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Pages tagged "conditions"


Licensing landlords drives up standards in England

Posted on Latest news by Dan Wilson Craw · October 24, 2021 10:14 AM · 1 reaction

Councils that require landlords to be licensed take more than twice as much enforcement action as those that don’t.

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Heat our homes, not the planet!

Posted on Latest news by Dan Wilson Craw · February 25, 2021 12:55 PM · 1 reaction

Two thirds of private renters need much stronger energy efficiency standards if they are to enjoy warmer homes that are affordable to heat and free of damp and mould. That's what our latest research with the Generation Rent Renters' Panel finds. 

Installing insulation and other improvements improves a property's value but landlords are leaving their tenants to put up with cold and draughty homes. Even the £5000 Green Homes Grant the government introduced in September has not nudged landlords into action. 

As well as higher legal standards, tenants need incentives to demand improvements. Right now many don’t know if they will stay long enough to benefit from improvements and worry that their landlord would raise the rent if they made improvements. Tenancy reform is needed to give renters confidence to ask for improvements, and the ability to claim back rent if their landlord leaves them with an inefficient home.

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What the NRLA has to say about mould

Posted on Latest news by Tilly Smith · December 14, 2020 4:07 PM · 1 reaction

It is winter, so, like clockwork, mould is sprouting on renters' walls and, in response, letting agents are dishing out spurious advice like this:

Our letting agent sent us this letter, to remind us that “lifestyle activities” such as “breathing” may be the cause of condensation in our home. 🙃🙃🙃 pic.twitter.com/U0zgSCbGGY

— Lucy Mort (@Lucyhbmort) November 17, 2020

More responsible landlords will look to their professional bodies for guidance to improve their tenants' living conditions. The National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA) are sharing this factsheet with its members to pass on to renters who are complaining about condensation, damp and mould.

We decided to take a look - and found that it is unfortunately little better than the cowboys' efforts.

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Once again, renters are vulnerable to revenge evictions

Posted on Latest news by Dan Wilson Craw · October 12, 2020 2:32 PM · 1 reaction

After six months of no evictions taking place at all, courts have reopened and landlords can resume the legal process of evicting their tenants. 

Despite the government's insistence that "the most egregious" cases will be prioritised, tenants can still be booted out without a reason, with no ability to appeal it and only six weeks' grace if they face "extreme hardship".

This is possible because of Section 21, the law that the government promised to abolish last year. Today it is exactly one year since the government closed it's consultation on proposals to change the law, and we are still waiting for it to publish the Renters Reform Bill to make it all happen. Join our campaign to get Section 21 scrapped.

 

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Will the Green Homes Grant leave renters out in the cold?

Posted on Latest news by Dan Wilson Craw · July 30, 2020 12:45 PM

Earlier this month, the Chancellor announced £2bn of funding through a Green Homes Grant to insulate homes. Poor insulation is a huge issue for private renters: one in 10 of us live in a home that is unacceptably cold - that's twice the rate among home owners and social tenants.

But it's not easy to get landlords to make these improvements - landlords have no incentive to reduce energy bills that someone else pays, and tenants have no idea how long they'll live somewhere to benefit from better insulation. 

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Private renters denied protection from revenge eviction

Posted on Latest news by Hannah Slater · March 18, 2019 11:29 AM

Dangerous, broken stairs, or mouldy walls making your family ill? What do you do if the landlord won’t make sure your home is safe? Private renters can contact their council, who have a responsibility to enforce housing safety standards. The council should investigate complaints and if they find a serious hazard, take enforcement action against the landlord, which triggers protection against revenge eviction for the tenant.

But new analysis by Generation Rent shows that just one in every 20 renters who complains to the council about poor conditions gets protection from a revenge eviction. Even when a severe hazard is found, tenants only get protection from eviction in 1 in every 5 cases.

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Proof that millions of renters are failed by unfair rental laws

Posted on Latest news by Jacob Mukherjee · July 20, 2018 5:10 PM

The latest English Housing Survey was out last week, and the results are further evidence for what we’ve been arguing for years: England’s rental laws are making life insecure and expensive for growing numbers of people.  

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Protection from revenge evictions a postcode lottery

Posted on Latest news by Dan Wilson Craw · June 16, 2018 7:54 AM

This week we launched the End Unfair Evictions coalition with ACORN, London Renters Union, and New Economics Foundation. We're calling for an end to Section 21, which allows landlords to evict tenants without needing a reason. 

One reason we're doing is that existing protections are not working in practice.

Back in 2014/15, we fought a hard campaign alongside Shelter, GMB Young London and others to give tenants basic protection from eviction when they complained about their landlord. 

The resulting measures in the Deregulation Act 2015 stopped landlords from serving a Section 21 eviction notice to tenants if the council had found hazards in the property and served an appropriate improvement notice on the owner. This protection lasted for 6 months and was meant to give tenants more confidence in getting their landlord to fix health and safety problems, because the landlord can no longer simply retaliate by kicking them out.

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London's renters are not getting enough protection from their council

Posted on Latest news by Dan Wilson Craw · May 07, 2018 12:32 PM · 1 reaction

With the votes counted in last week's London borough elections we now have some new council leaders. One of their responsibilities is to make sure local private renters are living in safe homes. But judging by the 32 councils' record in 2016-17, they have a lot of work to do.

London Boroughs took action against just 1 percent of the capital’s worst landlords in 2016-17. That's just one of the findings that we've uncovered in new analysis of Freedom of Information data - the basis of a new league table of council performance.

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Cross-party groups give their verdicts on renting

Posted on Latest news by Dan Wilson Craw · April 19, 2018 11:14 AM

This week we’ve had two reports from the political mainstream calling for a better deal for renters. They add to the pressure we’ve been putting on the government to improve tenant security – and though we contributed to both, they don’t quite go as far as we’d like.

The first was from the Resolution Foundation, a think tank chaired by Conservative peer David Willetts and run by Torsten Bell, previously adviser to former Labour leader Ed Miliband. 

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