New developments on Landlord Law

Several things I have been planning for a while will come to fruition shortly.

The Newsletter
The Landlord Law newsletter is an important part of my service. However, the newsletter mailer I have been using almost since we started in 2001, is now a bit old and clunky. I am therefore changing to using a professional company, Constant Contact. My web designer Gill and I have been working on the new template, which looks great!

However the new service requires the database to be re-created. The annual members list will be uploaded, so annual Landlord Law members don't need to do anything. However I do need all those on my free newsletter list to sign up again, which you can do here. The first of the new newsletters will be sent out later today (12 November) so if you want to receive it you should sign up now!

However all is not lost if you read this too late, as you will be able to read the most recent newsletter on the site (something else I have wanted to do for a while). I will be putting a link to todays newsletter on the site shortly.

A new blog
My web designer and I are also working on a new blog design, which should go live in a week or so. At that time the blog url will change (as we are coming off blogger) so watch this space, as you will need to amend any links you may have. However my feedburner feed url should not change.

If you receive the new newsletter today, let me know what you think.

[Later - the mailing went out all right, you can see the new newsletter here.]

Tenancy Agreements – resources on Landlord Law

Note - the Landlord Law Blog has now moved to www.landlordlawblog.co.uk.

Tenancy agreements and information on tenancy agreements is an important part of the Landlord Law service that I provide. Sometimes people find it difficult to locate all the tenancy agreement related resources on the site, so I have done this page of links to help them:

• If you are not sure what type of tenancy agreement you need, you can use the Which Tenancy Agreement Guide
  
• Here is a page with some general information about our tenancy agreements service
  
• This is the tenancy agreements downloads home page. There are links here to the downloads pages for the different types of agreements
  
• Here is a link to our tenancy agreements amendments service
  
• Here are some free tips for landlords and some free tips for tenants on tenancy agreements
  
• Landlord Law landlord members will find information, such as FAQ and articles on tenancy agreements for landlords linked from this page
  
• Landlord Law tenant members will find information, such as FAQ and articles on tenancy agreements for tenants linked from this page

As you can see, there is quite a lot on the site! Note that the tenancy agreements can only be downloaded by annual members.

How to choose the right tenancy agreement- some guidance for landlords

Many landlords don’t bother too much about their tenancy agreement. They consider it to be a disagreeable necessity, something filled with legal ‘mumbo jumbo’, and just try to get the shortest and/or cheapest one they can find.

This is a mistake. A tenancy agreement sets out the rights and obligations between you and your tenant/s, and needs to be clear and unequivocal. You also need to use the correct agreement for the type of tenancy concerned.

Most tenancies nowadays will be an assured shorthold tenancy (AST). However if:

• the rent is over £25K
  
• the tenant is living in self contained premises in the same building as the landlord, or
  
• the tenant is a limited company

the tenancy cannot be an AST (which are regulated by the Housing Act 1988), and will governed by the underlying ‘common law’. You need to use a slightly different form of tenancy agreement which makes this clear. Otherwise mistakes could be made in error, for example by your legal advisor, if he is not made aware of the type of tenancy concerned. This could result in a claim for possession (for example) being thrown out by the court.

Assuming the tenancy is an AST, slightly different forms of agreement need to be used depending on whether:

• there is one or more tenants occupying the whole flat or house, or
  
• there are a number of tenants who all have a separate tenancy agreement for their own room, with shared use of the rest of the property

Other things you need to take into account are:

- Whether, if the term is over six months, you will want allow either party to end the agreement early. This is done by including a break clause

- Whether you will want the rent to be a weekly or monthly rent (most rent is paid monthly).

- Whether you will allow the tenant to have pets (in which case it may be advisable to use a tenancy agreement specially designed for this)

- Whether you will pay the utility bills or whether you will want the tenants to be responsible for this (for example landlords often pay the bills in shared houses).

Finally, when choosing a tenancy agreement it is a good idea to look for one which is written in a plain English style. These are much easier for both you and the tenant to understand, and tenants are more likely to read and comply with something they can read easily.

Landlords will find more information in the Landlord-Law Which Tenancy Agreement guide.

