Your Car Has Broken Down? Then You Are An Idiot Who Must Be Lectured By Me

There are certain topics that British men, and indeed probably men across Europe and even further afield will not let anyone gainsay them on.  Football is one of them.  Immigration issues is another as is the treatment of convicted criminals.  Do-it-yourself is another topic.  These are things that the bulk of men will not be permitted to contradict them on, often even when there is clear evidence to the contrary.  The last resort is 'that doesn't sound right', 'that can't be right', and 'you must have heard it wrong'.  It is the equivalent of the 'does not compute' from a robot.  A man's dignity is so dependent on him being right in these issues that he cannot mentally cope with any challenges to this perception. Perhaps the largest area for such a mindset is in terms of cars and driving. 

The comedian Harry Enfield portrayed a character who would interrupt conversations in pubs with 'you don't want to do it like that' and would totally dismiss the individual's approach and lecture them on the correct way to do it.  He could not accept that anyone could trump his view.  Another set of characters in a similar vein were the Self-Righteous Brothers portrayed again by Enfield this time in collaboration with comedian Paul Whitehouse.  They tended to take particular celebrities and praise their attributes before drawing a particular line over which they would not let them cross.  These characters were played for comedy, but they are very well observed. As a blogger I get indignant and tell people what to think but the advantage of a blog is one click and you are away from it.  I am not pestering you any longer than you wish.  Unfortunately there are far too many people like this in Britain today who do it to your face and they make any troubles you face harder to deal with.

As I mentioned, the biggest focus for such intrusive souls is connected to cars.  I have had a lot of bad luck with cars, two in a row completely died, though fortunately I had not paid much for them.  In one case I was conned by people who appeared to be friends but clearly more wanted to offload a poor vehicle than they wanted to remain my friends.  I tend not to publicise these problems as immediately it reduces my standing in the eyes of any British man I meet.  They, of course, have perfect knowledge which means they are never conned and always get the best prices.  For them it is simple to achieve this, so I must be a real idiot not to be able to do so.

My last car was 15-year old Mitsubishi people carrier which had done 200,000 Km (125,000 miles).  It was still running but despite all the tweaking and services, it kept on losing revs at slow speeds, making it difficult to keep from stalling in the stop-start traffic that I now drive through.  I thought it had had a good run so started looking for a replacement before it died completely.  I lighted on a Kia people carrier, 8 years old and having done 115,000 Km (71,000 miles) for £3,500, about £1000 more than I could afford.  However, it was in good condition and was large enough to accommodate stock for the business I sometimes help out.  It has a diesel engine which these days means that it is less economical than it would have been about 15-20 years ago.  It has a fuel tank which is 40% larger than the Mitsubishi but the distance per litre is about 15% less than the Mitsubishi.  Apparently the advantage of diesel engines is only apparently if you cover more than 25,000 Km per year and I only do half that.  Having run for two weeks without problem, it suddenly would not start.

Since leaving London in December for a better job, having struggled to find anyone who would rent me a room in a shared house in a city for less than £650 per month, I ended up renting part of a very large house which unfortunately is in rural West Midlands. Before you write in to say that you can rent cheaper rooms, try doing it when you are a man, over 30 and working in my industry, all of these things put off potential landlords/ladies.  I have made another mistake about diesel cars.  Yes, once I saw that I might buy a diesel car, I should have run off and read everything I could about them, but when you are at the dealership you do not have such time and with this tendency for all car dealers to treat you like an imbecile if you make one mistake about the car you are looking at, you do not ask questions.  The woman accompanying me asked about the jack, something largely redundant in cars these days and it led to the dealer simply laughing out loud at here.  They do not care and you have no choice, a private seller would be even harsher.  It is all about them loving the boost to their insecure egos that such humiliation brings.  The mistake I made is that diesel engines start poorly in cold weather.  This seems ridiculous given that tractors, lorries and I imagine snowploughs use diesel engines.  However, it is to do with the fact that it runs on compressing the fuel until it ignites, rather than a spark from a spark plug igniting it.  I found I actually remembered quite a bit about diesel engines from my O Level Physics classes.  Thus, living in a rural area, on top of a hill, with few houses around put me into not an ideal position to start the car.

The day came almost two weeks ago now when it would not start.  I waited until the day warmed a little, then called Green Flag and still it would not start.  The size of it meant a larger tow truck was needed and this dragged it to the nearest mechanics I could find who had a space, the sixth I had telephoned as all the others were busy, being the time of year.  They had it for three days and could not work out what the problem was.  There seemed to be a range of problems, the heater which warms the fuel before it enters the compression process had loose wires and the battery needed replacing.  One problem with the car is almost everything in the engine is invisible, hidden below large metal boxes, a characteristic of a Kia, I have found I do not like.  It also turned out that one of the tyres was below the legal limit despite the car apparently passing its MOT just a fortnight earlier.  I had noticed this due to skidding on the road and was happy to have it replaced.  The mechanics managed to get the car running long enough to get it back to where I am living, 6.5 Km away where it proceeded to die once more.  I then discovered that the battery in the key fob was run down.  Having walked back 9.5 Km to a branch of Asda which had sold out of just that sort of battery and a further 3 Km to a pound shop that had them at half the price of Asda and got a taxi at £10 back.  I managed to start the car.  It was apparent the low battery simply kept triggering the immobiliser.  However, by now I was blocked in by the other lodger's car and satisfied that I had started it four times thought I would start again the next morning.  Of course then it would not work.  I have now had to wait seven days for the Kia specialists 25 Km away to fit me in and have to get it towed there once more.

In the meantime I have clearly been on to the people who sold me the car.  Given that they have treated me so poorly I will do something I do not often do and tell you that they are BMC Autonation based in Bournemouth in Dorset.  They are not huge but have a number of locations around the town.  They seemed to be reliable and the car came with a 12-month warranty on parts - an important qualification.  I telephoned them about the fact that they had sold me a car that had stopped working within two weeks of me buying it from them and that despite the MOT certificate had a tyre below the legal limit in terms of tread.  They simply denied vigorously that it had anything to do with them.  I had driven the car off the forecourt (though not very far given how little diesel there was in the tank) and as far as they were concerned that ended their responsibility for the car.  I guess I should have realised from the lack of diesel that much more would need replenishing from the key fob battery to the car battery to the tyres.  Basically the car was not fit to drive and I am sure thousands of men would shout at me for my inability to simply smell that these things were wrong with the car the moment I looked at it.  That has been the attitude of many men and indeed a woman, since I bought it.

