Housing more important now

An interesting snippet from the afternoon press briefing from No 10 for 28 June:

"On the role of the Minister for Housing, whilst the breadth of her responsibilities would stay the same, clearly the fact that she was in Cabinet sent a very clear message about the much greater importance of the Housing Minister and the role of Housing more generally in the Government's agenda."

It will be interesting to see how that works out. It will also be interesting to see if the new government takes up the Rented Homes Bill so carefully drafted by the Law Commission and published in May 2006.

A top property blog!

Did you know, dear reader, that The Times have included this as one of their 25 top property blogs in their Friday Life and Style section?? I am very honoured. Their comments:

"Low on entertainment, but high on enlightenment. All buy-to-let landlords should make this a regular read."

That does rather sound as if they think I am a touch boring, which is a bit of a blow, but then I suppose I am a lawyer and therefore boring by definition. Still the rest of it is very flattering. Thank you . I will try to continue the enlightenment and perhaps sneak in a bit of entertainment along the way.

County court possession order error

I had a very odd court order come though the post today. It was in respect of a hearing two days ago (which surprised me to start with!). It had the correct heading, but then said that the hearing took place in on 15 June in the Clerkenwell and Shoreditch County Court, whereas in fact it was in Norwich County Court on 25 June. It said that the defendant did not attend when he did, although they got his name right. They got the name of the Judge wrong though, and the judgement sum was incorrect, etc, etc.

It looks as if two separate cases have got confused. Perhaps there is a Clerkenwell case where the parties are going to receive an order with my case details in it! So much for the new central system.

The moral of the story – always check your court orders!

Two things

A busy time recently. For my sins I am the Hon Secretary of the Norfolk and Norwich Law Society, and I have been very busy dealing with the launch of our new web-site, which went live on Monday. The site not only has more information for the public and members than our old site, but also includes the membership database, so we can use if for subs admin. Hopefully it will eventually save us time. However it is certainly taking up a lot of my time now as I try to get the database in order, and deal with the various glitches and problems which occur whenever a complex site goes live. However I am quite pleased with it.

The other thing is the imminent launch of my book, which my publishers have decided to call Renting: the Essential Guide to Tenants' Rights (I wanted it to be called just ‘Tenants Rights’) which has a publication date of 9 July. Place your advance orders now!! Its been about a year in the making all told so it will be nice to get it out in the shops.

Buy to let blight

There is an interesting article in the Guardian pointing out that buy to let landlords are buying up properties suitable for families in Nottingham and letting them out to students, and that this is causing major problems in the area. Students leaving the place in a mess, shops closing and pubs closing during vacation, and schools being put at risk as there are fewer children.

Emailed comments from readers at the end confirm this trend for other towns such as York and Bath and bemoan the fact that absentee buy to let landlords are being allowed multiple mortgages by landlords helping to push property prices beyond the reach of ordinary people.

It is a difficult problem. One answer is no doubt the extension of licensing suggested by the article, which points out that landlords are selling larger properties and buying two story ones to escape the current licensing regime. Any extension of licensing would be bitterly opposed by the landlording community however (many of whom are responsible and provide an excellent service), and local authorities would struggle with their present funding to deal with this additional work.

However the real problem is undoubtedly the shortage of housing generally. After all students have to live somewhere. Universities generally bring benefits to towns and cities, but you cannot have a university without students! Also many students will stay in their university town and become part of the community - at least that is very common in my own city of Norwich (my husband being one such!).

It looks as if the problem may be relieved to a certain extent in Nottingham as at least 5,000 purpose built student rooms are to be built there shortly. If other universities follow suit (and if there is profit to be obtained from student housing they probably will if they can get the investment), this will help considerably. However unless either more property is built, or there is a property crash, or wages increase substantially, it is unlikely that property will become more affordable for low income families.

But then, it was ever thus! Low income families being unable to afford to buy their own homes, although unfortunate, is hardly a new problem.

The tenant's dilemma

The tenant’s dilemma, a new report from the Citizens Advice Bureau, states that tenants are put off complaining about their landlords failure to keep their property in proper repair because their landlord might retaliate by evicting them under the section 21 ‘loophole’. Government figures indicate, they say, that nearly one million private rented homes fail the Government’s decent homes standard and therefore need repair. It asks for a change in the law to prevent landlords being able to evict under section 21 where tenants are trying to enforce their repairing rights.

Although I do not agree with landlords being able to evict in retaliation to their tenants requests to make their homes meet basic standards, we do have to be careful about interfering with the landlords right to evict under section 21. This has been one of the main reasons for the buoyant private rented sector we have today. If landlords perceive that their right to recover their property is being interfered with, this may result in many selling up or discourage potential new landlords. It is important that there is a good supply of rented accommodation if only because local authorities need to have properties available in the private sector to place people in priority need (who they have a statutory duty to house), as much of their own housing stock has been sold under the right to buy.

As the report points out, the right to evict under section 21 has already been made unavailable to those who fail to get a license for a (mostly HMO) property subject to licensing, or who fail to protect damage deposits under the new statutory tenancy deposit scheme. This could be extended to properties in disrepair, but care must be taken so that ‘devious tenants’ cannot take advantage of it.

However, if the HMO licensing regime is extended to more, or even to all rented properties (as many suspect it may be), the problem may well be solved in that way. All licensed properties need to be inspected at some stage during the 5 year license period, and if it fails to meet the statutory standards, and landlords fail to carry out the necessary work to bring the property up to those standards, licenses in future should be refused. As this will have nothing to do with the tenant, landlords will not have any reason for (or obtain any benefit from) carrying out retaliatory section 21 evictions. Indeed if they are unable to obtain a license because of the condition of the property they won’t be able to use section 21 anyway!

I think that this or something similar, is probably the best way to go. To make the request for improvement work come from the local authority rather than the tenant, so the tenant cannot be blamed for it. Also, once a property has been identified as being in poor condition, this should be noted in the local authority files, and a check kept upon it until the repair work is done. So that if it is then let to another tenant, action will be taken without the tenant having to do anything about it.

The report suggests at the end that the right to use section 21 could also be limited to landlords who are members of an accreditation scheme or other similar organisation. However I think that this would probably be a step too far. There is no point in having a strong scheme to protect tenants, if because of it few people are prepared to be landlords any more. This will benefit no-one, tenants least of all, as there will be fewer properties available for them to rent.

Tenants Rights book due out soon

I have been neglecting this blog of late, for which my apologies. I have been rather caught up with work – my book is nearing completion and I was given just a few days recently by my publishers to check the proofs. This meant that I had to drop everything to get it done. A good thing I had nothing urgent on! Publication is getting very close and I was excited to see that it can already by pre-ordered on Amazon!

The book is to be called ‘Renting: the essential guide to tenants rights’. I wanted it to be called just ‘Tenants Rights’ but I suppose my publishers have their reasons. I am quite proud of it and Mr GP, a legal aid practitioner who kindly agreed to have a look at it, seems to think it is all right.

You can see it on Amazon here.

The Cutty Sark remembered

Coming as I do from south east London (where the taxis don't go after midnight) I was devastated to learn about the Cutty Sark fire. I have often been there in the past, and only last year we visited it, at the request of my son, while on a family weekend holiday in London.

Here is a picture taken during that w/e, of what it used to look like:


Let us hope that one day we can see it again.

Justice, what justice?