Banks swiping our cash

An article in the Observer today 'Banks exploiting obscure law to raid accounts and recover debts' prompts me to remind readers on housing benefit (HB), or landlords of tenants on housing benefits, of the advantages of using Credit Unions.

If you find it difficult to keep your bank account under control, you are always at risk that your housing benefit is going to be used up and will not be available to pay out to your landlord, thus putting your home at risk. Under the new rules which came into force last year, the new housing benefit, Local Housing Allowance (LHA), has to be paid (save in a few circumstances) to the tenant. Whereas before tenants could ask that it be paid direct to landlords, to safeguard their home.

Quite a few credit unions offer a service whereby they will ringfence any HB/LHA paid in, so it gets paid out to the landlord and cannot be used for any other purpose. I am compiling a list of credit unions offering this service on my Landlord Law site which you can see here. If you know of, or work for, any other credit unions offering this service, please let me know and I will add them to the list.

Credit unions would also be a safe haven for money being saved up for other purposes, to keep it safe from regular banks offsetting it against debts, as described in the Observer article.

Letting to tenants with pets

The Dogs Trust estimate that in the region of 40% of us in the UK have pets. Probably mostly dogs, cats and caged birds. As about 12-15% of the population live in rented accommodation it is fair to say that there must be many potential tenants looking for accommodation who have pets.

However many landlords routinely reject all pets as a matter of course, worried about the potential damage they could do to the property and its contents, and virtually all tenancy agreements have clauses prohibiting pets as standard.

However a report available on the Dogs Trust 'lets with pets' web-site challenges this viewpoint and suggests that many landlords are foolish to reject out of hand many people who would, along with their pets, prove to be excellent tenants. A survey carried out by the Dogs Trust also shows that

• 78% of pet owners reported that they had experienced difficulties finding privately rented accommodation that would allow their pets
  
• 54% of pet owners were never able to find a suitable property that accepted pets, and
  
• 8% of people had to rehome their pet

A landlord therefore who is willing to allow pets in his property will find that he has a much larger pool of potential tenants and is likely to let his property quicker, and to tenants who will probably stay for longer, meaning fewer voids.

In order to assist landlords, at Landlord-Law we have produced a new tenancy agreement specifically for landlords letting to tenants with pets. It contains special 'pets' clauses in the terms and conditions and fields for details of the pets, their vet, and someone who will look after them in case of emergency. You can read about it in the article 'Letting to tenants with pets' which you can download from here.

Out of season holiday lets

I did some work for a client today who runs a couple of holiday homes in a converted barn near her country home. She sometimes lets these out on short term lets out of season but is now regretting it, or at least the most recent let. This was to a lady who, having moved in on the understanding that she would have to go in May when the holiday makers start coming, has now decided that she is going to stay on, as indeed is her right technically. Which puts my client in a difficult position.

So my lady came to me to draft up a section 21 notice, which has been done and which will be served on the tenant tomorrow. But it is looking increasingly unlikely that she will move out much before the autumn, so my client is in problems with her holiday customers, some of whom booked up to stay in the holiday cottages over a year ago. She is hoping that they do not sue.

It is very difficult to get over to clients sometimes the difficulty of getting tenants out. "Oh, I told her she could only stay until April" I hear them say about their tenants. But telling them this is meaningless if the tenant is determined to stay, and has the legal right to do so. And a letter politely asking them to leave in 14 days when the holiday makers arrive is almost worse than useless. Any request to a tenant to vacate when their rights have not been followed (i.e. the right to have a proper form of possession notice served on them first) can technically be harassment, which is a criminal offence.

If you have a holiday cottage, it is always a risk letting it to a tenant on an out of season holiday let. If you only let to holiday makers you have the right to move them out at the end of their holiday period without going to court, as holiday lets are one of the exceptions under the Protection from Eviction Act 1977. However if your residential tenant refuses to go, you have to get a court order, and by the time this has been done, even using the so called 'accelerated procedure' the holiday period could be almost over and you will have a lot of disgruntled customers.