For £3500 I have been left with a car which cannot move after two weeks with problems that after 3 days, an experienced mechanic could not resolve.  Being in a rural area with buses stopping in the village every 80 minutes during the rush hours, when they turn up, has meant great difficulty getting to work.  It costs £3.30 to cover the first 6 Km and then £1.70 for the next 16 Km.  The second stage is from town to town so is faster and far more regular.  A return journey costs exactly £10 or £50 per week, 20% more than the diesel I was having to buy for the journey.  If the bus does not come then it is £10 for the taxi over the first 6 Km, each way.  So not only have I wasted thousands of pounds on a car I am now paying even more for the privilege of not having a car.  If this goes on the choice is to move into the town and see my rent rise from £475 per month for a room to £650.  Of course taxi drivers will swear that you can rent a 2-bedroomed flat for that much, but it actually turns out to be impossible to find any of these places they keep telling you that you are an idiot not to be renting.

I guess this takes me to the root of the problem.  Men largely have an unshakeable perception of the world.  They will not be challenged in that viewpoint.  To be challenged somehow twists their brains so much that it is painful.  Thus, they keep pumping out the same perceptions no matter how much someone contests them.  Their own explanation for the difference between their world view and what the person is saying is that that person is an idiot, no matter how many admirable traits or how much knowledge they have demonstrated up to that point.  Throughout this car saga I have had to put up with such lecturing, very difficult as a lot of it has come from my landlord and whilst I want him to stop banging on about this stuff I do not want to upset him so he feels that I am too much of a pain and chucks me out.  Of course, when the car first broke down the landlord insisted that he got in and tried to start it, he did this repeatedly with no more success than I had had.  The other male lodger similarly insisted that he must try and did exactly the same as myself and the landlord had done with exactly the same result.  By now the engine was flooded and the battery run down anyway.  However, there was nothing that could be done to stop them turning the engine over and over again.  The landlady was determined to do the same and was only prevented by me taking the dying battery out of the spare key fob.

The landlord then insisted that being a diesel engine it must need the glow bulbs replaced.  These were the old method of warming diesel before it was compressed.  He is still insisting on this even though I have told him at least ten times that the car has no glow bulbs but a more up-to-date, though possibly less reliable, heater system.  Even when the car came back from the mechanics he has continued to say it simply needs the glow bulbs replaced.  This shows the strength of his world view, that he believes even professional mechanics who had the car for three days would not have replaced the glow bulbs if that was all that was wrong.  My refusal to accept that this reason is the correct one is now angering him.  However, there is nothing I can do about it.  Even if I get the Haines manual and show him the lack of glow bulbs it will simply stoke his anger, he would rather be angry and wrong than be corrected and so feel humiliated in this subject matter which clearly shapes a large chunk of his masculinity.  The car has been sitting passive outside the house while awaiting the tow to the Kia dealers.  I have tried to start it on the off chance but have simply ended up running the battery down again.  Yet, even today the landlord suggested I try some more and went on about if I just got new glow bulbs it would be fine.  His knowledge is clearly greater than that of the manufacturers.

Having proved myself very poor at buying cars, he has now insisted that if I get another one, which seems quite feasibly will have to be the case, he must accompany me.  He apparently can sniff out faulty cars even when they work perfectly on the test drive (and as you can imagine given my past experience I tried absolutely everything in the car to see if it worked or not before I bought it).  He along with a number of colleagues from my job have this ability and all want to come along next time, because clearly I am incapable of buying a car.  I will need quite a large vehicle to fit them all in.  Of course, they will spend the time correcting each other and pointing out how not only I am wrong, but their fellow 'advisors' are too.

Being lectured repeatedly as a man of 46 is hard.  Being told that you are an idiot unsuited to drive, is humiliating.  Having people insist that a part which does not exist is faulty, is hard to tackle politely.  This is on top of the missed trips and visits to friends and the burden on my wallet to cope with.  I feel once more as I did when living with my parents last year.  All my achievements, the fact that I have survived all the bullying and losses without going mad are nothing simply because my car has broken down.

The Steady Path to Repossession of Our House

Early on with me posting to this blog, way back in 2007, I wrote a lot about the agonies of being booted out of one house by a landlord and then buying another house quickly.  Now, almost three years on, I am in a position to see how much of a mistake that rapid house purchase was.  December 2007 was the worst time to move, with house prices and interest rates seeming to be going to rise inexorably, we felt lucky to get a fixed-rate mortgage at 6% and a 3-bedroomed house at less than £240,000 (€283,800; US$372,400).  Now, of course, with interest rates at almost zero for 18 months, such a high rate of mortgage seems insane, and the house, well, that is worth somewhere around £205-£210,000.  Saying that though, even with a £900 per month (€1,060; US$1,390) mortgage repayment, it was already below the rent for a house of the same size in my town and now, three years later, renting the same type of property locally would cost £1200 per month, so there were savings.  In addition, I was fortunate that after Newham Council had taken its £14,000 cut from the sale of my flat in their borough; HM Revenue and Customs £16,000 for capital gains tax as I had been unable to find work near my flat and so had been compelled to rent it out, and the estate agents sold the 2-bedroomed flat to a friend of theirs at a price you could have got a 1-bedroomed flat in the same area for, I had quite a bit of money to put into the house.  I reckon I will come away with around £30,000 of that, which means I have lost £20,000 (€23,600; US$31,000) in house purchasing since 2001 and am unlikely ever to be able to afford to buy any kind of house or flat again.

