!!!!!!!? Council telling tenants not to move out!?

SAMMYE_2

I have a nice couple with a baby who have been good tenants for the last year paid rent always on time when Council wasnt messing about with the rent.

I had a 1 year assured tenancy with them which was a direct let through the Council which ends on the 9/06. The tenants asked me to write a letter to the Council saying that I would not continue to rent to them as the tenancy was up. They wanted me to do this because the place was too small for them due to them having a baby and the council told them to do it. I did that for them as I said they were good tenants and nice.

Anyway the Council has now turned round to them and told them when the tenancy is up to refuse to hand over the keys and not move and they will not rehome them until they are being taken to Court and the balliffs are knocking on the door!?

I cant believe it!? Surely that cant be right!?

The tenants are suggesting they just pack their bags and give the keys back to me and turn up at the Council forcing them to rehome them...

Any thoughts please guys?

ladymarmalade1970

Been in a similar situation myself. Your hands will be tied. I had a tenant that refused to pay the rent, even though she was getting housing benefit for it. I found out that i could get the housing benefit signed over to me directly after 2 months so i went to the council, filled in a form to get this. They went round the property, didn't see the tenant to decided that she wasn't there and stopped the claim! I then said, ok i shall change the locks then to which they replied you can't do that, you need to go through the courts and get a section 8 for non payment of rent and then a section 21 to evict her.
I had to seek independent legal advice and it cost me in total about 3 months rent. Fortunately the tenant just did a runner, albeit leaving lots of stuff that i had to get rid of and she ruined my floors.
I will not deal with council tenants or the council now. I think they are disgusting (not the tenants, the council). I "may" deal with people if i know them or they know me because i know they will go if they can't pay the rent but generally i wouldn't touch housing benefit people with a barge pole and it's not because of them despite my bad experience.
Should add if your tenants just go then they will be made intentionally homeless and will not be rehoused so again, the council is pushing the burden on you, albeit moral this time.
The council don't have the housing stock to re home them so they push the problems on the landlords. They don't care. Everyone thinks landlords are loaded.

DVardysShadow

As ever, the councils are being penny wise and pound foolish. They have pressure on accommodation, so they adopt strategies which abuse Landlords and then they wonder why no one wishes to rent out to their tenants.

SouthCoast

Some old news!

Published on Thursday 1 November 2007 19:30
IN response to the article (Gazette, October 25) about a single mother's housing hell, while I feel very sorry for the young lady and her baby, I would like the public to know about the housing hell facing many landlords.
What dreadful advice Arun District Council is giving to tenants, to wait for a court order to evict them from private premises, so they can be a priority to be rehoused.



It is the landlords who have to pay for all the solicitors', court and bailiffs' charges, with very little hope of ever getting this back from the tenants.



I know of a retired pensioner with a mortgage on a buy-to-let property.



This tenant had not paid any rent for three months, therefore the landlord is struggling to save his house from being repossessed, while paying for all court costs, too.

How unfair this system is, that tenants can only get better housing at the expense of their former landlords.



Name and address supplied

East Preston

http://www.littlehamptongazette.co.uk/community/readers-letters/landlords_as_well_as_tenants_suffer_problems_1_1129830

Rednax

SAMMYE wrote: »

I have a nice couple with a baby who have been good tenants for the last year paid rent always on time when Council wasnt messing about with the rent.

I had a 1 year assured tenancy with them which was a direct let through the Council which ends on the 9/06. The tenants asked me to write a letter to the Council saying that I would not continue to rent to them as the tenancy was up. They wanted me to do this because the place was too small for them due to them having a baby and the council told them to do it. I did that for them as I said they were good tenants and nice.

Anyway the Council has now turned round to them and told them when the tenancy is up to refuse to hand over the keys and not move and they will not rehome them until they are being taken to Court and the balliffs are knocking on the door!?

I cant believe it!? Surely that cant be right!?

The tenants are suggesting they just pack their bags and give the keys back to me and turn up at the Council forcing them to rehome them...

Any thoughts please guys?

Completely right unfortunately. Start the legal proceedings asap and think twice about letting to council tenants in future.

No matter how nice they are they have to do what the council tells them to get another property and that means costing you, as the landlord, thousands of pounds in legal fees...

chewmylegoff

whatever else has happened, you do not appear to have served the tenants with proper notice to end the tenancy so you need to do this as soon as possible.

presumably they are getting LHA in order to be able to pay you, so i don't really understand why they can't just rent another property elsewhere rather than requiring the council to rehouse them, but there you go.

if they do not pay the rent and then do not leave the property and you have to evict them through the courts, i would discuss with your solicitor whether or not you have any possibility of successfully suing the council for damages on the basis that it is their advice that has caused your loss. i expect you will get nowhere and the only person you can pursue for unpaid rent will be the tenant, but it would be interesting to know what a solicitor thought. in any case i presume the "advice" has been given verbally and is not recorded in writing anywhere, and that the council would just deny everything anyway.

G_M

This is standard. Councils have few properties, and dwindling funds. They rehouse the homeless but not people who already have a place to live.

Until you have evicted your tenants, and made them homeless, why should the council (me and you via our council tax) pay to re-house them?

Yorkie1

I think that if your tenants simply hand back the keys, they will be deemed to have made themselves intentionally homeless and therefore the council will not consider itself under the same duty to help them than if they followed its advice to stay put until the bitter end.

ayayay

Sue the counsel for tortious interference with contractual relations.

m_13

Am I missing the point here? The tenants haven't stopped paying the rent, they asked the OP to pretend he or she was evicting them so they would get a new shiny bigger property somewhere else?

OP - what the tenants asked you to do was to get involved in a fraud. Unless you genuinely no longer wanted to rent to them then writing a letter which you knew wasn't true, however nice they were, was dishonest.

Now that hasn't worked out for them they want to hand back the keys and see if that will work? How 'nice' exactly are they?

Graham_Devon

ayayay wrote: »

Sue the counsel for tortious interference with contractual relations.

Should he/she sue himself then too?

They did, afterall, voluntarily take part initially