In an effort to help things, I have now prepared a special out of season holiday let form, for members of my Landlord-Law service (to be found in my student lets section, as this sort of arrangement often works best with students who do not want to stay in the property over the summer anyway). The agreement specifically states that the property is let as a holiday home at other times of the year and provides for the rent, if the tenant stays on after the end of the fixed term, to go up to the holiday rent rate. This should hopefully discourage tenants from staying on.

Radio calling!

Funny I should have written about radio last night. Because today a nice man from Radio Norfolk rang up and asked me to go on his program next week. Next Wednesday in fact, fact fans, 10.00 to 1.00, with Graham and Karen. For a program on renting property.

Of course, as is the way of things, when he rang I was in the middle of having a new printer installed, and our talk was punctuated by the creaking and grinding noises of a printer being set up and tested. So I probably did not sound as intelligent as (of course) I really am. Well thats my excuse anyway.

So if you are at a loose end next Wednesday, why not tune in and see how I do? He promised that they would not do a Jeremy Paxman on me, so hopefully I won’t be gibbering with fear. It looks from the Radio Norfolk site as if the program cannot be downloaded via iplayer so you will only be able to listen to it live.

Anyway, thats enough blogging. I have two talks to do in London tomorrow. A talk for CLT on repossession proceedings in the morning and a talk about Landlord-Law at the Legal IT Show in the afternoon. Thankfully it looks as if the snow won’t be too bad for my journey, But I will have to get up at 5.00 am to catch the early train, which is never nice. And I still haven’t packed my bag!

Blowing in the wind

One of my favourite songs by American singer songwriter Suzanne Vega is Gypsy, in particular these words:

And we'll blow away forever soon
And go on to different lands

And please do not ever look for me
But with me you will stay
And you will hear yourself in song
Blowing by one day

I always loved that image of walking down a busy road and suddenly hearing yourself float by in sound, perhaps from a cafe, perhaps from a radio carried by someone on the street, none of them realising ...

Well in a sense it is going to happen to me now - not alas a romantic song from a former lover (I wish), but something a bit more prosaic. Yes, we have invested in a radio campaign!

Ever the optimist, I have decided that the current hard times should be a good opportunity for us, as our service is aimed at people wanting to save money. All that is necessary is for them to find out about us ... Hence the radio ad.

Let me know if you hear it.

VAT changes – how these are being dealt with on the Landlord-Law site

Mr Darlings reduction of the VAT rate to 15% from 17.5% has created a bit of a headache for myself and doubtless lots of other UK traders. This blog seems to be the best place to explain the way I have decided to deal with the various prices on Landlord-Law.

For me to change the Landlord-Law membership fees (4.70/£15/£70.50) would involve my web-designer doing work to the site (which I would have to pay for), as online membership purchase is completely automatic and done via a secure server. Were I to drop the prices, the benefit to the customers would be very small - £0.10p, £0.31p, and £1 respectively. As the Landlord-Law service is (in my view) pretty good value anyway, I am going to leave these prices as they are. Sorry!

For the other prices, I have decided to deal with them as follows.

Where the online price is based on an ex VAT round figure I have reduced my price to take account of the VAT fall. This includes Kits 1, 2, 3, and 4 non member prices, all the possession proceedings, and the tenancy amendments service.

Where the total price was chosen because it is a nice round figure, in particular the £75 advice fee, this has been left as it is. I put a lot of work into the advice given and I think clients can (effectively) pay another £1.60. I have also left the possession notice drafting fixed fee of £75 (although this is not used much as most people use the online forms), and the members kit prices for kits 3, 4 and 5. Members buying kits get a lot of support via the online forum so I am not going to reduce these prices.

The other two prices are the non members kit 5 price, which I have reduced to £95 (a bit more than the VAT drop) and my tenancy agreement check price, which has gone up to £391 (a slight increase on the previous fee).

I will take a view on prices generally next year if Mr Darling puts the VAT up again.

Student lettings - new agreements on Landlord-Law

I am just finishing a fairly long running project (about 2 months) to develop some new special tenancy agreements for student lets, for my Landlord-Law site.