The main problem for me at the moment is selling the house before I run out of money to pay the mortgage repayments.  Having applied for 40 jobs in 16 weeks and attended 11 interviews without success, it looks like I am going to be unemployed for a pretty long time; structural unemployment, 1980s-style is back.  I have enough saved from my last redundancy package to pay two more months repayments.  Where money for deposit on a flat and rental payments will come from, I have no idea.  Knowing that I will soon default on the mortgage repayments I have contacted my lender twice in the past four months, first when I was made redundant and again now.  However, both times I have been told they can do nothing, I am not yet desperate enough.  I need to have only one month's repayment money left before they can even begin considering any options such as moving me to an interest-only payment scheme.  I have noticed that at the job centre (even though many of the staff at my local branch are in line for redundancy themselves come December), the building society and the estate agent's, people are still thinking that we are only experiencing frictional unemployment, i.e. people being out of work for three months or less as they move from position to position.  In fact, at a Back-To-Work session run by the job centre they said as much.  People need to wake up to the fact that certainly in public sector work and, I feel, more widely, we are now facing a pretty quick progression to mass, structural unemployment as seen in the 1980s.  The principles of the late 1990s and 2000s do not apply in such circumstances.

I applied for mortgage interest benefit.  I was advised by my job centre that, given that I have been unemployed for more than three months, I should apply for such help.  I did.  I was then told that because the woman in my house works more than 24 hours per week, I was not entitled to it.  To make matters worse I was also told that my jobseeker's allowance, which currently is paid to me on the basis of my contributions, will stop in December because the 'household income' must be too high because the woman in my house works more than 24 hours per week.  Given the current economic climate and the fact that she is self-employed she is working more than 40 hours per week to try to make more money.  She is angry that her business which usually turns a profit of £12,000 per year, i.e. little more than the £8,400 needed to pay just the mortgage (let alone utility bills and food costs) if she was paying it alone, impacts on what I can claim.  To make matters worse, she has been told that whilst she is a single parent, because I am part of the household, even though I have no income apart from my jobseeker's allowance (and even that will stop in less than three months). she is entitled to only £15 ( €17.70; US$23.27) per week in 'in-work' tax credits, i.e. payments for people working but on a low income who have children.  If I leave the house, this would apparently rise to £200 per week.  I have spoken before about the hazards of inadvertently becoming a family if you live with someone of the opposite sex: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/05/i-now-pronounce-you-inadvertent-husband.html  Despite that, it is clear that it is much better to be living alone or just with a child if you want to claim benefits.

My efforts then to reduce the steady drain of my savings and the inevitable default on the mortgage has only one possible redemption, one which the building society keeps on talking about, which is to beg from your family.  This assumes that your family is richer than you and willing to bail you out.  I am estranged from my brother who lives abroad and the bulk of the family of the woman who lives in my house live overseas, the rest are in the same situation as her.  I persuaded my parents to pay the mortgage three months from now so the house is not repossessed before it can be sold and they would get that money back immediately from the sale price of the house.  However, they cannot do this indefinitely, and six months seems the maximum.  I am very grateful that I have that, most people would not.  Given how slow the market is, however, it seems very possible that come next summer, especially with more people having to sell up the way we are, the house will remain unsold and the building society will take it over.

Whether I lose the house to repossession or manage to sell it first, the experiment of being a property owner will be at an end and I will be back at the mercies of the unregulated rental sector, which under the current government is likely to be freed even further of its restrictions.  Given how I was kicked out of two houses at the whim of the landlord and had one intimidating myself and the woman and child that lived there, with no notice paid to that behaviour by the police, I have a very bleak view of my future in terms of finding a place to live.  In many ways I have been lucky and I am sure we are all going to hear more stories of people pushed from pillar to post as unemployment rises to new records and landlords/ladies exploit those people who have no choice but to come to them.

No Access to the Law

As regular readers will know I am facing another round of legal problems with the representative of my former landlord. He seized the £1000 deposit back in September and now is claiming anout £400 to do up the garden and £1000 additional rent. So, I needed advice on how to deal with this. Solicitors (equivalent of attorneys in the USA and notaries in other European countries) cost about £300 (€405; U$585) per hour, some as much as £800 per hour, so well out of the reach of even well off people to consult. In the UK we have a system called Legal Aid but in 2004 limits were introduced on who could access it as it was felt it was becoming too expensive a system to run. Trying to find out the top limit is difficult. The government has a Legal Aid Elibility Calculator: http://www.communitylegaladvice.org.uk/en/legalaid/calculator.jsp Legal Aid is still available for those on benefits or very low incomes but for anyone in a job or comfortably off you are not longer entitled. It has been denied increasingly to asylum seekers too. Consequently access to the legal process is now barred to the bulk of the population. Only the very wealthy can easily access legal services. Even when you have to use solicitors as when selling or buying a house you find they give very poor service for the thousands of pounds you pay. I have already outlined on this blog how little service we received for paying £3500. There are only two solicitors companies in my town that will handle legal concerns of tenants, all the others will only take you as a client if you own a house and pay their fees. Today I met a woman, a first-time buyer who had used the same solicitors as I had done and came off even worse, they missed many legal traps in the lease she signed and she has found herself repeatedly liable for a whole range of charges costing hundreds of pounds on each occasion which the solicitors had not alerted her to.

The only other option for legal advice even (not representation, increasingly you have to represent yourself in court and battle against people using high-paid lawyers who know all the tricks) is to go the Citizens' Advice Bureau. Now, they are a wonderful charity staffed by volunteers but as a result of 'rip-off' Britain with rapacious landlords and so many scams they are terribly overworked. I tried emailing my local branch on Monday and telephoned them constantly through yesterday and so today went to their office. I was seen within 1 hour of arriving which was pretty good. It was a very unnerving situation though as the advisor laughed my concerns off as 'just a story' and said I was wasting his time. Eventually I made him see how afraid we are of people demanding money and how terrifying it can be when debt collectors turn up at your house. By the end of the meeting he seemed to take me more seriously. I guess I am in not as severe a position as many people who come and see him, no-one is trying to evict me yet or take my children into care or those things. However, it took time to emphasise to him that to us it is important and we do not have the money being demanded and if we had to pay we would begin the spiral into other problems such as being unable to pay the mortgage.