I was very concerned to read in the Law Society Gazette today that if the proposed reforms to legal aid go ahead, it will lead to the 'immediate dismantlement' of specialist civil liberty legal teams in some firms. This is because cases dealt with by specialist providers tend to be more complex and time-consuming and are likely to be unprofitable under the reformed 'fixed fee' system. Government cannot expect solicitors to maintain a service if it is going to be run at a loss or at no profit.

Michael Schwarz, partner and Bindman & Partners said "Clients will not have access to specialist lawyers and their human rights will be at risk. It will be an encouragement for negligence or abuse by state officials, and is a recipe for injustice."

A LSC spokesman trotted out the usual statement saying that the numbers of people helped has increased. But we all know that statistics can be very misleading. Maybe more people wanting to know what to do about their grazed knees after tripping on a paving stone in the High Street have been advised via a telephone helpline, but what about those with serious human rights problems who need more specialised help? Does giving basic legal telephone help to ten people really equate to a better service than helping one person with a serious but expensive human rights problem? It is certainly cheaper, so maybe in government-speak it is.

It is ironic that the government which introduced the Human Rights Act is now going to be responsible for taking away the ability of people to use it.

Reflections on Riverside v. White

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

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Housing associations, in particular Riverside Housing Association, will have been popping champagne corks recently, to celebrate the result of the recent House of Lords decision in the case of Riverside Housing Association v. White.

In this case Mr and Mrs White, who were being evicted by their landlords, Riverside, sought to claim that they were not really in rent arrears because Riverside had not complied properly with the rent review clause in their tenancy agreement for the past four years or so. Worryingly for the housing association, the Court of Appeal agreed with them. This had very serious implications for Riverside, as the Whites were not the only tenants whose tenancies contained this clause and whose rent had been increased in this way. They had no option but to appeal.

The House of Lords have now found in their favour, finding a slightly different way of interpreting the wording of the review clause. However there were some interesting points in this decision:

• Their Lordships made it clear that this case was being treated slightly differently because it was not like the normal run of rent review clauses which appear before them. The appellant is "a charity and a registered social landlord and it is publicly funded. Its tenants will be relatively poorly off individuals, no doubt normally with limited, if any, experience of interpreting legal documents."
  
  
• They also commented that the whole structure and drafting of the rent review provisions (which was criticised in the decision) was quite different from that which one would expect to find in any commercial lease.

This seems to be signalling that slightly different considerations will apply in future when interpreting rent review clauses in residential leases (particularly for social tenancies) as opposed to commercial leases.

However this does not mean that landlords can now take a relaxed view of rent review clauses. Riverside had to wait several years and go all the way to the House of Lords to get this decision. Even though their opponent has been ordered to pay their legal costs (another drain on the legal aid fund), it is likely that they will have suffered financially as a result of this case.

It is far better to do your utmost to avoid the possibility of any dispute, to draft clear and unequivocal rent review clauses in the first place (which do not make the parties go through too many hoops - all of which can become points for dispute later), to and ensure that the clause is followed to the letter every time the rent is reviewed.

Tessa on the radio

I was on the radio last week! I got rung up I think on Monday by a lady from Radio Solent (Hampshire, miles away from me in Norwich) saying that they wanted to do a feature on lodgers and would I go on and talk a bit? Well I’m always willing to give it a go if it means publicity for Landlord-law (such a capitalist!) so I said yes, why not?

Although I would have preferred to be interviewed on proper landlord law, my site does cover lodger stuff. Apparently there is not much on the net on lodgers so when she did her re-searching, my site was pretty high up on the list (perhaps partly due to my www.lodger.org.uk domain name).

They were not able to do the first day they suggested as someone important in sport died and they had to do a feature on him, but we did it on the Friday.

As it was in Hampshire and I am in Norwich it was done on the phone. You get rung up and they then put you on hold but you can hear the program. When you are on the air they clue you in by asking a question with your name in it so you know when to answer. It is all very immediate and frantic on the radio, quite fun, but there were constant interruptions for things like traffic reports, or updates on a charity auction they were doing. I just sat there and spoke when asked to.

I listened to myself later via the BBC listen again feature and I suppose I was not too awful, although I ummed a bit. But you do, don’t you, when you are thinking of what to say? I don’t think there were any real bad bits, although I suspect that they knew when I was struggling as they would cut in with a charity auction update, which let me off the hook a couple of times.

Anyway, I have now ‘done’ radio. Did anyone hear me? What did you think?

Help for tenants with tenancy deposit protection claims

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

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I read a news report recently which said that about 97% of all landlords holding deposits have not yet joined one of the government authorised tenancy deposit schemes. Although one reason for this surprisingly high figure may be that many landlords have not needed to join a scheme yet, it is still disgraceful. So I have decided to do something about it!

I have therefore drafted up two county court claim forms (one for tenants who paid deposits after 6 April 2007 and one for tenants who paid the deposit earlier and whose tenancy was renewed after 6 April 2007) and a set of instructions, to enable tenants to reclaim their damage deposit and the 'fine' of three times the damage deposit figure, and these are being given away free of charge to annual members of my online service at www.landlordlaw.co.uk.

I did consider adding this to my list of online kits. However I charge extra for these as they are very detailed and include telephone advice. The tenancy deposit claim is fairly straightforward (4 pages of instructions as opposed to about 30) and I know that many tenants will not be able to afford my subscription fee and an extra fee for a kit. I am afraid I do want the subscription fee though (I have to earn a living somehow)! Also if the tenants are members, this will allow them to ask questions in the members discussion forum, which will serve instead of the telephone advice.

Hopefully my landlords will not be too annoyed about this and think I have betrayed them! But my site is for both landlords and tenants, and I have to keep tenants interests in mind too. All my landlord members should be already complying with the scheme anyway, and if they are dong it, why should other landlords get away with flouting the law?

I would be interested in any feedback from tenants using the forms to bring a claim.

Where has all the money gone?

I see from the Law Society Gazette this week (p5) that the County Courts made a profit of £45.5 million pounds last year. So why, when I was speaking to the manager of our local court last night, did she tell me that they have a massive turnover of staff because they cannot afford to pay them properly, and that they have horrendous listing problems because they cannot afford to use enough Deputy District Judges? Where is all this money going to?

By the way, turn over to page 21 of the Gazette and you will see a bit about me!!!

Or what?

Of course it could all be part of a plan. "Getting a bit expensive to pay all those solicitors. Why not make it really difficult for them. Death of a thousand cuts. No-one will believe them when they complain, no voters will anyway. They are just whinging solicitors wanting more gravy.

Then when there are no firms left prepared to do the work, let the supermarkets and big companies take over. They will be able to automate it, do it at a bargain basement price. The clients, sorry customers, won’t know the difference. They don’t understand what its all about anyway. Give them a free digital clock with their first appointment and they’ll be happy.

We don’t want all those small firms anyway, so untidy, much better have one big one like Tesco. Get into a working agreement with them, so they won’t start criticizing and arguing and encouraging their customers to be difficult about government decisions. Things will be much easier. Lawyers will have to behave themselves in future and the exchequer won’t have to hand out all that cash."

Paranoia or what?

Dealing with the empties

It looks as if some Councils at least are using the new Empty Dwelling Management Orders which came into force last year. I am delighted to see that my own local authority of Norwich seem to be in the van here, as reported in the Evening News, and their own web-site.

However it seems that they are not alone. David Ireland, the Chief Executive of the Empty Homes Agency, reports on his blog that other orders are being obtained in South Oxfordshire District Council. But, he reports, it is often enough just to threaten to use the order. Apparently Manchester have done this on no less than 15 occasions, each time the property was sold or let.