Developed initially in response to a query from one of my members on the discussion forum, they are designed to deal with two particular problems with student lets:

• The fact that they are generally signed when the previous tenants are still in occupation (which could potentially cause major problems if they refused to move out, as legally they are entitled to do), and
  
• The fact that landlords will want to let the property for the whole year, but many students will not want to live there over the summer.

It was initially just going to be one agreement. However when I put it out to consultation with the membership, some of them wanted one part and others wanted another, and some said that they would definitely not want that part, so in the end I decided to do a number of different agreements using different combinations.

Then another member sent me his standard agreement for out of season holiday lets so I thought that perhaps I would do one of them too.

So there will eventually be four different types, although at the time of typing this I have not yet loaded up the out of season holiday let one.

Its been a bit of a time for tenancy drafting recently. Apart from these student agreements, I have been asked by clients to do an under 18 tenant (signing jointly with her guarantor), an assured tenancy for an elderly couple renting a flat intended for the rest of their lifetime, and a memorandum for protected tenancies. Heigh Ho!

HMO licensing – tenants entitled to rent refund

I was interested to read the report here about a landlord in Liverpool who was convicted of operating a House in Multiple Occupation (HMO) without a license, and fined £3,000 plus costs. The Council then wrote to all his tenants, who successfully claimed back a part of their rent.

The rent refund application must be made to the Residential Property Tribunal (RPT) who can order the landlord to pay back up to 12 months rent to his tenants. In this case the RPT ordered the landlord to refund three months rent. This totalled £3,900, so in total this landlords failure to obtain a license for his property has cost him over £7,000 (if the costs order is taken into account).

Tenants wanting to make a similar application will find a pdf giving guidance and other information linked from the right hand margin of this page on my web-site www.landlordlaw.co.uk.

Landlords who are worried that their property might need a license, should contact their Local Authority asap. For contact details see the Landlord-Law Local Authority Directory.

Note that we are still compiling our list of HMO licence fees charged by different Local Authorities.

Strutting my Stuff

I have had a few gratifying initiations to speak recently. Last month I spoke at London Landlords Day and also to the Lambeth Landlords forum, which were both very enjoyable.

This month I am due to speak to the CLT 11th Residential Landlord & Tenant Update Conference 2008 on 23 October, where I will be giving a possession proceedings update. CLT courses are always rather on the expensive side, however CLT have agreed to allow my annual members to attend this (and another conference I am doing in February) at subscriber rates, which means a discount of £100. Members can find out more about this in the Landlord-Law special offers section.

Nothing so far in November (I was invited to do the Landlord & Buy to Let Show in Birmingham, but couldn’t face the travel) but on 3 December I will be doing a presentation at the Residential Landlord and Tenant Update, organised by Professional Conferences, called Possession 'Claims For Private Landlords – A Formula For Success'. One of my co-speakers on this conference will be Jan Luba QC so I am quite excited about that. I have wanted to hear him speak for ages, but as I generally have more than enough CPD (and being a bit of a tightwad) I can never justify the cost of attending his courses.

Finally, I was really pleased to be invited to talk about Landlord-Law at the 2009 Legal IT Show on 4 February. My web designer Gill Bishop will be there with me, to answer all those tricky technical questions on things I don’t really understand. So if you are interested in how the site was developed and how it works, please do come along.

If you would like me to speak to your organisation please do get in touch. I always try to speak when invited if I can, but this is subject to my being able to travel to the venue – I live in Norwich and do not drive, so am dependent on the trains. You can find more about the talks that I can offer here.

Saving pdf tenancy agreements and forms

The Landlord-Law tenancy agreements are all in pdf format. This has always been the case, for a number of reasons. Most people can access and use pdfs whatever sort of computer they have via the free Adobe Reader (which you can download from www.adobe.co.uk); they are easy (relatively) for me to create; and I can protect the template via the Adobe security system.

However a few landlords have complained that they cannot save the information in the fields. This is of course quite true, but it is nothing to do with me it is down to how the Adobe software works. If you complete a form with form fields using the free reader, when you close or save the document, the information on the 'fields' will be lost. You therefore have to be very careful to ensure that you have printed out sufficient copies of your document before closing.