One piece of advice if you are going to a Citizens' Advice Bureau, turn up with as much paper-based evidence as you can muster. There were people in there with box files about their cases. The advisors seem to expect this and it means they are less likely to perceive what you are talking about as 'a story' and nothing more. Include all the letters you have received and all of those you have written. Despite us being in this electronic age, emails do not count. On the other hand do not make my mistake and write an explanation of what has happened to you, rather explain it orally. This will allow the advisor to engage fully with you and ask questions as you go along.

Anyway, it turns out that however much the police dismissed our concerns, we were being harassed under the 1997 Freedom from Harassment Act when the landlord's representative sat outside our house and repeatedly kept calling especially as it was causing visible stress to my housemate. We were apparently in our rights to refuse to talk to the man and should have insisted he only communicate on paper. Apparently neither phonecalls (unless recorded) or verbal statements or emails count for anything legally. We should have similarly got a letter from the bank telling us about the steps to repossess. We should have tried to get the landlord's representative to write down that he insisted on us moving out in a 2-week window of his choosing as apparently they cannot get you to move out with less than 2 months' notice. Of course people somehow make an assumption that being middle class you know all these rules, but of course we do not and landlords and letting agents always know far more than we do.

As it turns out we are liable for the £1000 rent for January as these fixed-term contracts can never be broken even if you give notice or even if new tenants move in. They are great for landlords because they can get two incomes from the same property. The issue over work on the garden apparently has no legal guidelines and though we had vacated the property we were still legally responsible for it to the end of our contract so the grass which has grown up should have been cut by us. In court, we could contest the £400 charge for cutting grass on such a small area. In addition, the landlord cannot apparently demand extra charges on top of the £1000 deposit he took from us, so even if £400 is soaked up by the garden, he has to use the £600 remaining towards the rent charge meaning we have to still find another £400 but no more. Of course this is not how the landlord's representative sees it as he took our deposit for us causing him difficulties, not to cover expenses.

Apparently the best thing for us to do now is to get the landlord to take us to court. Of course we cannot afford legal representation (you only get it free if you have been charged with a crime, not in a civil case like this) so I will have to defend myself. Fortunately once I had managed to get the Citizens' Advisor to see how much trouble we were facing he advised me to come back for further advice about the legal documents once they are issued, so I did not feel so guilty about seemingly wasting his time. People need to understand that legal threats are frightening; the law is incredibly confusing and seems to be very imbalanced to the bulk of the population. We need help to deal with it or there is no point in having laws we might as well simply go back to Stone Age society in which the strongest one in a fight comes out on top.

Sorry this posting has gone from a general issue back to talk about my housing woes. However, it is a slice of the challenges that UK people face in dealing with the law. There were ten people in the waiting room at the Citizens' Advice Bureau when I arrived there this morning and I am sure they could tell similar stories of how hard it is to contest things legally in the UK, in fact two of them did tell me.

As I have noted before, power in the UK is in the hands of the very wealthy with the bulk of the population stripped of rights to oppose the bullying we get put under. It is no different to the Victorian times, we are simply supposed to put up with our maltreatment and be grateful for it. Our landlord's representative clearly believes that we should be so grateful for him letting us live in the house and that we should keep paying for the privilege of the months of pressure he put us under. Fixed-term tenancy contracts should be banned, they are not feasible to work with in a country where jobs are ever changing. It is perverse to be able to charge people rent for a house they are not living in. Greed seems to have become king in this country and (lots of) money is the only definition of power. As our rights and access to the law are regularly eroded it simply exacerbates this situation further in favour of the rich. Is it no surprise that people turn to rage to get some kind of recompense when there are no longer any legal means open to them? The British are too passive to revolt, but I am sure increasingly frustrated people will strike back locally against these fat cat lawyers and Rackman landlords and who can blame them?

Property in the UK 8: Problems Rise from the Dead

For much of 2007 this blog had me ranting about the constant problems I faced renting a house and trying to sell a flat and buy a house. By December it seemed that everything was resolved. I had sold my flat, though for less than it was worth, I and my housemates had got away from the rented house where the landlord's representative had incessantly harrassed us and I had bought and moved into a new house jointly with said house mates. It seemed to be all sorted and we all looked forward to a quiet year ahead. We were careful not to leave any details at the old house because we knew how nasty the representative was, what a fantasist he was and how he believed he had the right to bully us to keep paying him hundreds of pounds. He had taken our £1000 (€1350; U$1950) deposit off us even though we had left the house in an immaculate condition and we hoped that would satisfy him. The letting agent encouraged us to raise a complaint of harassment against him for constantly phoning us, telling us we had only a 2-week notice period at some date selected by him and sitting outside our home photographing it. However, we wanted to draw a line under all that and hoped to move on to our new place without hassle.

Since late December we seemed to have achieved that until today. The letting agent called my housemate's mobile phone saying the representative was demanding our details so he could bill us for a further £1400 (€1890; US$2370). Apparently he is demanding £400 to have the grass on the back lawn cut and the garden weeded and another £1000 in rent he claims we are due for January. The garden was left in a good state, but of course with the warm weather the UK is experiencing plants have not stopped growing and given we left the house seven weeks ago it is not surprising it is all grown up. It does not cost £400 to have that work done. We had three trees chopped down and removed for £80 when we first moved to the new house, much more work than a small bit of mowing (the lawn is 2m x 2m) and some weeding. He is also claiming for a glass lampshade which is broken. The thing fell down one day all most showering us with glass. It is a small sphere that could fit in your hand which was made in the 1980s and no longer made. Surely out of the £1000 he could pay to have the whole light fitting replaced. We do not have the £1400 he is asking and we feel we are not obliged to pay him, but you can guarantee he will soon have debt collectors after us.