Its nice to hear of empty properties being brought back into use.

Have you time for the Times?

I was sitting at my computer about three weeks ago, wondering how I was going to fit everything into my day, when I was rung up by a journalist from The Times.

"I’m doing a feature on online sources of information for Landlords" he said ("goody, goody" I thought) "and I would like to mention your Landlord-Law website." ("Yippee!!") " But to do the article I need to speak to one of your web-site members, today, and this really needs to be someone who would agree to have their photograph taken. I know it’s a bit short notice but could you find someone by about 4.00pm this afternoon…"

Well after a lot of ringing around I managed to find him three loyal members in the end, by lunchtime, one of whom was the nice Mr Thornton who he finally used. The article however did not appear until today, about three weeks later, when I had forgotten all about it. Typical! I will have to see if my newsagent can get me a copy.

You can see the article online here. I can’t see the photo of Mr Thornton though, although he told me it had been taken. Maybe it is in the printed edition.

Nice article though. I particularly like the 'respected solicitor and author' bit. Sometimes I feel I could do with a bit more respect, particularly from my family (fat chance). But I note that I answer the Q&A once a fortnight not once a month.

He also mentioned this blog! I had a look at the Times moneyweblog he referred to but could not find any entries on landlord matters. So you are better off sticking with the Landlord-Law Blog! Why not bookmark it now? Or better still subscribe to the RSS feed! (You can do this by scrolling right down to the bottom of the screen and clicking the subscribe to posts link).

Something I said?

The telephone rang just now. "Hallo" said a male voice, "can I speak to your senior partner please, if he's in"

"You can speak to me", I replied, "I'm the sole practitioner"

He put the phone down.

Was it, do you think, because I am female or was it because I am a sole practitioner?

Rent arrears protocol justified

Figures from the DCA show that landlord possession claims were 20% down during the last quarter. Co-incidentally this was the first quarter after the rent arrears protocol came into force. That’s the protocol which requires social sector rent officers to try to sort things out before issuing proceedings for possession.

So maybe it was a good idea.

ASBO landlord Dickens again

My anonymous correspondent (postmark Colwyn Bay) has sent me a cutting from the Big Issue Magazine, which shows that ASBO landlord Dickens is facing yet more court appearances. He has now received a summons from the Health and Safety Executive under the gas regulations, the gas appliances in his former properties having been substandard and the flues full of rubble.

I am glad to see the HSE doing something in respect of these regulations, which after all are there to prevent people being killed by gas emissions. I am just concerned to see that the article emphasises how unusual it is for the HSE to summons offenders in this way.

The article goes on to say that the authorities are using this high profile case to send out a strong message to landlords in North Wales. If that message is that avoidance of the gas safety regulations will result in prosecution, I hope that they will bring a few more, to press the message home. There is not a lot of point in having safety regulations if they are not enforced.

Lawyers (not) in the news

There was a big lawyers demo against the legal aid 'reforms' at Parliament today, but so far as the early evening news was concerned it might just as well not have happened...

As we work from home we are able to watch the news at lunch time. I was encouraged to see a rather good report of the demo on Channel 4 news which I felt presented the problems perhaps as well as we can expect. However it seemed to have vanished off the airwaves by the evening.

I made a point of watching BBC1, ITV and the 7.00pm Channel 4, and it was not mentioned on any of them. Indeed I have not been able to find much on the internet, other than a few blog entries and this on Channel 4 (not nearly as good as their lunchtime effort).

Of course it might be reported on Newsnight later on, but I am not sure if I can face another news program. I suppose the fact that the most needy in our country are shortly going to find it difficult to enforce their rights is not considered to be a newsworthy topic by those who select the stories to cover.

Tenancy deposit protection avoidance

There are a lot of landlords who are very annoyed about the tenancy deposit scheme (described in previous posts). And many are not just annoyed about it, they are determined to avoid it! Here are some of the ideas I have heard:

Letting property as an assured rather than an assured shorthold tenancy. Well they can do this if they want to, but I think they will be pretty silly if they do. The benefit of an assured shorthold, as opposed to just an assured tenancy, is that you can use the 'no fault' notice only ground for possession to evict the tenant once the fixed term has come to an end. Let the property as an assured tenancy, and they will be able to stay there forever, so long as they keep paying the rent. Mind you if the landlord once lived there, or is going to live there after he gets it back, as his only or principle home, he may be able to use ground one (the owner occupier ground) to get the tenants out if he needs to. But that is not going to help the landlord with a portfolio of several properties – he cannot live in them all!

Taking a guarantee rather than a deposit. Well this would probably work in that they won’t have to comply with the scheme. However neither will they have money to hand – if they need it they will have to extract if from the guarantor. Who may not be willing to pay just now, and may need taking to court. Less trouble than the deposit scheme? I think not.

Putting up the rent instead. Well this again might get around the problem, but it will also make their property more expensive and less attractive to tenants (although of course they will not have to find a deposit). Plus if this brings the rent to above the market rent, the tenants have the right to challenge the rent this by referring to the Rent Assessment Panel, who may decide to put it down again. If this happens the landlord will not be allowed to put the rent back up again until after the end of the fixed term. NB, putting up the rent with a 'cash back promise' to the tenants if they leave the property spick and span is probably a bit too risky. Bearing in mind that there are pretty swinging penalities for non compliance.

The Tenant Guarantee Scheme. This is an insurance solution being developed by Residential Landlord and Letcare, where the tenants will be insured, with the benefit assigned to the landlord, for (we are told) more than a the deposit would have been. This does actually sound pretty good, however if the tenant has to pay the premium, would this be treated as a deposit in disguise? Also the web-site tells us that "only tenants with exemplary credit histories and references are accepted into the Tenant Guarantee Scheme". What about those with a less than exemplary credit history? They have to live somewhere, and I doubt that there will be enough ‘exemplary’ tenants to fill up all the rented property on offer.

No deposit. Finally there is this approach taken by a builder client of mine who says that he is just not going to take a deposit any more on the basis that as he is a builder he can get any repairs done quickly and cheaply anyway, and it is less bother. Probably the least risky course of action (and one I suspect that will be popular with his tenants), but we are not all builders.

But I think that landlords will probably find, once they start using the schemes, that they get used to them, and maybe wonder what all the fuss was about. That is what happened in Victoria, Australia apparently, where they have had damage deposit protection for some eight years now. The same company, Computershare, is running the custodial scheme here, and I suspect that they will run a pretty slick operation. In fact all of the schemes are anxious to cut down on the paperwork and will prefer landlords to register and do as much as possible online. So as long as landlords have a computer and broadband they should be all right!

It is probably also worth remembering that very many tenants (not a majority but still a lot) have had their deposit unjustifiably withheld (stolen some would say) by greedy landlords, and it is only right that they should be given protection.

Stress and spotted dick

Not a good day today. Problems with my website not working properly and people not sorting it in time to let me to get things done before the weekend, problems with other people not providing me with drafts when they said they would (so I had to draft them at short notice myself), problems with other people not getting other webby things done in time, sometimes I feel I am the only one doing anything. Thank God its Friday. I can sit here tapping soothingly into my laptop listening to Gene Harris’ fingers rippling across his piano creating magic.

And we did have spotted dick and custard for pudding. Very un PC of course, but nice.

Maybe if I forget about all the work problems I will wake up on Monday and find that they have been magically sorted over the w/e. Maybe.

