Is the landlord responsible?

xmaslolly76

OK long story short we are having major problems with the kids of one of our neighbours this culminated the other night with one of the houses in the street almost being set alight. The problem we have is we know it is this particular child but cannot prove it. There are other instances of bad behaviour and damage to other properties that can be proved to be down to this one particular child. My question is, is their private landlord in anyway responsible for the actions of his tenants and is there a way we can put pressure on him to do something about it? Our neighbourhood watch representative is currently in talks with the council but we would really like to know what we can make them do if anything.

Thank you in advance of any help you can give :-)

phlash

Difficult, tricky and probably won't get much joy out of contacting the LL, although if it was me you would.

Going through the normal means, that your neighbour is currently doing, is the best option imho.

Simply getting the LL to turf out the tenant only moves the problem on elsewhere, so although I sympathise immensely, the problem needs the roots pulling out not simply having the weed cut down.

mlz1413

A LL is not responsible for a tenants / tenants childs behaviour. The LL can refuse to re-new the AST if they want to or there are issues of damage to LL's property.

If you know how to contact the LL then it might well be worth writing a letter directly to them saying that the family is impacting on the neighbourhood and request he contacts you or does an inspection of the property.

But most of your problems sound like police and enviroment/council issues, keep a diary of noise and distrubance and keep reporting them to the relevant authorities.

Good luck, bad neighbours are awful things.

prudryden

Perhaps you could find out if the LL is the freeholder or a leaseholder. If he is a leaseholder, then he potentially could be held responsible depending on the convenants in his lease. Not guaranteed however.

xmaslolly76

All the properties are freehold. We are currently going down the route of the police and council so much so that the police are no going to talk to the family in question about the childs behaviour and all residents are from now on going to report anything they see.

From what i can gather from the Coordinator he has contacted the LL and he couldnt give a rats !!! as long as they pay their rent. I personally cant believe he is not willing to do anything as he has had three lots of trouble tenants which has cost him dearly in the past as they have all but trashed both the properties he owns which has hit him in the pocket hard you would think he would take more notice this time.

The tenant in question has 5 children in total and the other 4 although a bit gobby ( but then what kids arent these days) are pretty much well behaved it is just this one that they seem to have no control over and have all but given up trying too.

Anyways thank you i had a feeling there would be little we could do with regards the LL but it was worth a question :-)

clutton_2

when i had a noisy tenant the local authority Environmental Health Officer wrote to me because neighbours had put it in writing that there were loud parties going on.. the neighbours names were not mentioned....

i did evict her in the end but it can take months...

BitterAndTwisted

xmaslolly76 wrote: »

From what i can gather from the Coordinator he has contacted the LL and he couldnt give a rats !!! as long as they pay their rent. I personally cant believe he is not willing to do anything

What is it that you expected the landlord to do exactly? They won't evict tenants who pay their rent on time just because the neighbours think they should, and that's good thing imo. Some neighbours are horrible busybodies who take against other people for little or no reason at all, as has been proven by a fair number of posts on this forum before.

It sounds to me like you and your other neighbours are going about things in the right way, in any case.

xmaslolly76

BitterAndTwisted WE are not sure really maybe he could have put a bit of pressure on them to pull this child into line the family as a whole are quite nice but this one child is now making the lives of everyone in the street a misery. So far this year alone he has Scratched numerous cars, damaged very expensive slate slabs, graffitied the alleyway, beaten up other kids in the street including little girls of about the age of 5&6 he is twice their age, kicked down the alleyway gate, damaged fencing, is constanly knocking on doors and running away, Stealing door bells , spitting through letter boxes and his final and last trick was to try and set one of the houses on fire which is way beyond naughty its down right Dangerous.

BitterAndTwisted

I completely sympathise with all the trouble this little wretch has caused but no landlord can "have a word" with his tenants about issues which are none of his business. His obligation is to supply decent housing in return for being paid the rent on time and that's it.