The greed of the man is astounding and the sense that he can still keep charging months after the tenants have left indicates how avaricious he is. He has taken £11,000 from us in one year and yet this is not enough for him, he effectively wants us to pay to do up the house so he can sell it. The obligations of tenants do not extend that far whatever he and so many other landlords believe. By definition tenants are not the richest people in the community so why should we be pressed for more and more money for very spurious reasons? I suppose it is because it is actually more expensive to be poor in the UK than it is to be rich. We have to cough up many charges that richer people never do. If I could threaten this man with my own lawyer then I am sure he would not think twice about even trying to press these costs on us. It seems that the next stop is court and my housemate is bullish to face the representative in a legal setting. However, before then I am sure we will have to face debt collectors and all the pressure they can bring plus the damage to our credit ratings and attempts to seize items from our house. In the UK you have no defence against a financially more powerful person who just keeps on squeezing. What makes it worse is that this man lives in a fantasy world and cannot disassociate his lust for revenge on us from business dealings. He cannot be negotiated with the way a more sane person could. How I curse the day we ever saw that house to rent and how I wish the other people who wanted it had beaten us to it. I do not know how the representative would have dealt with a lone mother with five children, but she should be grateful she never had to face him.

I thought this strand of my blogging was dead and buried, but it seems to have risen up and come back to plague us even when we thought we had escaped. In the UK do not dare be even comfortably off let alone poor, you have no rights; no power and the greedy will consequently exploit you.

Property in the UK 5c: A Twist in the Sale

In terms of my categories of blogging this probably straddles the anger management and the journal type as it outlines, briefly, the latest development in the hassle we have been receiving over the house we have been renting since February. It is astounding that we have reached the halfway mark of our 12-month contract, the pressure makes it feel like many weeks more. Anyway, I am currently on leave and was about to set off for a day in a lovely part of southern England when there was a ring at the doorbell. A late middle-aged man stood there and asked me if I was Mr _____, i.e. the landlord. I said I was the tenant, which surprised him, and in fact that the landlord was in the USA. He then outlined that the landlord was months behind in making his mortgage repayments. I do not know how I stand legally but I know in the past tenants would just be kicked out when the landlord defaulted and the house was repossessed. I am guessing that we have more rights than that these days and hopefully there are a few stages before the house is repossessed, especially as we are close to being able to move out anyway.

This bank representative asked to see my tenancy agreement. However, it takes me half a day to find any legal document I need. I cling tightly to everything that I am sent, and the more precious it is the more securely I keep it, hence my inability to locate it. As it turned out later, my housemate actually had it, so it was a good thing I did not look for it as I would never have found it among my things. In addition, I have no financial relationship with the bank and did not feel compelled to deal with this man. I sent him to the letting agent, fortunately located near to our house, as I assume he can put his hand on all the legal papers needed and anyway, that is his job, I am supposed to be on holiday.

I do not know if this is going to make our situation any easier or harder. I can see now why the landlord was unwilling to come out with any financial incentive for us to leave the property early, but I cannot understand why he simply did not sell the property before he left the UK. Our rent is £1000 (€1480, US$2003) per month (out of this he pays only 7% fees rather than the usual 13-16% because of the agent he uses) and his mortgage payments are £1400 (€2072; US$2842), I guessed he made up the gap from the extra pay he got from his promotion in his work and the posting to the USA which presumably came with relocation funds. It was certainly wrong for him to go ahead and rent out the house defaulting on the mortgage payments; luring us into a property that he did not intend to keep for the duration of our contracted tenancy and, in turn, exposing us to his father and his slimy ways of doing 'business'. Even more than before I feel as a tenant I have no protection, I am just a cash cow that can be slaughtered the moment it is convenient for the landlord.

Gordon Brown says he is going to do more for those who are first-time buyers, but he also needs to help secure the position of those millions of us who rent. We have far fewer rights than people the other side of the English Channel. It must come as a shock for those people coming from France and Poland to work here to find they can be exploited in this way within the EU. So, this is the anger management element as tonight I feel I have absolutely no control over a central part of my life and my future - where I live.

Property in the UK 5c: The Beginning of the End or Just the End of the Beginning?

Well, in my long-running saga of our landlord's representative things become more bizarre. On the plus side we have found a house we like and have found out we can borrow enough money to buy it. However, the other-worldly behaviour of the landlord's representative continues. Now he says that we cannot leave the house we are renting early (because obviously the landlord would lose the rental income and be liable for council tax on the empty property) but we can stay no longer than the day before he exchanges contracts to sell the house. He feels he has been generous in offering us a two-week warning of the sale of the house (I guess rather than being hard on us and just telling us the day before). However, there is no indication of when the house will be sold, so we cannot plan anything.

At least now we can probably move to the house we are buying rather than having to put all our stuff in storage and stay in bed-and-breakfast accommodation while we looked for a house. The fastest we have been able to move in the past is about six weeks. Having to go through all the hoops and checks by letting agents and the various utility companies makes it harder to move faster in the UK, not even factoring in the time it takes to look for a house and apply to live in it.

The landlord's representative has now said he will not speak to us. He has been by-passing our letting agent who is supposed to handle these things and now has cut off communication because he is angry with us. Following the meeting he had with my housemate, we thought he was going to put our proposal (for some payment in return for breaking our contract which runs to January 2008) to the landlord, but apparently he thinks he never said that and is angry as we were supposed to be considering his offer (read threat - obey all my demands or face legal action) and ring two days later to confirm our acceptance of that.

We are actually now looking forward to getting a letter from his lawyers as we expect (maybe wrongly) that they will not be fantasists or work in a schizophrenic way and we can negotiate some deal with them, rather than simply being lectured by them the way the representative does (literally he will go on for 30-60 minutes about how his family is suffering [they own a £350,000 house, have an excellent job in Texas and so on], how his daughter-in-law is useless, how experienced he is, how he wants to treat us like family, but thinks we are behaving illegally and so on). The police say him sitting outside the house in his car and calling us repeatedly on the phone does not constitute harassment and cannot understand why everything is not covered by the contracts (well it is for us, but the representative feels he is not bound by them).

The worst situation for us is if we buy the house and still have to keep paying the rent on our house until January 2008, so we are seeking a deal now in which we can leave when we want and in return will let the representative put the house on the market, have people view it, etc. (even though in the contract we do not have to permit this until the end of December 2007). The representative keeps getting more and more estate agents to market the house so we get even more phonecalls coming in. We have had backing from estate agents and advisors on housing in the town that we are doing the right thing. However, one lawyers' firm we contacted said they never represent tenants only landlords.