Music to my ears

I know it is going 'off topic' but I must just enthuse about a new jazz/blue CD I have bought - the The Best of the Concord Years by jazz pianist Gene Harris, who I first heard played on Michael Parkinsons Sunday supplement a few weeks ago. In fact if he were not sadly deceased I might be considering booking a plane to Boise, Idaho to hear him play live (Gene Harris that is, not Michael Parkinson) ...

Tenancy Deposit Scheme Update

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

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I have now visited and done interviews with all three of the companies running the new Tenancy Deposit Protection schemes, due to come into force on 6 April, so am in a position to say a bit more about them.

The company running the Custodial scheme is Computershare Limited, a large multinational firm. They have set up a company called The Deposit Protection Service Ltd to run the scheme, which has a web-site here. Their scheme is free but involves the landlord handing over the deposit for them to hold, and their costs come out of the interest on deposits held. They have been running a similar scheme in Victoria, Australia for the past eight years, where they tell me, their custodial scheme is the only one. Apparently landlords moaned a lot when it was set up, but now take it for granted. They feel fairly sure that the same thing will happen here. I think that their web-site is pretty good and I suspect that they will run an excellent service.

There are two companies running Insurance based schemes. These are where the landlords get to keep the deposit but have to pay the scheme administrators for the privilege. They are both different, one is aimed largely at landlords and the other at agents.

The landlords scheme is run by Tenancy Deposit Solutions Limited which is sponsored by the National Landlords Association with Hamilton Fraser, and has a web-site here. Theirs is a pay as you go scheme. Landlords will have to pay a joining fee of £58.75 and then £30 per deposit. National Landlord Association members pay slightly less at £47 and £26. There is an annual renewal fee of £14.70. There are slightly different fees for agents, accredited agents paying less than non accredited agents. Note that it costs £83 to join the NLA, with a few variants.

The final scheme is run by the Dispute Service Ltd, whose web-site is here, and is aimed mainly at agents. The only fees announced at the time of writing this are for agents. These run from £521 for agents who are members of ARLA, RICS etc to £1,609.00 for unaffiliated agents, with a few variants inbetween. However once this fee (which is an annual fee) is paid, the agent can register as many deposits as he wants. So the more deposits are registered, the cheaper overall this scheme will be.

It will be interesting to see how the insurance based schemes go. I know that there is a huge amount of interest in the Dispute Service’s scheme, plus they already have an existing client base as they formerly ran a voluntary scheme for letting agents, and these firms will be passported through into the new scheme.

The National Landlords Association has, they tell me, over 12,000 members and I suspect that many of these will be using the NLA scheme. However other landlords associations appear to be boycotting it, and going for the Dispute Service scheme. I am not sure whether this is because they consider the Dispute Service will run a superior service or whether it is because they do not like the NLA. However it is likely that the NLA will do quite well out of this and will probably pick up a lot of new members, to the fury no doubt of the other landlords associations!

However I suspect that for the smaller landlord, the cheap and easy custodial scheme will be the most attractive, as it will not involve any cost. For if the property has good tenants and no recourse is needed to the deposit, then there is no need for the landlord to incur the additional expenses involved in having the deposit money in his bank account rather than the scheme administrators bank account.

Certainly the custodial scheme will be the most attractive one for tenants, as they will know where their deposit is. The NLA told me that if the landlord fails to pay the deposit over to them in the event of a dispute, the tenant will have to get a county court judgment (as opposed to going to arbitration) before they will pay anything over to them, which I suspect will not please tenants. I also suspect that this comment may not accord with the regulations, but we shall see.

However if you are a landlord, you should, fairly soon, read the information on the various scheme administrators web-sites, and register with them to receive more information. And then make your choice.

Housing law in crisis

The Law Society Gazette was rather a worrying read this week. Amid tales of criminal legal aid solicitors going on strike, and DCA leadership not being fit for purpose, was this news item on plummeting legal aid housing contracts which have fallen from 840 to 587 – a drop of some 30%. A bet that there are quite a few housing law deserts out there – 587 firms cannot cover the whole country, particularly as I suspect quite a few of those are in London.

I attended a housing conference last week. The speaker on unlawful eviction confirmed that in his experience the police simply refuse to take any action when someone is illegally evicted - despite that fact that it is a criminal offence. And yet being unlawfully evicted from your home must be the most traumatic experience.

So if the poor old illegally evicted tenant can’t get any help from the police and there are hardly any legal aid housing solicitors for him to consult – how is he going to be able to enforce his rights to re-instatement (if he wants it) and compensation? Drafting a decent court claim for compensation for unlawful eviction is not easy as there are so many different causes of action – it would be a difficult job for most litigation solicitors, let alone a litigant in person.

Its not fair is it? And what is the point of making something a criminal offence if the police refuse to deal with it?

Happy birthday to me!

I see that my very first blog entry was on Friday 17th February last year - so this blog is now one year old! Its been quite fun so I expect I will continue.

Feed me!!

Eminent legal blogs have predicted that RSS will explode in 2007, so who I am to argue? We have now finally added a RSS feed to my Landlord-Law site, which gives links to new items recently uploaded.

Not without a certain amount of angst from me, as I continue to find this really simple technology a bit difficult to follow sometimes. However my web-designer Gill did admit that not all of it is really simple, which gives me some comfort (although perhaps she was just being polite).

I am now using RSS feeds on my Google personalised home page which means that I can easily view and keep up with news, legal blogs, and of course the Doctor Who news page and outpost Gallifrey! I find I use it all the time now, and have five tabbed paged of links!

There is also a feed for this blog which you should find right at the bottom of the screen if you scroll down. Although if you use Mozilla Firefox, the feed icon on your toolbar should go red and you will be able to subscribe by clicking that. This doesn’t work with the Landlord-Law feed though - I have no idea why not, another one of the 'really confusing' things about this 'really simple' system.

Merger Mania

The word on the street is that ARLA (the association of Residential Letting Agents) and NAEA (National Association of Estate Agents) are to merge. See this report. The official verdict is that this is a 'major step in the protection of the consumer, the professionalism of the residential property industry and a benefit for all those employed in residential sales and lettings'

However others are not too sure. A later report expresses grave concern. A major letting agency, Leaders have issued a press release on the subject. I myself have spoken to another letting agent who was very worried that ARLA will be subsumed by the estate agents organisation and the needs of letting agents, which differ, will less well catered for. His company is a member of the Guild of Letting and Management. If the merger goes ahead, I suspect that the Guild will do rather well out of it.

Another merger on the cards is between two landlords organisations, the National Federation of Residential Landlords (NFRL) and the Southern Private Landlords Association (SPLA). See this press release. This will mean that there will be two large landlords organisations – The National Landlords Association, and the merged NFRL and SPLA.

Interestingly the National Landlords Association has been awarded a contract to run one of the two insurance based tenancy deposit schemes, the one which is supposed to be aimed at landlords. However the NFRA/SPLA is offering its members a scheme using the other insurance based scheme, provided by the Dispute Service Ltd, which I understand was aimed primarily at letting agents. Could this mean that the two landlords associations do not like each other?

An interview on the Tenancy Deposit Scheme

I did my first recorded interview yesterday. It was an interview of Lawrence Greenberg who runs the Dispute Service Ltd, one of the three companies contracted to run the new Tenancy Deposit Scheme ("TDS"), scheduled to start from April 2007.

I am afraid you can't listen to it unless you are an annual member of Landlord-Law as it is a 'members only' content. However I think Landlords will find it very interesting. Here are a few points which arose from my talk with Lawrence and his colleagues during my time with them.

