Recent News
The recent case of a Reading landlord who was fined £12,000 for failing to maintain a rental property, is just one example of growing problem of dangerous properties that are putting tenants at risk, according to the Association of Independent Inventory Clerks (AIIC).
Ravinder Singh Takhar, 57, was recently prosecuted under the Housing Act and Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act for failing to comply with regulations in respect of managing HMOs and one of failing to provide information in respect of a property. Takhar, a millionaire, owned and let a house which had been converted into four flats. The fire extinguisher had not been tested since November 2006, the rear garden had become overgrown with several discarded household items in it and a gap in metal railing at the front of the house was wide enough for a small child to fall through and down to the basement flat.
Four in 10 tenants say that they’ve needed to borrow money in order to pay a tenancy deposit, according to new figures from the leading tenancy deposit protection scheme, my|deposits.
The research, part of my|deposits’ quarterly Tenancy Deposit Protection (TDP) panel, also shows that the average tenant has paid £2,344 on tenancy deposits since renting property.
A quarter of a million private tenants a year are taking matters into their own hands and withholding rent from their landlords because of delays resolving emergencies like heating and electrical faults, new research reveals.
Figures from HomeServe, the home emergency specialists, show that one in three private tenants (34%) has faced a home emergency in the past 12 months, with boiler faults and other central heating problems the most common.
Landlords who do a good job should have enhanced tax allowances, the Chancellor has been told.
The Chartered Institute of Housing is calling for better tax breaks for private landlords who keep their properties well maintained and managed.
THE “bedroom tax” is costing millions of pounds more to implement in Scotland than it will save, the country’s council leaders have revealed.
Local government body Cosla claims the policy will cost about £58-60 million this year, which outweighs the estimated savings of £50m on the benefits bill.
Changes to benefits payments have led to difficulties letting affordable homes and may stop hundreds more being built every year, research suggests.
Community Housing Cymru (CHC), which represents housing associations, reports problems letting 700 homes.
The capital is more than 209% more expensive for renters than the rest of the country, according to new figures from Move With Us.
After levelling out in September, average advertised rents in London grew by over £32 in October.
A Derbyshire landlord has been handed a suspended prison sentence for failing to maintain a faulty gas boiler that caused the death of a tenant from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Dr Victoria Martindale, 39, was sentenced at Derby Crown Court for breaches of gas safety laws after she failed to arrange gas safety checks to be carried out at the property in Stanley Common, near Ilkeston, over a four-year period.
LABOUR has been accused of "rank hypocrisy" after 47 of its MPs failed to vote on its key Westminster motion, demanding the so-called bedroom tax be scrapped immediately.
Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister, Anas Sarwar, the deputy Scottish Labour leader, Douglas Alexander, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, and Jim Murphy, the Shadow International Development Secretary, were among 10 of the party's Scots MPs who did not vote.
This time last week, there were confident predictions that the catastrophic development of universal credit was about to claim its biggest victim to date. Not Iain Duncan Smith, the secretary of state, but Robert Devereux, his permanent secretary. Devereux, whose experience of welfare reform goes back to the early days of new Labour, knows the department well, and he's also had the now-obligatory spell outside the department and outside Whitehall.
But the huge process of introducing a live system that folds six different in-work benefits into one that keeps up with a claimant's circumstances week by week has lurched from crisis to crisis. In September, the National Audit Office (again) raised serious concerns. The public accounts committee followed up with evidence sessions with the main players. Its report, it was anticipated, would lead to Devereux's swift departure.
Ahead of an Opposition Day Debate in the House of Commons, charity Citizens Advice has warned that changes to Housing Benefit are “simply creating more problems”.
The Housing Benefit reform, which came into effect in April this year, is aiming to cut costs by restricting the size of accommodation a family can receive Housing Benefit for.
Housing associations say change to benefit rules means tenants cannot afford to rent three-bed maisonettes.
Three-bedroom homes are being condemned to demolition by housing associations because the coalition's bedroom tax has made them too expensive for tenants to live in, the Observer can reveal.
NEARLY 200 people have signed a petition calling for the ‘bedroom tax’ to be scrapped – with protestors urging Councils to debate the issue.
Last Thursday, an organised protest group set up in Angel Place to ask passers-by if they would add their support to the campaign.
The lack of affordable housing is adding to the country's cost of living crisis with private rents in England forecast to rise another 44% by 2020.
And research carried out on behalf of the National Housing Federation shows that more and more parents are helping their children to pay their rent.
Seven months after the introduction of the so-called ‘bedroom tax’ two thirds of council house tenants affected are behind with rent, a Freedom of Information request has found.
Rent arrears have risen by £693,202 to £4,182,026 since the welfare reform’s introduction in April. It cuts housing benefit by an average £14 per week to council and housing association tenants deemed to have ‘spare’ bedrooms.
The Government's benefits cap will struggle to meet its objectives of saving taxpayers' money and encouraging people into work, a report has found.
The Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) studied the results of the cap in Haringey, one of four London boroughs chosen as pilot areas for the scheme.
The UK's housing system is in crisis due to a lack of housing stock. Shelter estimates that there is a need for 250.000 new homes to be build per year and that is just for England alone. It is pretty much universally accepted that successive governments did not find building homes politically-attractive and, due to the short-sighted ineptitude, there are simply not enough homes especially in the social sector.
So how does the Tory-led government tackle the housing shortage crisis? Do they listen to housing and business experts and build more homes? No, they ignored these experts. Their solution to the housing shortage crisis is to manipulate the benefits system so that tenants on a low incomes pay for the housing crisis via cuts to Housing Benefit.
A cash package worth nearly £400,000 has landed in council coffers to help those affected by the ‘bedroom tax’.
The news was welcomed by Linlithgow MSP Fiona Hyslop who called the measure an “unfair tax”.
The government's benefit cap will struggle to meet its aims of encouraging people into work and saving taxpayers' money, a report suggests.
The Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) looked at the London borough of Haringey, one of four pilot areas.
A MAJOR survey of social landlords has found that rent arrears have risen in some of Scotland's poorest communities since the introduction of the so-called bedroom tax.
New figures show that the amount owed to residential social landlords (RSLs) such as housing associations soared by nearly £800,000 after the welfare reform was introduced in April this year.