If you have the Adobe Acrobat software this is not a problem. Acrobat saves the information in the fields, so you can open the document up again later, either to amend the information or print it out again. If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro as I have, you can even change other peoples forms (so long as they have not protected them). However this software is pretty expensive at about £3-400 plus, and most small landlords will not want to pay this. Indeed many of them will be quite happy with just printing the form out, and will not want to store it electronically. After all it is the paper copy with the tenants' signature on, which you will need in court.

However if you do want to save the wording, there is an answer. You need to 'print' the form, using special software. This software creates a new pdf document exactly the same as the document on the screen, so it will include all the information you have typed into the 'fields'. You won’t be able to change anything on this new document though, the fields won’t be there, just the wording you put in them. This could be very useful – for example if you want to email a tenancy agreement over to a tenant.

Adobe has this feature with its own Acrobat software – it used to be called the distiller although it may be called something else now (I am out of touch with what they do). I used to use it all the time (for sending court forms over to clients for them to sign), but then after I had some work done on my computer earlier this year it suddenly started producing a load of squares instead of text. I spoke to my computer people, who did not know how to fix it, but the computer man suggested that instead I use this free software called CutePDF Writer. It worked a treat and I have used it ever since.

So if you are a user of forms with form fields (preferably from the Landlord-Law website!) and want to save a copy of what you have done, but do not want to splash out on the Acrobat program, I would suggest you give it a try.

(Needless to say however, I make no warranties regarding it, and if it trashes your machine I am not liable!! But then I would say that, I am a lawyer.)

Tenancy deposits – another happy customer

One of the tenants who posted comments to my item on tenancy deposit protection - 62% failure, subsequently bought my kit 2 and was on the point of issuing proceedings. She has now contacted me to say that her landlord has finally caved in and paid back the whole of her deposit. "Which", she said, "is all I ever wanted!"

This landlord had made a deduction for 'cleaning' despite the fact that there had been a clear inventory report, and tried to justify his failure to protect the deposit (which meant that my client could not use the free arbitration service to challenge his deductions) on the basis that his agents should have done it.

Obviously he has now taken some advice and found that his position was a bit shakier than he had thought. So it is worth tenants persisting with claims regarding tenancy deposits. Most landlords do not want to risk a court claim if it is clear that they are in the wrong.

See also my earlier post here.

Twitter twitter, tweet tweet …

I have decided to go on to twitter. For those who don’t know what this is, it is one of those social networking sites from America. You sign up and then every now and then you do a tweet. This is a short statement of what you are doing. Like 'I am having a cup of coffee' or 'I have just put the washing into the machine'. Anyone who is interested can sign up to follow your tweets, and find out what you are tweeting about. And you can sign up to follow other peoples tweets.

Put like that it all sounds a bit silly. But I suppose fun. However, there is a bit of marketing in there (being a bit of an entrepreneur I have to think of marketing, it sort of goes with the job, not that I have a job being self employed …).

For example I have discovered this thing called twitter feed. This puts notes of entries of my blog onto my twitter page. So those following my tweets will know when I have blogged. Then I can (and have, you can see it if you look to the left) put a feed from my twitter page onto my blog. So people following my blog can see what I am twittering about. All pleasingly circular and possibly futile.

I haven’t found anyone to follow yet, apart from Nearly Legal. Being of a slightly more mature generation, none of my friends really do that sort of thing. Or at least I have not found any yet, although it is early days. The Nearly Legal tweets are all feeds from the NL web-site, some of which seem to be reports of my postings on my blog. Which of course I already know about, having done them (and of course they are also reported on my twitter page). More circularity.

So what will I twitter about? I will probably use it to tell the world what I am doing on the Landlord-Law site, what new items have been loaded up and the like. I will probably also tweet about work related things I have done, such as talks, conferences etc. And I will probably from time to time just answer the question on the twitter text box, which is 'What are you doing?'. Which at the moment is writing this blog.