Landlords must have a detailed inventory. It is clear that in a dispute where there is no inventory, landlords run the risk of losing their case simply because of the lack of inventory. They need to be very, very detailed.

Photos are a waste of time unless they are very clear and focused and contain a ruler or something similar to show the scale. I have to say that photographs clients have sent to me in the past when I have been advising about their tenants liability for damage, have generally been pretty useless.

Tenants need to protect their position and make sure that any damage to the property or its furniture is marked on the inventory at the check in meeting, otherwise there will be no way to prove that the damage was not done by them, and they will be at risk of having to pay for it out of their damage deposit.

I did not discuss any actual fee charges with Lawrence, but I suspect that the cost of the insurance scheme may be more than people think, especially at first. Not so much perhaps for agents who are members of one of the national associations (particularly those who are already clients of the Dispute Service’s existing TDS scheme), but for private landlords who may be an 'unknown quantity' and therefore a higher risk.

Of course landlords who do not want to pay for TDS can use the custodial scheme (this is not the scheme run by Lawrence’s company but one of the two others). However if so they will have to hand the deposit over to the scheme. One of the people I spoke to (not Lawrence) expressed doubts as to whether the company running this scheme, Computershare Investor Services PLC, would be able to make a profit, as the government is not making any contribution to their running costs, their only income will be the interest on the deposits held, and part of this will have to be paid out to the tenant.

Anyway it was great fun doing the interview, just like a real radio journalist! I had a chat with a BBC man a few months ago who gave me a few tips, one of which being to look the interviewee in the eyes during the interview so you can judge when to speak. I did find that a great help.

I shall have to do some more …

Trends in buy to let

There is an interesting article here on buy to let mortgages (which will be 10 years old this summer) which shows that they are highly successful and indeed less risky (for the lender) than residential mortgages as only 0.68% are in arrears of more than three months, compared to 0.97% of normal loans.

Buy to let mortgages now account for 8% of the housing stock in the UK and the buy to let market is worth over £73 billion. However the average property portfolio is still fairly small although it has apparently has increased from three per landlord in 1996 to seven this year, and research has revealed that 83 per cent of landlords plan to increase or maintain their portfolios in the next six months.

However in the future this dominance of the market by small investors may change. This article in the Times indicates that larger investors, such as pension funds, looking for a steady income flow, may be looking to increase their investment in this area. We could be also looking in the future at considerably more ‘build to let’. This is common in Germany, Holland and several other European countries, where many people live for years or even decades in blocks of flats owned by banks or other financial institutions, but is fairly rare in the UK.

The disincentive for the larger investors may be that residential property is management intensive - finding tenants, chasing rent arrears, dealing with repairs - and the large city investors (suggest the Times) would not want to be directly involved in this work.

However there is no doubt that residential property has proved itself over the past 10 to be a sound investment and no doubt will remain popular, at least with the smaller landlord, and possibly also with the big boys.

My talk at London Landlords Day September 2006

You may be interested to see a recording which was done of a talk I did at London Landlords Day last September on Essential Legal Points for Landlords here. Be warned that the first few minutes is the camera running before I start talking (there is a long shot of the emergency exit notice for example and quite a lot of the walls).

I am a bit in two minds about giving this link because as usual my hair looks dreadful, but I do cover quite a bit of ground, if the subject of landlord and tenant law interests you.

Which UK law is most in need of reform?

There is an interesting article in The Times online today, where members of their law panel nominate the area of law they consider to be most in need of reform.

I like the answer given by Professor Adrian Briggs, who suggests that law which affects ordinary people should be written in a language which is easy for them to understand. This is also reflected in the response of Andrew Arden QC who says that some legislation almost looks as if it were deliberately designed to be unintelligible to those whom it most affects, citing the Housing Benefit Regulations as an example.

I would add that if the Law Commission has spent a considerable amount of time working on a much needed piece of legal reform, for example the Renting Homes Bill, carrying out huge amounts of public consultation, it seems madness not to use it. But maybe it will be included in the next Queens Speech.

What piece of legislation do you think is most in need of reform?

Legal Professional Training Ltd

A new year, a new business venture. This year it is a new training company called Legal Professional Training Ltd, "LPT" for short.

LPT has been some time in the making. I and several others were to do some lecturing last year for a training company which then went under. We were a bit upset about losing the potential earnings, and some of us decided to go it on our own. Eventually LPT was formed. Basically it consists of me, Martin Iller, Deputy District Judge, author and solicitor, Diana Iller (yes, former wife but a long time ago – they are still speaking) solicitor, and Director of Postgraduate Studies at Thames Valley University, and my husband Graeme, employment specialist and a former trade union man. Martin and I are going to do the housing courses and Diana and Graeme do the employment/discrimination stuff. I think we will all make a good team.

If we can battle our way through the paperwork that is. We incorporated on 4 December 2006. Jordans did that – they were very efficient and helpful, no problems there. The problems are mainly with getting the bank account opened. We all live in different places (well, not Graeme and I, but the others do) so it is a nightmare getting the papers signed plus the bank then went and lost them, so most of it has to be done again. And until we have a bank account we cannot really register for VAT or do anything else much. So as I have some courses I want to start advertising, they are being run technically as Landlord-Law courses ‘in association’ with LPT for the time being. Hopefully we will not have to do this for too long.

So what sort of courses will we do and how will they be run? Well for the online training we are using an open source course management software called ‘Moodle’. I had never heard of it before Martin mentioned it but it is really good. Apparently Open University use it and lots of schools and colleges. We now have a moodle training site and I have done a fair bit of training on how to create the courses.

We also want to do some traditional face to face training, and will be looking to develop courses and such over the year. We will also do in house stuff if people want it.

So there you are. I spent much of the Christmas period creating two moodle courses (in between cooking turkey and watching Dr Who DVDs with my offspring) one of which is ready to roll and the other is scheduled to run for four weeks from the end of March.

The main course in March is on tenancy agreements – so many people fail to understand the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 or even realise that they exist. I saw a tenancy agreement provided by some landlord software only the other day which was way out of date and wide open to successful defences by tenants against possession claims (e.g. for rent) during the fixed term. More courses are to follow, on contracts of employment and discrimination law, just as soon as the employment team can find time to create them.

To find out more, why not visit our web-site at www.professionallegaltraining.com?

Five things

To those who do not know, there is this sort of tag thing going around, I do not know where it came from, but UK legal bloggers are all tagging each other to tell 5 things about themselves that others don’t know about, and then tag 5 other bloggers. I have been tagged by two sites, Impact and Family law.

I don’t mind telling 5 things about myself you probably didn’t know, if you don’t mind reading them. Here goes:

1. In the late 1980s I took a year out to travel and spent about 7 months in Mexico. I learnt Spanish and stayed on a farm and had a great time. I have forgotten a lot of the Spanish but I expect I could get it back if I tried (although my language ability is about moron level, I learned at about half the speed of everyone else).

2. I originally studied geography (at Hull University) – at that time I no more thought that I would end up a lawyer than go to the moon (law students were sad people who spent most of their time on the second floor of the Brynmor Jones library). I am still interested in environmental matters, as you can see from much of this blog

3. After Hull, I went for teacher training, but gave it up after teaching practice, as the prospect of spending the rest of my life trying to teach 15 year olds who did not want to learn geography, was to awful to contemplate. Best decision of my life (almost).

