flats and appartments with unsafe, possibly murderous cladding because government and government institutions didn’t do their job properly??

Perhaps Madam should stop throwing stones at PRS when she’s living in a huge, very transparent greenhouse!

Perhaps she just needed to make her mouth go to get some cheap attention!!?

A homeless tenant would suffer a lot worse then a bit damp after a LL packs in due to no money left in the pot because of fees/fines/maintenance/legals!

Quote “with an average of only 2.2 Council enforcement officers for every 10,000 private rented homes.”
So you are saying that all homes have the problem,?

And what about the social housing checks then???

Costs of regular inspections will be added to the rents.

What’s the likelihood that a tenant would be advised that opening a window once in while, in the room they dry their laundry would sort the problem out?
I’ve attended properties on a number of occasions, where a closed door was opened into a room containing a clothes horse, windows closed & vent’s also closed. I even came across one where the vents were blocked off on purpose by the tenant. One tenant couldn’t even understand the relationship between damp, mould & a bathroom extractor fan not working (which had gone unreported). I’d have fixed that really quickly, but tenant stupidity got in the way.
So what are we supposed to do when the cause of damp is tenant stupidity? I imagine we’ll eventually probably be forced to issue a government sanctioned “how to avoid damp & mould” document, coupled to a threat of fines if we don’t serve it on a certain date, by a specific method, or using the revision 6.4.1 which will likely be released unannounced.
Or maybe, not having us issue it is the plan here? Damp or mould must equal a structural issue in some peoples view. A tenant could never be responsible, surely? I beg to differ. But the responsibility will fall on landlords to prove the building has no faults that could be causing the issue, which costs money to get an expert opinion on, which in turn increases rental prices.
Sensibility seems to fly out of the window on widely spread wings when politicians get involved in the nitty gritty. Unless they really know what they’re talking about, it’s time to shut up or go & learn a few things about how the real world functions.
Give us historical percentages of where a structure has caused damp or mould & the same where tenant actions have caused it. Without statistics, it’s all just opinion. Stats mean change, simple. Opinion means the square root of nothing without supporting facts & evidence, even, or perhaps especially, if the person having a rant is a member of the government.