Tenant not paying rent and never has done !!!

Dave101t

you rented to a benefit family without being pre-registered with the council, or going via management, or getting a bond, or getting a deposit, or doing anything at all? wow....

geek84

Yes, she has signed the tenancy agreement but not paid a penny.

BitterAndTwisted

I suspect your tenant's difficulty is their inability to apply for more than one lot of LHA at a time. Local Authorities do sometimes pay LHA for more than one property at a time under some very specific circumstances.

I do have some sympathy for your tenant, as the reason for children being in care are sometimes not always due to a fault or deficiency with their parenting, ill-health or similar could have been the reason.

However, that won't get your rent paid. I would suggest that you issue your tenant with a Section 8 Notice at the earliest opportunity. This should prompt her to get the issue of HB/LHA sorted asap or she may not be able to have her children with her if she's not able to provide housing for them

G_M

There was a legalistic arguement earlier in the thread about rent frequency and S8 arrears criteria. This is relevant.

OP: what does the tenancy say about rent? Is it
* £X per month (or 'monthly')
* £X per week
* £X every two weeks

or what?

My advice in this situation would be to serve a S8 as soon as validly possible (which depends on the answer to the Q above.)

This in itself will incentivise the tenant to start paying rent! And if they don't, then you can evict, learn a serious lesson (you really did lay yourself open to this) and move on with a new tenant.

BigAunty

Is it possible that HB is being paid for the other property where you say she resides? And does anyone know if HB be backdated when a late claim has been submitted?

Housing benefit can be paid for two properties for a brief period of overlap so long as it is unavoidable (see the Shelter website for info on HB for 2 properties). A tenant is not supposed to receive HB for a property where they are not primarily resident.

To be honest, I would trust the council's report that she hasn't even submitted a HB claim over anything that she says.

I second the previous posters who say that you should submit a S8 (and S21 for the belt and braces approach to ensure you can get her out at the end of the fixed term, should rent be received in the interim period and invalidate the S8 grounds for arrears. Clearly she's going to be a nightmare tenant).

There's a strong chance that she's not eligible for HB to cover the rent if she doesn't get her children back so for the last couple of months since the tenancy started when she does not have the primary care of her children, she'll only get a tiny sum of HB. If she's under 35, she's only actually entitled to the LHA rate for a room in a shared property, if she's 35 or above, she's entitled to the 1 bedroom rate if she doesn't have dependents.

BigAunty

geek84 wrote: »

.. I did explain to him that she has signed a short term tenancy but not paid a pennmy up to date.
...

How long is this initial tenancy agreement? Most ASTs are 6 months.

If you don't have the stomach/knowledge to do the paperwork yourself, look at the Landlord Action site. They have stepped payments for each step of the eviction process.

Also, look at the HB board on the Landlordzone website - that's normally choc full of similar stories to yours.

http://www.landlordzone.co.uk/forums/forumdisplay.php?18-Housing-Benefit-Questions-(HB-LHA-DSS)

missile

No good dead goes unpunished.

You need to look after your own, see a solicitor and get her evicted asap.

metropolitanlandlord

I have not read all the posts here, so forgive me if I am telling you stuff you already know.

I had a tenant who did just that and eventually the council really did start paying - but the nature of the thing was that she then ran up huge bills and she didn't pay them. Not only that, but things disappeared - and the stench of cannabis eventually caused me to give her notice.

She really did have children, and they came with her (and charming they were, too) but does your tenant really have children? Is anything she says true?

There is a young lady who frequents both Camberwell Green and Catford Market with this story asking people for money and to anyone who has worked in mental health it is perfectly obvious that she a lying drug addict - be very careful indeed.

G_M

metropolitanlandlord wrote: »

There is a young lady who frequents both Camberwell Green and Catford Market with this story asking people for money and to anyone who has worked in mental health it is perfectly obvious that she a lying drug addict - be very careful indeed.

Is her name by any chance an anagram of ceerbca T?

If so their trying to con you would be easily exposed and I could apply to have them kicked out of my place.

geek84

Hi folks

I’m just giving you an update on mysituation and would like further advice from you kind folks out there, in termsof what I need to do next-

I have now found out that my tenant (whosigned a short term tenancy agreement in November 2012 and has never paid anyrent or deposit, and had assured me that she had put in a claim for HousingBenefit), had in fact never put the claim to HB, and hasn’t paid a pennytowards the rent or deposit up to date.

She has in fact only put in her claim forHousing Benefit from the end of January 2013. She now claims that ‘something went wrong with the first application’and that I should now get some sort of rent payment within the next 4weeks. Do you think that is possible?

Assuming that I do get the rent payments fromJanuary this year, what about the period when I didn’t receive any rent – November2012 to January 2013. Is it worthapproaching the HB people and showing them the short term tenancy agreement inan attempt to persuade them to back date the rent due? Of course, they might say we only receivedthe application in January this year, so we can’t do that. If that happens, should I go through thecourts in order to obtain the rent covering the period November 2012 to January2013? Of course, in that case the tenantmight say to the courts that she has not got enough money/savings, so cannotpay up or the court may give her some ridiculous order to pay off £2 per weekto make up the rent arrears. If I decideto take this route, how long would it take and would I incur any costs?

Thanks in advance for your responses.