4. I don't like potatoes. This means that a fish and chip supper is a bit of an unbalanced meal for me. Everyone always assumes that everyone likes potatoes as a matter of course.

5. I don’t drive. When I was young I couldn’t afford it. Now I’m older I am too scared to learn. Its not a real problem though. What you have never had you don’t miss, and it is of course better for the planet. Besides, my husband is a much better driver than I could ever be.

The second stage of the tagging exercise is a bit of a problem as I think most of the bloggers I know of have already been tagged. Still here goes. Corporate blawg, Legal spy, Terminological Inexactitudes, Head of Legal, and the Criminal Solicitor. All good blogs.

Landlord success in disability discrimination case

There is an interesting report in the Times on a case, Williams v Richmond Court (Swansea) Ltd (heard on 14 December 2006), on disability discrimination. The landlord was appealing against the Judge's finding against him at first instance that he discriminated against 81 year old tenant Mrs Williams who had requested he install a stair lift, as she found it difficult to use the stairs.

The Court of Appeal found that the landlords did not discriminate, as the reason they had refused to install the stair lift was not because Mrs Williams was disabled. The reasons given by them for refusing consent included, (i) that the other tenants had voted against the proposal; (ii) aesthetics; (iii) the cost of repair; (iv) inconvenience to the residents as a whole; and (v) the Disability Rights Commission code of practice made it clear that it was not under any duty to make reasonable adjustments to the premises.

The Court of Appeal said that Judges have to carry out a two-stage exercise. First, it was necessary to identify the relevant act or omission on the part of the appellant, and second, it was necessary to look to comparators to see if they were or would have been treated differently.

Here, none of the reasons given by the landlord for refusing consent related to Mrs Williams’ disability. The underlying complaint was that the they had failed to put her in a better position than that to which she was entitled by her underlease, namely by failing to take positive action and providing consent to the installation of the stair-lift.

Landlords will no doubt feel fairly pleased at this judgment. I am sorry I am unable to provide a BAILLI link but the case does not appear to have been reported there yet.

Two more bad landlord stories

Landlords may moan about the new HMO licensing rules, but two stories which have come my way recently show that there are still bad landlords out there.

Firstly, this report on Youillscar Mohammed a Landlord in Glasgow who not only let out HMO properties without the proper fire precautions, but asked tenants to lie for him so he would not have to pay the license fee.

Then there is our old friend, ASBO landlord Dickens from North Wales, who has (according to a report in the Daily Post) recently had charges brought against him under the gas safety regulations. Although apparently he has now sold most of his portfolio, so the tenants of Conwy are now fairly safe from him.

I dare say these are not the only offenders. Although I agree that the disparity in the license fees across the different authorities is unfair, I do think that basically the regulation of landlords, at least in the more vulnerable HMO area, is justified, if it helps prevent this sort of thing, and keeps tenants safe.

Publishing for profit

I get sent books from time to time to review for my Landlord-Law site and I recently received a copy of Regulating Conditions in the Private Rented Sector: A Practical Guide, by Caroline Hunter and Andrew Dymond from Arden Chambers published by Thomson/Sweet & Maxwell. I was quite looking forward to receiving this, as the authors are distinguished lawyers and it is an area of law which I write about quite a lot. However although it will undoubtedly be a very useful book for me which I expect I will use a lot, I am a bit disappointed.

My main gripe is that virtually half of the book is appendices, most of which are extracts from statutes. However is there really any need for statutes to be reproduced in text books any more, in this age of online legislation? Particularly since the UK Statute Law Database has been published (although admittedly it would not have been made public when this book went to press).

At £85 this is not a cheap book. It is about an inch thick and on first glance you might think, "OK, eighty five quid for an inch thick book of analysis on a new area of law from specialist counsel, that’s acceptable". But is it acceptable to be paying effectively forty pounds for a reproduction of statutes which you can get free on the internet? It would be very easy just to have a list of relevant statutes and the url of the Statute Law Database and leave it to the reader to look them up. This book is after all aimed at the professional legal market, virtually all of whom will (or should) have broadband on their desktop computers and probably also their laptops. But if the statutes were eliminated, would we still feel happy about paying eighty five pounds for a slim volume of just half an inch thick? Probably not.

The internet is changing everything. I suspect that lawyers, a deeply traditional species mostly still steeped in paperwork and pink tape, will one day wake up to fact that legal publishers are charging a fortune for something they can now get easily for free, and refuse to pay any more. However this may not be until the younger solicitors trained on computers and the internet start to make partner status.

Tenancy deposit scheme contractors named

Well we now know the companies who are going to run the tenancy deposit protection schemes. From 6 April every landlord who takes a damage deposit will have to be a member of one of these three schemes.

The first is the general custodial scheme. This will be free of charge and open to everyone. The deposits will have to be handed over to the scheme administrators who will hold them until the end of the tenancy (the interest on the money held will pay for the scheme costs). So not very popular with landlords who like to have the deposit handy to use for repair and other work, and also to swell their own bank account. The company running it is to be Computer Investor Services PLC, a large company whose web-site gives little information about the scheme other than a pdf press release.

There are then two ‘insurance backed’ schemes. These are the schemes which will allow the landlord to hang on to the deposit money, so long as he pays an insurance premium (so the company can pay the deposit back to the tenant if the landlord fails to cough up at the end of the tenancy).

The first of these is being run by the Dispute Service Ltd. This is the same company which has been running a (very successful) trial scheme for letting agents for the past year or so. The current scheme is just for agents who are members of ARLA, the NAEA and RICS, but the statutory scheme will be open to other agents and landlords. The chief executive is Lawrence Greenberg who was also in charge of the tenancy deposit scheme trialed by the Independent Housing Ombudsman several years ago, so he is very experienced in this type of work. I note for example that this is the only one of the three companies who will be providing their own arbitration service rather than using the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. I suspect that this scheme will have the least teething problems, in view of their past experience.

Finally there is Tenancy Deposit Solutions Ltd, which is sponsored by the National Landlords Association and which will be administered by Hamilton Fraser Insurance. I understand that the National Landlords Associations' initiative (which will no doubt help increase their membership) has annoyed greatly some of the other landlords associations. There is a surprising amount of friction and antagonism between the various landlords associations (and sometimes even within individual associations) which is a bit of a shame really, as they all ought to pull together rather than wrangling among themselves. After all no-one else is going to look out for their interests. However it is good to see that at least one of the schemes will have a (no doubt considerable) input from landlords, who will probably ensure that it is run in a landlord friendly manner. I am sure that this scheme will be very popular among landlords.

So there you are. The delegated legislation which will set out the rules and regulations governing how precisely these schemes are to operate has not yet been published, but is expected to be laid before Parliament some time early in the new year.

Going green electric

I was very pleased to see this article in the Cash section of the Observer this Sunday. Like a lot of people probably, we have been thinking of switching to a more environmentally friendly electricity company but were confused about which company would be the best.

The answer, according to the Ob, is Good Energy, which it seems is the only one to source its supply 100% from renewable sources. Sounds good to me. I expect we will be switching soon, but I just want to think about it a little bit longer …

I interview Dalek Sec

We are huge Doctor Who fans in our house, so when I bought some lapel mikes for my recording equipment, my son Patrick insisted that I interview him as a Dalek. Landlord and tenant law on Skaro seemed the obvious choice of topic, although purists will realise that of course this interview is impossible as Skaro was destroyed in the time war. We only thought of that afterwards.

