BBC’s Panorama investigates rogue landlords in the private rented sector.
Panorama’s exposé ‘The Great Housing Rip Off?’ comes hard on the heels of Shelter’s national campaign to evict rogue landlords and stop the exploitation of tenants in the private rented sector.
Launched in September 2010, the investigation revealed shocking evidence of widespread abuse by a minority of landlords. Shelter, the Housing and Homelessness Charity is calling on the Government to work with councils to develop a tough programme of action.
Evict Rogue Landlords.
While the majority of landlords are honest and responsible, unfortunately a small minority treat their tenants in a deliberately exploitative way, making their lives a misery.
lettingaproperty.com believes that this is unacceptable and supports Shelter’s national investigation to expose these practices. Shelter thinks that politicians are not doing enough to tackle the problem, and want to see much tougher action to bring rogue landlords to justice.
Tell us about your experiences.
We are conducting a short survey (9 questions) which will help us gather information about the general state of the private rented sector and help expose bad practices by rogue landlords.
Our current landlord, since we have moved, is fantastic, so let me start by stating that. It was our previous one.
The house was in disrepair the whole time we were there. He never protected our deposit. There were structural, gas and electrical issues with the house, not to mention damp problems and he left us in there knowing full well my girlfriend was 4 months pregnat (i might add he had not long had a child of his own, so fully aware of the importance). He did next to nothing about the house, there were periods that we moved back to my parents and carried on paying rent cause we could not take the cold etc…
He was rude and completely unhelpfull. We are currently deciding whether to go to small claims about the issue.
This is an issue I think really does need to be exposed and I appluad you for doing so. Our lives were misery for several months, through what should have been some of the happiest and it was all due to greed.
I have all the proof in email and contracts etc…that you would need to back up my story and I would be more then happy to share it with you if you were interested in hearing it.
The landlord’s agent has been handling the planning application for installation of gas central heating for a year now and has lied to us about the progress, been very slow to respond to our queries and is overally totally incompetent and not fit to be an agent.
I rent privatly from a landlord who has tried to illegally evict me, refused to put my deposit in a secure scheme, purposefully given me a bad refrerence to force me to rent from her to prevent me seeking legal redress for my deposit not being legally held. She has also failed to carry out safety checks on the gas boiler and other electical equipment in the hosue and threatened to call the police to arrest my four year old daughter for ‘willful damage to property’ when she peeled some paint off a door frame.
My landlord was just generally dodgy, for want of a better word, the back door was not secure and he never fixed it despite many requests for this to be done, all the windows leaked when it rained, there was a gas leak which the engineer said could have killed me and my family. I had to pay to have the front door fixed as it was always sticking and I was locked in the house on many occasions, when I told the landlord this he replied that there was nothing wrong with the door. There are so many issues that it would take i lifetime to go into them all.
Our landlord completely screwed us over. Basically, problems werent resolved, we moved into a flat with a toilet that was broken and took a week to fix, was ignored by the letting agents and then had the deposit withheld. its quite a tale.