Dear Sir,
Re last week’s anonymous letter attacking landlords for not referencing and taking action against badly behaving tenants, I’m left wondering how the writer knows the landlord did not carry out any checks, what exactly he or she expected the landlord to do about their tenants’ anti-social behaviour, and what they expected would happen to the evicted tenants?
The laws of the land dictate that there are strict limits on what information on a prospective tenant can be accessed by a prospective landlord, references are not infallible, and prospective tenants can be extremely devious. Landlords also have very limited powers to deal with badly behaving tenants. The law is stacked in favour of the tenant. All the landlord can ultimately do is go through an eviction process which can be tortuous and expensive. Clearly the police were unable to solve the problem. The writer says the police gave warnings, but warnings they would do what, and why didn’t the police take action to back up the warnings? Probably because there was very little they could do under the current legal system.
In this case, it appears the tenant was eventually evicted, but the tenant was re-housed by another private landlord, who may well have been duped by them and may well by now be ruing his or her naivety. However, what would’ve been the alternative? They would’ve been homeless and the Council would’ve been left with a legal responsibility to house them. Options are a social house, private landlord or a B&B, and the antisocial behaviour is just re-cycled to another location. Maybe the tenants will eventually get sick of moving around and start behaving themselves, but not before they cause a lot of unrest, annoyance and expense, with the main victims most likely being their landlords!
It seems to me that the main blame here lies with the bad tenants and the toothless legal system, not the landlords.
John Snowball