Credit Unions and Local Housing Allowance

As I have written about before, Credit Unions can provide a useful service to tenants who want their Local Housing Allowance payments to go direct to their landlords. Many tenants prefer this, as it prevents them spending the money by mistake and thereby making themselves vulnerable to being evicted. However under the new rules payment direct to landlords will only be done now in exceptional circumstances.

However some credit unions have a service where they arrange for a special bank account to be set up to receive the payment. They will then pay it over to the landlord. As the money is ring fenced and kept separate, there is no danger of it being swallowed up by the tenants overdraft, and their homes will be safe.

I am now compiling a list of credit unions who offer this service on my web-site www.landlordlaw.co.uk which you can see here. If you know of any other credit unions which offer this can you please let me know.

London Landlords Day 2008

Thursday was London Landlords day – this is an annual event put on by all the local authorities in London for their landlords. It is currently run on their behalf by a company called Accession.

I was doing a talk called 'Dealing with Tenants Rent Arrears'. This is a new talk, based largely on my new(ish) Rent Arrears Action Plan section on Landlord-Law. It was just going to be about what to do when tenants fall into arrears with a short section on preventative action at the beginning, but then the organizers in their wisdom sent out a flyer saying (without consulting me first) that I was going to tell everyone how to prevent rent arrears arising in the first place! I wish! Still I decided I had better add a few more slides, so that turned into quite a largish and important part of the talk (which I am now thinking of turning into an article).

I think the talk went well. It was in the auditorium which I think seats about 400. There seemed to be quite a lot of people there for my talk, although it was difficult to see much beyond the blinding lights which shone into my eyes whenever I tried to peer out in the audience.

If you were one of those people, thank you for coming along and I hope you enjoyed it. Some of you took up my invitation to let me have your business card or email address so I could send you a pdf of the presentation. These have all been sent out, apart from a few where I could not read the handwriting. So if you have not had it, that is the reason!

I also took the opportunity (while walking to and from the station) to take a few digital photos of houses and flats in the surrounding area which, being Kensington, is posh. Eagle eyed readers of Landlord-Law have probably noticed that it is now festooned with pictures of property. I now take pictures whenever I go anywhere new, much to the irritation of my family ("come on Mum …"). There are some stunning blocks of posh flats on the Kensington side of Olympia, some of which may well be rented out, although I would surprised if any of them are ASTs (where the rent must be under £25,000). Square clips of these will gradually get onto the Landlord-Law site, hopefully giving it a bit of class, and making it a bit more representative, most of the current pictures having been taken in Norwich.

Apart from a jaunt to Lambeth in a couple of weeks to speak at their Local Authority forum, and my normal slot in the CLT October property conference in October, that is it for my speaking this year. At the moment anyway.

Responsible Renting - the final report

After having got back from holiday, settled back in, and dealt with the back log, etc, I have finally got around to reading what is the final report from the Law Commission on their housing projects.

The new legal team on Nearly Legal got in ahead of me with a rather depressing report, taking the view that the proposals are basically ineffectual, and the government probably won’t take any notice of the report anyway.

There does seem to be a deafening lack of action by the government on the Law Commissions proposals. In particular the Renting Homes report which has been out for several years now. However there are I suppose a number of excuses for this. For example:

• The fact that on the whole the private sector is not working too badly so maybe action here is not as necessary as elsewhere in the economy
• The need for the private rented sector to grow to provide much needed housing and therefore a desire not to 'rock the boat' which may discourage investment, and
• The need for recent initiatives to bed themselves down.

The last of these is I think particularly important. In the space of a couple of years we have had three major changes, the new Housing Health and Rating System, the HMO licensing scheme and the tenancy deposit scheme. Very shortly there will also be the need for landlords to provide environmental performance certificates. These changes all need time to settle down and for landlords to get used to them, before anything else new is brought in.

For example it has taken Local Authorities some time to get to grips with the new licensing scheme which came into force in April 2006. The first year was taken up with setting up the new schemes from scratch, dealing with the initial rush of registrations, and getting used to things. The second year was building on this, so it is only now that Local Authorities are starting to do more enforcement work. I am pleased to see many more reports of enforcement action for landlords default, and no doubt this will continue. It will probably take quite a few more years (bearing in mind the limited staff resources available to most Local Authorities) before they dig out all the recalcitrant landlords, and are able to say that they have most of the HMO landlords in their area properly licensed.