The representative now wants to evict us but, of course, not so quickly that he will be liable for council tax. This mad system in which we are being compelled to stay in the house until the precise moment the landlord's representative decides we must leave, with no thought of how disruptive that is to our life, just re-emphasises how powerless we are even when we adhere to the law. In addition, he is going round estate agents and letting agents in the town literally lying that we have always been late with our rent, so making it harder for us to find a place anyway, and defaming us, knowing we lack the funds to challenge him in court (especially now that legal aid is only available for the poorest people). So, we are very much in limbo and with our reputation being hammered.

They wonder why the British labour force is so inflexible, well it is no suprise when you face such hassle and lose so much money just renting a house. My housemate and her son will have lived at 4 addresses in 2 years by the end of 2007 and we are not like Will Smith's character in 'The Pursuit of Happyness', I have a well-paid, established job and she runs her own successful business and yet we lack the power to stop ourselves being kicked from pillar to post as part of landlords' economic whims.

Property in the UK 5b: The Landlord's Representative Turns Up the Heat

Taking a break from the writing on counter-factuals in this post I return to probably what blogs are supposed to be about, day-to-day life. The ongoing saga of the problems with housing for me and mine continues. To recap, we have rented this house since February. We had to leave the previous one after only 16 months as that landlord split with his wife over Christmas 2006. Now, having been in this new house only 5 months we have been told we have to leave despite our 12-month contract.

The landlord has emigrated to the USA so he has appointed his father as his representative. With interest rates reaching 5.75% this month and set to rise further the £1400 (€2040; US$2800) the landlord pays on his mortgage each month is rising quickly. This man told us lots of lies trying in some way to get us to like him. The key one was that he would not put the property on the market until Monday 2nd July when he returned from the USA himself. In fact he put it on the market immediately, Monday 18th June. I was angered by his lie and my housemate who works from home would not accept people coming to view the house and disrupting her life. As she pointed out, in the contract it says we only have to permit this in the final month of our tenancy, i.e. January 2008. She certainly wanted to negotiate some kind of deal so we did not have people turning up at any time with the estate agent simply letting themselves in without warning. Of course to the landlord's representative this house is simply a business and we are an illegal obstacle to his plans whereas to us it is our home and we feel violated to be treated this way.

The landlord's representative has a major problem, his mind is in a fantasy world in which he owns 47 properties and used to be a lawyer and is somehow a nice man. Even the estate agents are irritated by his attitude. He clearly expected the house to be sold by the time he returned from the USA and us to have disappeared from his concerns. Even if we had been willing to leave without complaint, in my experience it takes a minimum of 4-5 weeks to move to a new property (you have to find a place, sign contracts with the new landlord, get credit checks, get a day when removal people can come, get a day off work, etc., etc.) but of course the landlord's representative sees this as none of his concern, we should simply have gone.

Right, so the landlord's representative's fantasy world where tenants disappear in a puff of smoke when they are no longer needed (we pay £1000 (€1460; US$2000) for this house, so have provided the landlord a good income) has run up against the real world. What is his reponse? To call my mobile 'phone eight times in two hours; to ring my housemate at 08.00 when she is trying to leave the house to take her son to school; to park his car outside our home and watch us go about our business. We want to negotiate with him, but he will provide not telephone numbers or contact details and will not keep the letting agent informed. Ourselves and even now people coming to the house, look up and down the street, uneasy to think he is watching them. He will not listen to what we are saying, that we need time to move, we need a reduction in rent or a lump sum to recompense us for being turfed out early and having our lives disrupted by people tramping round our home. He says we are breaking the law, that we have not kept up the house and garden properly (it has rained incessantly for three weeks in the UK, weedkiller is ineffective in such weather and they left the driveway not properly surfaced so weeds keep getting through) and that we have been late with our rent each month. We were tricked one month. My salary comes on different days each month sometimes as early as the 27th sometimes as late as the 31st so paying out on the 28th each month was sometimes hard. We were told that if we paid an additional £100 we could move it to the 1st of each month. We did exactly in line with what we were told and then were told we were late and should pay a £25 per day fine. We have gone back to the 28th but have lost the £100 and the landlord's representative has said we have been late every month, which is a lie, but the landlord's representative's fantasy world can only see as trying to cheat him at every turn, when in fact the landlord has tricked us out of an additional £100. A letter from the lawyer of the landlord has been promised outlining all that we have done wrong in the house and what legal steps are going to be taken against us.

The landlord's representative keeps talking at us and has never listened to what we have said. We are treated as if we have no rights and are even illegal in asking questions. He has said things blatantly like 'I will find a loophole to get you out'; 'I will do what I have to do', that latter one verging on sounding like a threat of violence. Even if we had rolled over to his demands immediately, he would have been dissatisfied as we could never have moved on in 2 weeks as he wants. We now feel under siege with him parked up outside the house and ringing at all times. My housemate has been made ill by the worry of all of this. She has an appointment on Monday on neutral ground with the letting agent as mediator, but given the landlord's representative's fantasies I fear her words will fall on deaf ears. The man is stupid because if he had not lied to us, and had listened to us, he could have avoided all this hassle and cost of lawyers, but clearly he loves to throw his weight around.

For us, the sense of powerlessness that I have been talking about for the last two months is again re-emphasised. We are a well-off household, with intelligence and good networks. If we still suffer such bullying, heaven help people in similar circumstances who are not blessed with these things.

I have just realised the date is 07/07/07, well I hope someone out there has had some luck today, if you have done, have one on me.

Property in the UK 5a: Treated like a Football

Well, new twists in the latest saga of our landlord seeking to kick us out because we are simply an obstacle to his desire for money. I know you ardent capitalists out there argue I should simply accept my role in the economic system and allow myself to be manipulated by market forces and the people who embody them. However, it causes problems for my day-to-day life and I think I have a right to protest about that. After all, I am only asking to be treated with respect and be left alone. I fulfil my obligations but that is not enough apparently, I have to recognise my role as nothing more than an element in a bigger economic process and I should be grateful that someone deems to rent me a house to live in.

