It’s 9:30am on a Saturday, and there are two strangers at my door. The strangers enter my home and look at me uncomfortably until I leave. This small eviction is a microcosm of a larger one: I’m getting kicked out of my home. My landlord is in a ‘tight spot’ and has decided to sell the place I’ve been living with my wife these last twenty-one months.
The landlord, Steph, has accrued a total of £16,000 from us, at a rate of £750 a month. That’s £25 a day, or £1.04 an hour. Curiously, nobody reimburses us that pound when we’re expected to be out for an hour, so that strangers who can afford to buy a house can look round the house of me and Sophia, who can’t. If they did, we could have bought ourselves an ice cream, which wouldn’t have solved all our problems but might have been nice.
When we’d stayed a year at this house and our contract expired, we asked if we could get another year-long contract, to give ourselves some security. We were told that was a faff because of paperwork, and it’d cost us £96, whereas a rolling monthly contract was free. But we were told “Steph says you can stay for however long as you so wish”. This was a relief – that security meant we could work to make a home of our house, get to know the neighbours, put down roots in the community.
As it turned out, Steph turfed us out just nine months later. This will be our third relocation in three years of marriage. Every one was because of a bad landlord. In our first flat, rented from my college, we weren’t told in our contract that we’d have to pay gas and electricity bills (on top of the £1180 they charged us every month). We eventually took the college to a tribunal over the contract and won, but relations had soured badly enough by then that we didn’t want to stay much longer.
So we moved to a bungalow, just a mile up the road. This was let to us by Redmayne Arnold and Harris, who described it as ‘Furnished or unfurnished – landlord is flexible’. When we arrived, we found all the furniture had been removed and there was no possibility of the landlord returning it. We spent a few days sleeping on cushions on the floor while we waited for a mattress to be delivered, then scavenged for bed, sofa and chairs on Gumtree. It was a grim and expensive week. When we asked the landlord, a woman named Poppy who lived next door, to reduce the rent (£950 per month), given the absence of furniture, she refused. So when our six-month contract was up, we hightailed out of there.
If you’ve never rented, you might not realise how bad the whole setup is. In Cambridgeshire, as in most of the country, housing is in such high demand that there is no need to be a good landlord. If you steal a tenant’s furniture and they leave in protest, you can just find another tenant. Oh and by the way? You have like a thousand pounds of their money at your disposal. Poppy memorably took a chunk out of our deposit for scratches around the front door frame. The scratches were caused by us moving furniture in and out of the house she’d failed to furnish.
Sophia and I are exhausted. We’re tired of packing up all our belongings at unpredictable intervals. We’re tired of viewings and forms and letting agents. We’re tired of the feeling you might be shunted out at any minute. We’re tired of landlords.
It’s hard to believe we’ve just had three bad apples in a row. You start to suspect the whole barrel might be rotten: that something about being a landlord, owning a property you don’t intend to live in and glugging constantly from the money-tap it becomes, might make you an arsehole. Or else it’s the other way round: only arseholes become landlords, while better people give their money to charity or lend to small businesses or buy model trains or something. At any rate, the system seems broken: the capitalist model is failing to give tenants stable or affordable housing.
In 2019 (an election year) the Tories announced plans to ban Section 21 notices, or ‘no-fault evictions’, the mechanism by which Sophia and I were evicted. But then they didn’t. If they had, we might not have spent the last six weeks stressing about becoming homeless. Good legislation might also deter the most deplorable people from becoming landlords, allowing them to sink their money into blood diamonds or people trafficking instead.
Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much appetite for changing things. It probably doesn’t help that 28 per cent of Tory MPs are landlords themselves. But the impact that the small group of private landlords has on everyone else is devastating. By one conservative estimate, buy-to-let landlords have prevented some 2.2 million families from owning their own home. Research shows that a third of people my age will still be renting as retirees. Imagine – being 65 and unable to decorate your own walls. It’s absurd. Change is long overdue – but the will to make it happen is lacking. And I can’t help – this blog took me an hour to write and I have to go and give Steph her £1.04.
If you enjoyed this blog, you may enjoy more of my astute social commentary in Ten Great Excuses To Keep Not Socialising Even Now Lockdown Is Over.
Apprentice Joe 
This is interesting.
LikeLike
Joe, my heart goes out to you. This is a complex problem with no easy solutions and politics gets in the way, because you will get left wing and right wing solutions.
First of all, on the point about landlords “stopping ordinary people” from buying their own home – this is a left wing viewpoint. Recently the Tory government has tweaked taxes and other things which makes it much harder for to buy to let landlords to turn a profit. This means that they have sold up and left the industry. It means that there is LESS property for young people to rent, and so the rents have risen and the surviving landlords have to sweat their assets harder. Don’t for one minute think that the Tory government is behaving like a right wing government. This is what happens when you half heartedly apply left wing solutions to problems.
The real issue (which no one ever talks about) is the availability of mortgages. The way to get young people to own their own home is to make mortgages available – all the other government tinkering gives further lessons in the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Another point to remember is that all Landlord and Tenant law is in favour of of the tenant. It may surprise you to read this, but it’s true. This has the knock on effect that only hardnosed landlords will enter the fray to fight against tenants “who know their rights”. The reason why landlords are such dicks is because they have all been taken to the cleaners by unscrupulous tenants in the past. Just go to any Landlords meeting and you will hear all the horror stories.
There’s a lot more to go into here, but that’s enough for now.
LikeLike