Likewise with the Tenancy deposit scheme. As set out in my earlier post, it appears that many landlords are still not compliant, so again this will take some time to work through.

In the circumstances I think that the Law Commission are right not to go for major change, but to seek to strengthen the existing initiatives. Their main proposals are:

• To make landlord accreditation available everywhere rather than in just a few areas, as now
• To set up a housing standards monitor body to carry out further research, develop a single code of practice, and trial initiatives (such as a scheme for home condition certification)
• To have all letting agents regulated (Everyone agrees with this! Apart from the cowboy letting agents of course)
• And to carry out proper evaluation of any new reforms introduced

This all sounds pretty sensible to me. It will lay a foundation for further work, won’t rock the boat too much and discourage new landlords just now (particularly important in the present economic climate), and probably won’t cost too much. The Law Commission also make the point that there is a cost in doing nothing, as poor housing creates costs elsewhere in the system, and therefore (taking a wider view) expenditure in the field of housing could result in significant savings elsewhere in the economy.

There are a number of other reports which have been published recently (which are set out in the Law Commissions paper), plus there is the report commissioned by the government on the private rented sector being undertaken by the University of York which is yet to be published. It may be that once this is out, and now that the commission has completed its housing project and the government is able to look at it as a whole, together with the other reports, government may now decide to do something. For example take steps to bring the Rented Homes Bill onto the statute book.

If you are interested in housing, it is probably worth getting hold of the report – which can be downloaded from the Law Commission web-site here and in the Landlord-Law Law reform section. As usual it is well written and readable (bearing in mind that it is a legal report). I was pleased to see that Landlord-Law was mentioned favorably (page 17), and also interested to see that the responses via the Landlord-Law answer form provided nearly 30% of the total. There is a very interesting appendix where they report on what people responding to the consultation actually said.

Interesting times ahead!

Tenancy Deposit Protection - 62% failure

Note - the Landlord Law Blog has now moved to www.landlordlawblog.co.uk.

I read a news items on the Deposit Protection Service website today which reported a survey showing that 62% of private landlords are flouting the tenancy deposit rules, and not protecting their tenants deposits.

If this report is true, and I suspect it probably is, or at least very near the truth, then this means that only letting agents and the better landlords are complying – meaning that those the scheme is really aimed at are ignoring it.

One probable reason for this is that the penalties (in particular the provision for the tenant to be awarded a 'fine' of three times the deposit money) appear in reality to be difficult to enforce. This is partly because the legislation is unclear. Upon careful reading it does not actually say that the fine is automatic if the landlord fails to protect within the time limits (although they do appear to indicate that it might be if the landlord is in breach of his schemes rules - there may be grounds for a test case there).

I am only aware of one case where the tenant succeeded. This was reported in Legal Action Magazine (June 2008) and was where the tenant had actually vacated in response to a section 21 notice served on her. Here the landlord was unable to remedy the position (ie by protecting the deposit out of time) and the Judge reluctantly made the order. However if the tenant had still been in possession, no doubt the landlord would hastily have arranged for the deposit to be protected, and the Judge would then have refused to make the order. The Legal Action report made it clear that the Judge only awarded the fine with reluctance and because the legislation gave him no alternative. (NB I would be very interested to hear of any other cases.)

[Note - since this post was written in July 2008, there have been considerably more cases reported, see the other posts on this blog on tenancy deposits to find them]

What is doubtless happening is that many landlords are taking the view that they will not protect deposits unless tenants threaten court action. However most tenants do not do this. Many will be wholly unaware of the tenancy deposit protection provisions, particularly, for example, if they have only recently come to this country and English is not their first language.

However, even if they are articulate British nationals, most people, even if they have a vague sort of idea that the landlord ought to do something about the deposit, will just assume that either he has done it or that the rules no longer apply. Ordinary people do not go around assuming that their landlords are breaking the law, or threatening court action. Generally people are unfamiliar with the courts and find the very thought of bringing a court claim scary.