Anyway, it turns out that everything the landlord's representative told me and my housemate on the telephone was a lie. He is apparently well known in my town. He has never been a lawyer only a clerk (in the UK sense of the word, someone who does low level administrative work, not the US sense of a shop assistant), in a legal company. He does not own 47 houses, at most he owns 1 and maybe not even that. He said that there would be a 2-week pause in putting the house on the market while he was in the USA and that he would come and discuss it with us when he returned, but that turned out to be an immediate lie as the estate agents turned up after the weekend wanting immediate access to photograph everything and start bringing people through our house, when we told them to slow down, they got angry and telephoned the representative immediately. In addition, we were told that there would be 2 companies selling the house, our current letting agents who we know quite well (they are not very efficient but are not as nasty as these other people) and one other company. In fact this second company that we do not know has been given sole rights to sell the property.

The landlord's representative (who said he was the landlord's father but given he lied about everything else in his almost 2 hours of whining at us on the telephone I cannot even believe this) said that he could have us removed from the house in 2 months by giving proper notice. This is a lie too. As is increasingly common in the UK we are locked into a 12-month contract which we cannot break even if we wanted to; if we leave the house we are still liable to pay the rent on it even if they get new tenants in there. I encountered this kind of contract in Milton Keynes and got advice from the Citizens' Advice Bureau and they confirmed you can do nothing about it, even though it means paying thousands of pounds for a property you no longer live in.

Now we are anticipating that the landlord's representative will start playing all the tricks landlords do such as changing the locks and causing other problems for us; accessing the house when we are out and breaking or taking possessions of ours. Anything to force us out quickly, because he knows that a house (as opposed to a flat to which different economic rules seem to apply) with sitting tenants is unsaleable and even if it was not, we are not willing to have people tramping through what is our home, at any hour of the day. I know as tenants we should not become attached to a property, but in that horrible American phrase we are very much home-makers (and garden-makers) and treat where we live as a home, not a hotel room. I think we are going to suffer both emotionally and financially but my housemate has taken the lead and is challenging the landlord's representative. She has taken legal advice from Shelter (a charity to help homeless people, but it gives excellent free legal advice on issues around housing in an effort to stop more people being screwed by landlords and becoming homeless. Most people in the UK who are homeless do not live on the street, they are families put up in cheap hotels by local authorities) and so is ready to challenge what the landlord is trying to do to us for simple economic gain.

In contrast I am certain that we cannot win. The UK law is always on the side of those with money and power. An ordinary UK, even middle class person (we are not citizens in the UK apparently, just subjects of the Queen) has little chance of getting a fair deal, so I think we should cut and run before the landlord and his henchmen start doing nasty things to us. I think standing up to him will just make it worse and we will lose even more. It is increasingly clear that you have no rights as a tenant in the UK (unless you have the money to employ lawyers; one quoted me an hourly rate of £800 (€1184; US$1600) and now unless you are really poor you are no longer entitled to legal aid to fight cases of this kind). The difference in view on what to do is obviously causing arguments in the house and I was called 'Judas' today for not supporting the more aggressive policy towards the landlord.

I accept that my job which comes with responsibilities and my reasonable income have fooled me into thinking that I have some power over what happens in my life. This incident has proven me entirely wrong. I have no power even to decide where I live and for how long. Contracts are worth less than the paper they are written on when you face those with money and influence. So you will not be surprised that I feel like a football (for US readers, I am thinking of a soccer ball, unless the landlord starts thinking he is going to pick me up and dump me down somewhere like the river) on the pitch of the UK economy, feeling every kick that is layed into me.

Property in the UK 5: Caught in the Crossfire

I never intended this blog to simply be about houses, I expected a mix of politics and some personal observations, favourite films and books and things. However, I suppose the political and the personal are coming together in the latest instalment of my housing woes. Every time I encounter a problem, I think it must be tough for me, but there must be hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of UK citizens who are suffering this and worse and have less cash and family support to ameliorate it. I am solidly middle class, I earn 50% above the national average salary and yet I am being kicked around as if I was some homeless person. I am grateful that I am not homeless, but, maybe though, you will say I should not expect my comparative wealth to protect me from the harshness of people and the marketplace. This was the mistake the middle class made in the 1920s and so when all their money disappeared in the Depression they resorted to dictators like Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, etc.

As I have noted before, when you feel powerless you turn to despair or anger and this week it has been anger. With my car having broken down last week I was fortunate to get a lift from my boss who lives about 10 miles away to where I was working, about 46 miles away. I could have gone by train but in the rush hour it would have literally cost me as much as how much I spend for the family on groceries each week. Whilst in my bosses' car, as I have outlined in 'Property in the UK 4', I was telephoned by my landlord's lawyer father telling me the house we have been renting for three-and-a-half months is now going on the market. As landlords now have to pay council tax on empty properties they keep tenants in them until the week they sell the property and it seems clear now that it was the landlord's intention to sell the house as soon as he could. So we have to deal with people walking through our house looking at us as if we are zoo animals and for no personal benefit for us. We will effectively be sold on as part of the fittings of the house. The sale will likely to be quick, fortunately, it will probably go straight to another landlord. However, we have no guarantee that we will be allowed to stay because with 2 months' notice we can be kicked out (we can leave with 1 month's notice).

Now to complicate matters the letting agency who are supposed to run the house on behalf of the landlord rang to say that we did not have allow people to view the house and in fact our contract is one of these unbreakable leases (these are increasingly common in the UK and mean you are liable for 6 or 12 months rent even if you give notice and move out after one week). He wants us to refuse to let people see the house. It seems clear that the agency and landlord have fallen out. The agency are angry they are not sole estate agent on the property as selling it would earn them £5000 (€7,300; U$10,000) compared to £840 (€1225; US$ 1680) if they continue renting it (they only charge their landlords a 7% fee rather than the 13-16% which is usual among UK letting agencies), so being a small company are seeking to deny the sale fee to a rival company. The agency say no-one will be a family house with sitting tenants anyway.