We did not really have a script but made it up as we went along having discussed a few ideas first. It was Patrick’s idea to mention the oncoming storm (if you have watched the new series you will understand this), my husband suggested enslaving the Thals, and I was determined to escape via a ventilation shaft.

I have loaded the interview up to my web-site as a bit of Christmas fun, and you can listen to it here.

One rule for treasury draftsmen ...

In these days of plain English and legislation against unfair and unclear terms in consumer contracts, one can’t help wishing that there was something similar which applied to statutory instruments.

I have been trying to make sense of The Disability Discrimination (Premises) Regulations 2006 but I have to say that so far I have found them almost wholly impenetrable. Of course this may be because their general literary style is so deeply boring it is difficult to work up much interest in mentally cross referencing the necessary three or four sections so you can work out what the section you are looking at is talking about.

If this sort of thing was printed in a consumer contract it would be slated by the OFT as unfair and be unenforceable. But although this is not a contract, it is relevant to consumers, as presumably not only lawyers will need to know about disability discrimination in premises. But it is drafted in such a way that most ordinary people will never be able to understand it. Even the explanatory note at the bottom is not wholly clear. Would that treasury draftsmen were subject to the same drafting rules as the rest of us!

Financing the courts

I was talking to someone who knows the other day, who told me that many courts are experiencing horrendous financial problems. Their funding is insufficient and they are having to make more and more cuts, which are affecting the services that they provide. For example badly paid staff, with no proper training resulting in a high staff turnover, not enough money to employ sufficient deputy district judges which means huge back logs with box work and delayed court hearings. All very bad news.

Well one answer is perhaps for the courts to become a bit more commercial and start earning some extra income. Here are a few suggestions:

A monthly newsletter. I have always thought that this would be a good idea – it could have announcements about court services, new initiatives etc, letters from readers, articles by Judges about procedures not being followed properly, Q&A sections, information about new court rules and procedures and the like. Virtually all solicitors firms and barristers chambers would no doubt subscribe. If the court charged £250 pa and got 200 subscriptions that would be £50,000 per year. It could be either paper or electronic.

Guided tours around the courts. Sounds awful but if stately homes can make money at it, why not the courts? The guide could give information about the judicial and court system, plus some juicy stories about famous trials which had taken place and the like.

A business centre, e.g. for solicitors and lawyers. For example wi fi cards for laptops, a photocopying service, hire of computers with internet access, hire of standard legal books such as the green book by the day or half day, and fax facilities.

A bookshop selling legal books, both for the general public (for example the LawPack range) and text and other books for solicitors and barristers. Plus some bodice rippers for bored advocates to read in the advocates room if they have to wait a long time for hearings to come on and don’t have any work to do or colleagues to talk to! It could also usefully stock counsels notebooks and pens.

These are just a few ideas. I am sure there are many more. Courts could ask their staff to make suggestions, with a bonus paid for the best ideas. Staff could also give suggestions for savings as well – often quite junior members of staff can come up with brilliant ideas that no-one else has ever thought of.

So there you are. No doubt there are reasons why none of these can happen, but I am sure that if they made an effort and thought in a different and more entrepreneurial way, courts could do a lot to bring in some more cash. They are obviously not going to get it from the government.

Tenants book - any suggestions?

Nearing completion of my tenants book now. I have done most of the text and now need to check it and improve its readability.

I am worried however that it might be a bit weak on social tenancies. My main experience in the past 10 years or so has been with private tenancies. I know some of you lot do housing law – is there any advice you would like to pass on? What could tenants do, for example, which would make your job easier when they get around to consulting you? Is there anything in particular you think I ought to emphasise? Problems you see a lot of?

If you are a tenant - are there any sorts of problems you would particuarly want me to look at? I think I have them all covered but you never know ...

I am quite happy to credit good suggestions (so long as I know who you are).

Unbelievable arrogance

I have just had the dubious pleasure of watching Vera Baird QC, our legal aid minister, being questioned on Channel 4 lunchtime news about the legal aid reforms. When asked how vulnerable clients were going to manage if they have to travel up to 50 miles to get essential legal advice, she just shook her head in a patronizing manner and said that that this was simply not going to happen.

Actually, she told us, it is going to be better for everyone after the reforms come in, because (she implied) solicitors will be forced to manage their practices properly which will mean more money and work for all. In fact, those silly old solicitors are just making a fuss about nothing and will soon be grateful to the government for making them carry out these essential changes which will make their working lives so much better.

How stupid is she? Does she not know that all legal aid practices have had years of efficiency measures being imposed on them, auditing, five year plans, cost cutting exercises and the like. Does she really think that she, a government minister and barrister, knows better than the partners how to run a legal aid firm? And does she really think that solicitors are going to carry on doing legal aid work if these reforms come in, when there is other much more profitable work to be done? It is not solicitors, remember, who are going to suffer for all this, it is the clients.

So far as I can see there are two possible reasons for the governments attitude. One is that they want to kill the legal profession dead because an active legal profession is an embarrassment to them as they keep pointing out problems in their legislative program etc. The other is that they don’t have the cash and the Health Service is a more popular destination for any cash that they do have. I really hope it is the second, but sometimes I get paranoid and wonder if it is the first.

But if I had not given up legal aid work a long time ago, I would be very much tempted to give it up now and to write to Ms Baird and tell her that it was her smug patronizing attitude which had been the last straw.

If you feel as annoyed about all this as I do, support the Law Societies "What price Justice?" campagn.

Schools' junk mail problem

I was talking to a deputy head teacher recently who told me that they had a terrible problem (as apparently do all schools) with junk mail. The problem is disposing of it, as they apparently get charged for rubbish collection. So this totally useless rubbish mail, which they do not want, is actually costing them money to dispose of.

I wonder sometimes whether we can’t do more to stop junk mail, perhaps fining companies who persistently send it out to people and organizations who don’t want it. And before you mention it, although there is a fax preference service which businesses can register with to prevent unwanted faxes, so far as I am aware there isn’t one for business’s for mail.

Something should be done about it. Money paid to schools should be used for children’s education, not for disposing of junk mail they never asked for in the first place.

(Rant over!)

Inside the Insider

Rather against my better judgment I included 'The Insider' by Piers Morgan in my last Amazon order. But to my surprise I am really enjoying it. I had no idea that editors of the Mirror had such access to the great and famous. And he is delightfully rude to people (or at least he reports himself as being). He also shows an entertainingly childish "I’m going to get you for that" attitude, which reminds me a bit of those engines in 'Thomas the Tank Engine' who were always getting at each other and having feuds.

My husband thinks it a gross error of taste to have the book in the house at all, and refuses to believe that it could possibly be worth reading. "He's a complete toerag" he splutters "I can never forgive him for what he did to the Mirror, never, a once fine paper with columnists like Pilger and Foot". Thus speaks the diehard socialist.

Well personally, I wouldn’t read the Mirror in a million years anyway (unless perhaps I found it on a train seat on a long journey when I had forgotten to bring a book) so I don’t really care what he did to it. I still think the book is an entertaining read. Although deeply worrying too, if you think about it seriously.

There is one thing about buying a book written by a journalist, it is generally quite readable. They have after all had quite a bit of practice in writing. I enjoyed Andrew Marr’s book as well, very much, although it is quite different in tone.

I have introduced some Amazon links in one of the blocks to the right, just for fun and possible financial enrichment as I am an affiliate – I get something like a squillionth of a pound for every purchase. You may have to scroll up or down to see them depending on where this item is on the page.

