lodger problems

123oleary

hi all
for the last six months i have had a lodger and it has worked reasonably well and in some ways he is a good tenant. the lodger is an eu national.
last week he lost his job and the employer refused to pay his salary up to date or any notice.
whilst i sympathise with his predicament , my lodger rarely leaves the house and makes up to 20 coffees a day. also while i am out at work all day i have no idea what bills ,broadband etc he is running up and it also means that i dont get even a couple of hours to myself downstairs without him paddling through to make yet another cup of coffee.
our contract states one months notice is to be given by either party to end the tenancy. rent is paid upfront on the first of the month and i hold a deposit of one months rent. he has made a few breakages of beer glasses and also my bath tap which will cost £70 to replace and fit but i was going to absorb these costs as wear and tear and accidents happen.
i am expecting he will soon have money problems and he has mentioned to me that if he cant get his backpay he can't afford to stay in this country. no timescale was mentioned.
my question is how to resolve him constantly been in and his energy consumption. i dont feel i can talk to him about it because i arent in often enough to enforce it . i feel that i will have to get rid of him.
i also think that he may not have his rent on rent day, if he asks me to use his deposit as rent should i let him stay or can i kick him out there and then ? and if i did kick him out there and then do i have to refund his deposit given his breakages and not giving me a months notice. also can i get rid of him now because his employment status has changed. on my advert i said working people only although it is not in the contract.
i welcome your comments.

annie-c

You need to look at exactly what your tenancy agreement with him says. The contract is binding on both sides and you need to be aware of your own responsibilities as well as his. The agreement will afford him certain rights and you need to be fully aware of those to keep yourself out of trouble. I'm not sure that you will help yourself if you think in terms of kicking him out and witholding his deposit. I would think that, contractually, if you have an agreement that he is free to use the whole house and bills are included, then there is little you can do about the increased amount of time he is spending in the house now. If his bills are up to date so far, then, at this stage, he has done nothing wrong and so you have no legal recourse to take action against him. Without knowing the details of the contract I cannot give advice, but one glaring thing that strikes me is that you absolutely cannot withold his deposit if YOU are the one to ask hie to leave without notice.

Personally, I would recommend that you sit down with him asap and have an informal chat about your worries. He will no doubt be worried himself. Given that you share a living space, things could get very uncomfortable if you don't have an open discussion about practical matters. It may be possible that by talking it through in a non-threatening way, you can come up with a workable solution that you have not thought of yet.

Once you start talking about 'kicking him out' you will be in the territory where it becomes more difficult because the goodwill relationship will be lost. Personally I'd try not to go there without taking advice, maybe from CAB?

Whatever happens, you need to have a good think about how you set up contracts in future. I don't mean to be harsh or critical, in different circumstances I have found myself in tricky contractual positions because of not thinking things through at the outset. But maybe this needs to be a lesson learned for the future.

Jowo_2

Are you actually suggesting that you evict the lodger without letting them serve their notice and then retain their deposit on the grounds that they didn't give you a month's notice, or have I misread?

You have a contract that obliges you to give the lodger 1 month's notice and any rent arrears or changes to their employment status is irrelevant. If you re-negotiate this and the lodger consents to leaving earlier, then get this in writing to prevent any disputes.

In future, have a lodgers agreement with a shoter notice period (plus less rental period than the sum of the deposit). Fit an energy monitor so you get an idea of consumption in future so you can track this. There are other gadgets available to cut consumption, such as plugs where appliances can't be left on standby. There are lots of broadband packages with unlimited usage so why not switch to it?

Consider a lodgers agreement where energy bills are exclusive, though its much easier to manage if bills are inclusive. You can't expect the lodger to make changes to their energy consumption if you don't actually know their consumption or haven't chatted to them about it, but I suspect your main bugbear in their lack of employment income and extra presence in the house.

Has the lodger applied for LHA? Landlords aren't usually notified by the local council when this takes place as it is paid directly to the tenant.

Emmzi

he is currently up to date with rent, he just lost his job, and you want to make him homeless? have some heart.

it is not his fault you dont like people in your house making coffee, and it is not his fault you may have underbudgeted for electricity.

are you suited to house sharing?

A reasonable person would be sympathising and sitting down for a chat, not getting the suitcase out.

Jowo_2

Emmzi - of course it seems harsh but it isn't the role of a live-in landlord to solve the problems of their lodger or subsidise them when their income stops. The best lodgers are ones that are out of the house working or studying and don't get under the landlords feet.