So, now we are in the crossfire. Do we go with what the landlord says and face being moved out in a couple of months (the third move in 23 months) or go with the agency and deny the landlord ability to sell the house meaning he will move to kick us out anyway? We are just a football in the argument between the two sides. No-one considers that this is our house where we have put in work keeping it clean and have lots of crops coming up in the garden. It is clear we are counted as nothing by either side, despite paying £1000 per month rent, we are just here to be disposed of as fits with the plan of the landlord or the agency. Despite my income and status I have absolutely no power over what happens to my family this year. Each time we move it costs us about £1000 and we have already paid that this year just moving four streets to this house in February. Everyone thinks about their profits and squeezing a few thousand more, what about our basic cost of living? It counts for nothing.

People keep saying to me: 'well why don't you just buy a house?' as if I had never thought of it, but with a good salary like mine struggling to afford to buy a two-bedroomed flat let alone a family house, that is just getting annoying. An increasing number of people in the UK are becoming tenants and it is clear we are just counters in some economic game, not perceived as humans trying to live a quiet life in a half-decent house. I have never started a campaign, but I feel someone should to give tenants some rights.

Property in the UK 4: Return of the Rentier Class

I had thought that maybe I had run out of things to be angry or frustrated about which was why my blog was moving over to nicer things like movies and books I find interesting. However, there is always the unexpected. This week my car broke down and I found I can only afford to buy and older or smaller one; it turned out someone had been misusing my credit card but weirdly only for sums of £10-20 and once just for 52p; then my landlord's father said his son (currently in the USA) wanted to sell the house we have been living in for the past five months. This fact, combined with what I heard from an estate agent at a barbecue recently, provoked me to return to the British obsession - property.

Up until now myself and the people I live with have had to move house on average every 16 months. We reckon we lose about £1000 (€1460, US$2000) every time we move. Now, however, the gap between when we are forced out of our houses seems to be decreasing. This is coming about because of interest rate rises to try to slow inflation in the UK. They make mortgages more expensive and there is a fear as in 1990-3 house prices will fall sharply and lots of people will have 'negative equity', i.e. they owe more on their house than it is now worth. Since the 1990s with so many companies stealing pension funds or closing them to workers UK people feel that the only way to secure their old age is to buy property and rent it out then sell it off when they retire. 'Buy-to-let' has been so common in the UK. In some ways this is good as it has put much needed rental property into the system, though this has not come without costs.

Many people, like me, rent a house but own a smaller property that they rent out as their pension scheme. I bought a flat having lived there for a while got work far away from it so I was not 'buy-to-let' but I moved into that class when I put it up for rental. It has now become such a liability because of random, arbitrary charges from Newham Council that I am selling it. I am not alone. Those buy-to-let people are finding the mortgage payments get harder to meet, especially as their rent is rising quickly (about 20% per 18 months in my town). The 'for sale' signs are appearing everywhere now and this is likely to trigger the crash in prices that they are all trying to avoid. For tenants it is proving a nightmare as with us, a few months after you move in, you find you have to leave when the house is sold. In the case of a couple I know, the house they rented once they married a few months ago, apparently was already on the market but the landlord never told them. His greed meant he wanted to keep getting rent up until the day he sold the property. (This is encouraged by the fact that the landlord since 2004 has had to pay council tax on empty properties). So much for their new home together, four months down the road they have to move again and have no guarantee they will not be treated the same at the next house they rent. This has happened to another local couple I know too and I imagine it is occurring across the UK. UK tenants have few rights and little comeback.

I was under the impression that a lot of rental property fell into this category, that as tenants these days you tend to rent from someone who owns one place. Often, as I thought was the case with my current landlord, they get work somewhere else abroad and rent the house out just in case they need to come back and live there again in the future. However, when I found out the landlord's father has bought 47 (forty-seven) houses since 2001, I realised that I had been missing a whole situation. The buy-to-let people are small fry, there is a whole 'rentier' class above them who distort the economy in many towns. In fact I then realised I had seen more examples in the newspapers. You may ask what is so bad about people expanding their businesses in this way. The problem is that it is them who are driving up both house and rental prices. This was where something else I had been oblivious to comes in. Talking to an estate agent recently she said that in her office they never advertise around 50% of the houses they are asked to sell, they just contact landlords directly and offer the houses to them. This restricts the supply of properties coming on to the market and so artificially inflates the prices. In addition landlords are not as fussed as owner-occupiers in getting the lowest price as long as the rental income can cover their mortgage, they would in fact like quicker rising house prices and it increases their equity faster. In addition, they get a pick of the properties meaning people actually trying to get a place to live in are simply left with the rejects. I know one family who are now searching over a 40 mile (64Km radius) to try to find a decent house.

You might say, well, with these rentiers owning so much property there must be a lot available for rent. Yes, that is true, but effectively in each town you get a cartel. There is no ability to shop around. In a town of say 150,000 people at any one time there are likely to be no more than 30 properties of a particular type, for example 3-bedroom houses, to rent across the town, these may all be owned by just 5-8 people. There are obviously seasonal fluctuations, the bulk of the agencies we visited in January had no properties at all to let, and if you want a 2-bedroomed flat there will always be more available than say 4-bedroomed houses. Anyway, they set the prices and you have little choice because there is no free market and little true competition. Inflation in the UK has been running around or below 3% for years now and interest rates below rising to a little over 5%. So how come rental prices are rising at 10-12% per year? With all the people who own one buy-to-let property now selling up, competition will shrink further as these will be snapped up by the big rentiers with the money to weather any financial squall.

Despite all the rhetoric since the early 1980s of the free market meaning competition and that meaning better service and lower prices, in fact the UK has ended up with capitalism working in a different way with a few individuals manipulating the market, unfettered by regulation to ensure that they grow even richer at the expense of the bulk of the population financially beneath them. Maybe we have got the flexible labour force Thatcher wanted, but unlike what the Thatcherites envisaged of workers moving where there is work, we are shackled by unbreakable long-term contracts and then are kicked out when the sale price of the house becomes worth more than keeping you living there. This is a labour force which does not move on its own accord, it is one that is driven like a flock of sheep by the rentiers.