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 2: Take the Deposit and Run

Now, this is one issue which a few months ago would have angered me even more than it does now, so I suppose you can say I should not be disheartened as some things get better. Since leaving home in the 1980s, bar for a short period in 2001, I have been a tenant. I rented in Germany for some time in 1989, but the bulk of my experience has been in the UK. I am a clean person who treats where he is living with respect and I always spent time and money clearing and cleaning before I leave a property. However, as yet only as late as 2005 have I ever got any of my deposit back and it was not until 2007 that I actually had a whole deposit returned. Until 2007 deposits which are supposed to cover damage a tenant does to the house or flat have been treated as bonuses for the landlord. At something around £500-3000 (€730-4380; US$1000-6000) per time it was a heavy loss. It does not matter if you were renting from a letting agency or direct from the owner, they would invent the maddest excuses to hold back money: £30 for moving a microwave from the garage back into the house, when I could have done it for free if they asked; £30 for 'soap residue' left around a sink after cleaning; £45 for 'dust in the bottom of a drawer'. These are all genuine charges that I and friends have suffered. The big improvement in 2007 is that deposits now have to go into a licenced independent account and they measure the charges against an agreed itinerary. This is one of the very few things that the New Labour government has done for the British population (and visitors from abroad too). [New Labour fans, be patient, I will mention the handful of other things in coming postings.]

These made up things are not what deposits are for, they are for if you broke the front door in or burnt the carpet. NOTE: those people letting out flats can totally redecorate the house and replace all the furniture and claim it back as business expenses. NOTE: in addition to being able to get this work done tax free, they can also claim back 10% depreciation on everything from the inland revenue, so they do not need to snatch the money from your deposit.

You might think you would get a better deal from letting agents, but in my decades of renting I have only encountered 2 letting agencies that have not tried to rip me off. In general they take 13-15% of the rent that is paid, some take as little as 7% but they are desperate. To save money they tell the tenants to fix things. I was told that when a bulb went in a fixed external light it was up to me to fix. I have no electrician qualifications and was not going to hang off a ladder to unscrew and fit an expensive bulb. When the shoe was on the other foot and the oven did not function for 8 weeks and the central heating was shut down for 9 weeks because no-one had bothered to put mortar between the bricks in the flue, did I get any discount, no, of course not.

The other scam letting agents do is all the excess charges such as 'credit check' or 'arrangement fee'. I accept they have to make money, but they rake it anyway. They charges in my experience range from £120-350 (€175-510; US$240-700). They can check your credit rating in 5 minutes using a relevant company at a lot cheaper and anyway you have to provide bank and employments details, in detail. I have encountered only one letting agency in the whole of the UK that does not charge this. One company in Milton Keynes, a strange new city built in the South Midlands, and which has tens of letting agencies as it is growing so fast, admitted to me that they ran a little scam with these fees. They would show the potential tenants a house knowing that they would reject them because they were, to quote 'unclean', but still took the £200 fee, knowing they would reject the tenants. On one house they showed me they had already taken £600. The arrogance was incredible that one of the staff boasted this to me. Of course the owner of the property does not see any of this fee, they only get the 85% of the rent, so it was straight into the letting agents' pockets. Now I know not all agents do this, but it is incredible that some can and do and no-one can do anything about it.

A new trick which appeared from letting agents in the mid-2000s was fixed contracts. When I revealed what was going on to landlords/ladies even some of them were shocked and one dropped the letting agent they were using. As you know, normally, if you want to leave a house or if the owner wants the tenant to leave, they give notice of usually 1-3 months. Under the fixed contracts, it does not matter if you give 6 months notice, you still have to pay up to the end of the contract. When I left Milton Keynes I was still liable to be paying rent on that house for 4 months after I had started paying rent on a house in the new town I was moving to. In addition the agency was still free to move someone into the house I had vacated and get rent from them too. I checked this with the Citizens' Advice Bureau and apparently there is no legal comeback. Letting agents now often guarantee rent to landlords/ladies and this is the way they cover months when it might be empty. Even madder, though they might have moved other tenants into the property, I was still liable for its upkeep, mowing the lawns, cleaning windows, etc., even though I lived 120 miles (192 Km) away by then. I obviously told them where to stick their idea but then they said I was a 'bad tenant' for questioning their procedures (despite me putting up with no oven and no central heating for 8-9 weeks without protest) and they would write a bad reference for me.

Family members of friends of mine ran into real financial problems with such fixed contracts. Rent on one property takes 55% of my income and I earn 50% above the national average salary, so imagine how tough it is for people on the average or less to have to pay two rents for months. No wonder debt is such a huge problem in the UK. Bascially running a letting agency is a licence to print your own money. They expect you to do the maintenance and pay them for the pleasure of doing so. Good letting agents are extremely rare, barely competent ones are the norm and greedy, swindling ones are increasingly common. The whole sector needs much more regulation as it is hurting the ordinary people.