A live in landlord provides accommodation to a lodger in return for being paid rent and clearly the OP doesn't have any confidence the rent will be paid.

I agree that the OP needs to have a chat with the lodger about energy consumption issues if these are significant (no evidence yet, just a hunch from the OP) and to determine if the lodger can pay the next month's rent and their general plans.

If the lodger can't pay the rent, the lodger must go. I happen to think the worry over energy/broadband consumption is minor and is probably really an overspill from the general fear that the lodger will default on the rent.

Perhaps a quick chat with the lodger will reveal that they'd prefer an early termination of their contract as if they decide to go back home, they'd probably prefer not to hang around for another month.

123oleary

thanks for the replies.
emmzi- i do sympathise but when you come home from work and theres someone sat on your sofa in their pyjamas watching telly and a mountain of washing up in the sink, crumbs all over the worktop and one time an unflushed toilet and then he spends the rest of the day mooching round the house its hard to take.
i know drinking coffee doesn't sound a big deal but he makes it using a stove top esspresso maker and microwave to warm the milk, two or three a day and a couple more on weekends is no biggie but now its more than one every hour. and the cleaning up after each one means more hot water being used.
jowo-i think there are three scenarios
1 - he says he cant afford to stay in this country and leaves at short notice - probably paying for a full month in advance then leaving part way through ,
i think i would shake his hand and give him his deposit and wish him well

2 - on rent day he says he has no money , can he use his deposit ? this puts me in the the posistion of having no safeguard if he goes on a wrecking spree accidental or deliberate and i think deliberate is unlikely but you never know. do i have to let him stay or can kick him out straight away as he has broken his agreement. and if i kick him out should i have give him his deposit back or could i keep it in lui of a months notice? i think i would be inclined to do the decent thing and give it back to be honest.
3- i decide that his new circumstances don't suit and give notice for him to leave . i understand we have a notice period which i must honour and i would also give him the rest of this month making about six weeks. the problem with this is that he might feel resentful and just run bills up out of spite.

123oleary

annie c, the contract is just a basic one from wh smiths really stating notice periods,deposit and amount of rent, and i interviewed him beforehand and we had an informal chat about what we both wanted and expected. there was never a list of hard and fast rules. i've learned a bit for next time.
jowo yeah im vaguely aware of energy meters and such like, but i thought if i got somebody who was working and they were reasonable i wouldn't have to count every kilowatt .i thought making it inclusive would make it easier to manage.

bitsandpieces

What you can legally do and what you should do are two different things. Being reasonable and helpful to the lodger is a good idea: partly because it's the right thing to do (he has just lost his job - and, from the sound of it, been shafted by his employer - while in a foreign country); partly because, even if you ask the guy to leave, it's going to be much easier if you part on good terms.

It's worth having a sympathetic chat and trying to make sure you live on good terms. People have different ideas about what makes a property clean, and the lodger has just lost his job. Asking him politely to keep things clean, politely discussing his money worries etc. (you could suggest he goes to speak to CAB?) and asking him if he has any particular concerns would be a good place to start. If you think he's feeling down, you could suggest he speaks to the GP.

If you have lodgers long-term, odds are that some or most of them will always have crappy periods: they will lose their jobs, get dumped, people close to them will die, etc. Slobbing round the house for a short period isn't that unusual a response to nasty things happening...so developing ways to deal with this isn't a bad idea.

By the way, you can get unlimited broadband cheap (e.g. O2). May be a good idea - saves worrying about usage, if you have a lodger.

sequence

Who pays for broadband per usage these days ? I haven't heard of that for about 10 years lol.

If I were paying to live in your house I'd expect to be able to make as much coffee as I want and slob around in my underpants all day. It is his home a well!

Sounds like you are being unreasonable to me until he stops paying rent that is!

jdturk

what he does at your home is upto him, he is paying you rent to be able to lounge around, make as many cups of coffee as he wants etc and if you don't like it you have to give him his notice.

As said before it is not his responsibility for you paying the electricity bills and if you don't like the cleanliness then again give him his notice

muskoka

Sounds like you have a pretty good relationship with him at the moment. What about asking him long he is going to be in the Uk if he dosent get a job and offer to give him his deposit back on leaving day (so he can afford to get back to wherever he came from?). Keep it nice - you dont need to keep the deposit do you. And he has been a pretty good lodger by the sounds of it.