Fleet heroes

I was delighted to read in the Observer today about the Energy Saving Trusts Fleet Hero awards. Mind you, I can’t find anything about it on the EST site – maybe they have just not got around to loading it up yet.

Still, on to the awards. Good stuff with Gateshead Local Authority increasing their bio fuel usage, and saving 300 tons of carbon dioxide per year and £77,000 in fuel costs by re-organizing the way it uses its fleet (green can often be cheaper!) and training their staff in ecodriving techniques. They were the overall winners. However the report also featured:

• The Bolton Alternative Fuels Co-operative which converts waste oil from local restaurants to biofuel for their members
• Goingreen which imports and sells small electric cars
• City Lawyers Tom Pakenham and Jonny Goldstone who left their jobs to start up eco taxi company greentomatocars
• Italian taxi company Bioshuttles which not only uses biofuels but also environmentally friendly detergents to wash vehicles, and
• The South West Regional Development Agency whose own staff devised their green transport policy which has resulted in 20% decrease in mileage
  

To name but a few. It is very exciting to see such enthusiasm for cutting carbon emissions.

What are you doing?

Legal aid? Problem sorted.

Thinking about the decline of legal aid while in the bath this morning (as you do), I thought "If I were in charge, what would I do?". Well here is my ‘from the bath’ solution, gratis, from someone who used to do legal aid but does it no longer.

Well, I think to start with, I would like to separate civil and criminal legal aid. From all I hear, it is the terribly expensive criminal trials which drain the legal aid funds. So if the civil stuff were separated out, it would show itself to be the inexpensive beast that it is.

Probably the best thing would be to have a fund. This could be used to underwrite legal costs, so solicitors could be certain of getting paid. Government could pay into the fund a specified amount, to cover those cases where the costs are not recovered from the other side. The fund could ‘earn money’ by taking on, once again, personal injury actions. The majority of these are successful so the insurers pay all the costs. However if the fund was the organization taking the risk, the ‘success fee’ currently paid to solicitors could be paid to the fund. No doubt insurance cover could be arranged, as now, to cover the risk of the claimant having to pay the other sides legal costs and experts fees.

So the fund could get income from the government (about the same as it pays now for civil stuff), interest from money held, success fees from civil claims which are successful, and would probably take a loss on most family cases. Housing cases – well some would be a cost but others, for example disrepair claims, could well bring in cash via the success fee. There would also have to be a statutory charge type arrangement to cover situations where a benefit is obtained but no costs are paid.

I have to say that I would prefer to see the fund administered by someone other than the Legal Services Commission – I think they are a horrendous organization (although with some very nice people working for them), realistically though I suppose we would probably get stuck with them. However as this is all imaginary anyway, let us say that the civil fund would be managed by a new organization – called something like the Civil Legal Costs Fund. Perhaps to be headed up by someone sensible from business, with a proven track record of running things efficiently.

The fund would have to be very carefully managed so its potential liability for costs (bearing in mind the proportion, statistically, of current cases which will not be a cost) did not exceed the amount of the fund. All cases would have to be assessed before being approved by the fund and strict limits applied, as with legal aid certificates.

Hopefully this system would be supported by solicitors. Although they would lose their success fee on PI cases, they would hopefully gain other work which would balance this out. And if they just did PI cases, then no doubt the option would remain to ignore the fund and carry on doing their own no win no fee agreements as now.

On reflection, and in an ideal world, I think I would prefer to see the scheme operate free of government altogether, i.e. be a private legal aid funding system. It would need a friendly multimillionaire to seed it by coughing up a few million, but it could be self funding thereafter. The advantage of being a private scheme is that it would be more likely to avoid the stultifying form filling and bureaucracy which inevitably accompanies any state funded system, and which makes them such a nightmare for all who work in them. Maybe it could start from a few firms and then gradually expand.

"But what about criminal legal aid?" I hear you ask, "You haven’t mentioned that!" Well I have never been a criminal practitioner so they will have to think up their own solution. Forcing government to think through the legal aid implications of new legislation would of course help.

However talking to a friend recently, he pointed out that government really needs the criminal practitioners because they are far, far cheaper than a state funded system would be. In a state funded system, the working time regulations would have to be followed strictly, whereas self employed solicitors can ignore them and just get on with the work. So they have the government over a barrel really. All they need to do is push this point home, which hopefully they are doing with their current go slows and strikes. Good luck to them.

So there you are. Problem sorted. What do you think?

But of course it is not really as easy as that.

Another missed opportunity

While doing research recently for my book, I was distressed to see that the Department of Communities and Local Government's Decent Homes Standard, which all social housing is supposed to meet by the end of 2010, does not not include a measure of energy efficiency.

I am constantly disappointed by this governments poor record on environmental matters. It seems that despite lip service to environmental concerns, in things which could make a real difference, they just forget about it. If all social housing landlords were forced to consider energy efficiency when looking at improvement works, this could have a tremendous beneficial effect. As it is, the cash strapped social landlords are not (save for the enlightened few) going to consider improvements they are not required to make.

Yet another missed opportunity.

Councils in crisis with HMO backlogs

An interesting article in Inside Housing gives the not entirely unexpected news that Local Authorities are finding it difficult to cope with all the licensing applications they have received. Indeed it appears that some of them have not issued any licenses at all yet.

A survey of 10 Councils by Inside Housing showed that 6,380 applications had been received but only 348 licences had been issued. Of course 10 is a very small sample and I am sure that many councils are doing splendidly. However I expect the general view put forward, that Councils are finding it difficult to deal with the applications received, is a true one. Indeed I would be surprised if this were not the case, bearing in mind that so many applications have had to be made at the same time, and that councils are unlikely to take on extra staff to deal with it.

The sad thing is that due to the pressure of dealing with the licensing applications, staff are unable to be out there dealing with the bad landlords, none of whom will have submitted their applications.

Still it is not all doom and gloom. One day they will get over the bulge of work and be able to take stock of the situation. They will then know who is good and who is bad. And hopefully then, there will be the will and the power to deal with the bad landlords.

Tenants Book

I’m writing a book. A book for tenants this time (I have already done one for Landlords - see left). Its coming along quite nicely, I have done over 40,000 words so far, but I thought having a blog I ought to use it to vent my angst from time to time, on writing niggles and so on. Otherwise why have a blog?

Mind you I am not going to tell you all about the book, I will tell you that when it is published (so it will be a nice surprise for you!). But it aims to help tenants through the minefields of residential landlord and tenant law.

I’m hoping to make it easy to understand and am trying to make my English as plain as I can. However it is difficult sometimes when you are a lawyer and legal phrases are second nature to you. I have to keep stopping myself and saying “they’ll never understand that, you will have to re-phrase that”. Which of course makes the book very wordy as most legal phrases are verbal shortcuts, so we can refer to complex concepts without having to explain them every time. Difficult.

Also I keep coming across nasty holes in the law where I cannot find the answer to questions I suspect tenants will expect to have answered. For example there is a common law implied covenant that rented properties will be fit for habitation on the first day of the tenancy, which only applies to furnished lets. But I cannot find any definition of what a furnished/unfurnished let actually is! Does 'unfurnished' mean no furniture at all? Does 'furnished' mean the furniture must be sufficient for the tenant to be able to move in and live in straightaway (for example have all necessary beds and chairs)? What about lets where only kitchen white goods are included?

I suspect there may be something on the Inland Revenue site about this and I will have to brace myself to take a look there. If you can help do leave a comment. I am sure that there must have been a case on this at some time.

More on the book later ...