Safer Renting, a project that works with vulnerable people renting in the private sector, has been commended in the 2018 London Homelessness Awards.
Roz Spencer of Safer Renting said: “Eviction from private rented housing is a real concern and the primary driver of rising homelessness in London.
“We work with people in bottom-end private rented housing – that some might call slum rentals – to give them advice and support to prevent homelessness.”
The Safer Renting team identify at-risk tenants of offending landlords by working closely with local authorities.
At present they work with 200 households in partnership with Croydon, Hounslow, Enfield and Waltham Forest councils but they hope to expand the service.
So far they have stopped illegal evictions, reduced the risk of homelessness in over three-quarters of cases and secured compensation for six families.
Spencer said: “We are delighted that the judges recognised the importance of encouraging this project to be in the private tenants’ corner, determined to push back on the growing number of criminal landlords who think nothing of brutally evicting their tenants in search of higher returns.
“We want more councils to see that engaging services such as ours is a great way to deliver on their homelessness reduction targets.”
Anything helps get ‘rogue’ landlords out of the sector is good, but we need to make sure that proper landlords who are either trying to evict tenants who breach their contract, don’t pay their rent or ones who just need to sell the home don’t get caught in the net as well.
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Why do they want to stop evictions from ‘slum’ rentals? You would think they would be encouraging the tenants to immediately leave and that they would be taking these tenants to the lovely homes they have supplied and got ready for them.
Similarly, I notice on the TV programme which calls paid council officials ‘the heroes that take slum landlords down’ (an abysmal misuse of the word ‘hero’ and a debasing of the term) they tell tenants that their accommodation is awful, that they shouldn’t live that way (usually with nearly a tear in their eye as they are so caring), they shut down the house and where on earth do the tenants go? You see them shuffling up the street – possibly to go and live on the pavements.
If anyone should win a prize it should be those who provide decent or even adequate housing for those in need. If there was enough of that, then no-one would pay rent to criminal landlords who, incidentally, are often actually tenants sub-letting and not landlords at all – and landlords are their victims, especially then they rake in loads of rent from cramming people in and don’t even pay their rent and wreck the house. In fact, I have seen on the programme mentioned, situations where it is the tenant who has done this but the script refers to bad landlords and it is in the ‘bad landlord’ section of the programme.
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Hang on! They want to stop evictions from ‘slum’ landlords??? Did they mean to say that?! Surely they want people evicted from such appalling places so that the much much much higher quality and more flexible social system can put them into their superior houses? I agree with RosBeck73 – the heroes are the landlords of good properties taking these people in.
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Excellent points! Possibly they realise that the state the PRS is becoming, and the fact that the councils and LA’s cannot house even a fraction of the people who need it.
So why, in the name of all that is holy are people still allowed to rent a house out as a landlord without some form of license or regulation?? If someone wants to sell a house privately then they can, but solicitors and mortgage lenders etc are there as the balance and to make sure everything is above board.
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