One answer I suppose, is to do more to make people aware of the tenancy deposit scheme. Maybe it ought to feature in one of the soaps, there is probably a storyline in there somewhere. The other is to amend the rules to make it clear that if the landlord has not protected the deposit within the time limits, he cannot prevent the tenants succeeding, in a claim for the 'fine', by protecting the deposit out of time.

NB Tenants wanting to bring a claim, should note that there is a do-it-yourself kit (Kit 2) available via my web-site www.landlordlaw.co.uk.

[Note - there a many questions from landlords and tenants in the comments, most of which I have answered (although COMMENTS ON THIS POST ARE NOW CLOSED and no more will be added or answered). Please bear in mind that new cases (and interpretations of the rules) have come along since my answers were given. Note that there are many other more recent posts also on tenancy deposits which you can read via this link.]

[Note 2 - see my post here one year on : Tenancy deposit protction - now only 30% failure]

Thank goodness for Geograph

When I upgraded up web-site recently I left reviewing the Local Authority Directory for a later date. This is a very large section of the site, which covers all local authorities giving the LA web-site and contact details for housing related information. As there are now so many pictures in the rest of the site, I decided it would be nice to put a picture for every page showing an aspect of the LA concerned. However there is one problem here. I have not visited every borough in the country.

Having got the upgrade out of the way, the directory needed to be tackled. But what to do about the pictures? It would be a bit expensive to buy them in, and I was unhappy about just lifting them from the internet. However, I did a trawl via Google images to see what I could find. What I found, was Geograph.

This is an amazing site, sponsored by the Ordnance Survey. Its aim is to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometer of Great Britain and Ireland. The pictures are donated by ordinary people who load them up to the site, where they can be viewed online. What is more, they can be reproduced under the creative commons license on web-sites! Voila, my problem solved!

I have decided that, in accordance with the spirit of the Geograph site, I will only use their images in my 'open access' Local Authority Directory, and will rely on my own and purchased images for the commercial part of the site. There is a fantastic selection of pictures to use, many of them of superb quality! Mind you, artistically speaking, there are also a lot of rubbish quality photos, but good show all the same. It has made the otherwise tedious business of reviewing and updating my directory, fascinating.

So, after doing a few amendments to my template (some of you may have noticed that the amended entries have the H1 orange heading, and the unamended entries still have the blue H3 heading), and checking the housing information from the LA web-site, I can then turn to the more interesting business of looking for a suitable picture on Geograph. This of course has the added bonus that I get to find out where the local authority actually is. This may sound silly, but many authorities have names which give no indication (to the average person) of their location. I now know for example that Allerdale is Cumbria, Broxtowe is in Nottinghamshire, and Calderdale is around Halifax.

It is interesting to see what pictures have been loaded up on geograph. It is clear that many of the photographers are keen railway buffs, as there are a lot of rail tracks, steam engines and the like (I have used one of them for Bury). There are also a lot of very nice pictures of canals and canal boats (eg Charnwood), and of course castles, and countryside.

Some of the pictures I have chosen for the site are city scenes, such as Brent and Bromley, others are of special buildings, such as in Cambridge and Canterbury, or show a well known scene in different weather conditions - Looe in winter, and Exmouth beach before a storm, plus a nice sunset for Brighton. There are also a few statutes, such as in Cannock Chase and (my favourite) Cheltenham. Some, such as Dover and Ely could only have one subject. As you can see, it has been fun.

A condition of using the photos under the creative commons license is that the photographer must be credited, and the fact that it is published under the creative commons license must be acknowledged. I have done this in the alt text, which you can see by hovering your mouse over the image, as well as mentioning it in the notes which will go (eventually) on every directory page.

At the time of writing this blog entry I am part way through the E’s so I have quite a lot of work still to do! Mind you, not all the LA Directory pictures are geograph ones, but most of them are.

As a grateful user of Geograph images, I have loaded up some of my own pictures to the site, and will continue to do so, so I can give back as well as take. I hope that some of you readers will also visit Geograph and find it as interesting as I have.