What are my legal options on renting a bad property

00ec25

Steelsmasher wrote: »

But this is a supplier that was set up by the landlord from day one. Is there no obligation from the landlord to provide a working meter so I can actually pay the supplier?

please explain who is the customer of the gas company: you? the LL?

the meter is owned by the supplier. Normally that will be the gas company. If it is not working it will be the owner's responsibility to fix it, after all they want to sell gas to their customer, ie you or the LL as the case may be and need you to have a working meter so the customer can buy gas from them.

are you really unable to think what to do yourself? Read this:
https://www.uswitch.com/gas-electricity/guides/prepayment-meters

[Deleted User]

I moved into emergency accommodation. Therein started three weeks of hell trying to get the gas working at the property.

But all the communications were between me and the supplier.., not the council (the LL). I didn't expect anything different.

I think you will be wasting your time expecting the LA or LL to sort this. You have some responsibilities too.

Is it a similar situation to mine.., the gas needed to be uncapped (contact the meter provider). Then the normal gas supplier provided gas card was missing. It turned out that the supplier used different cards to British Gas cards (never had this happen before) so I couldn't just go to any retailer with paypoint and ask for a replacement British gas card. It was eventually sorted but until it was, I had to keep phoning the supplier, and get them to send the meter supplier engineers to credit the meter temporarily (had to pay all that back) so I had hot water.

Hopefully you just need to get a British Gas card, insert it into the meter to register it, and then put money on the card. Have you tried this?

I totally agree with G_M that buying a screwdriver and rescrewing in the door handle will give you skills and tools everyone should have in their life. And you won't have to wait for days for the LA to send some odd job person round to do the same.

Legionella risks.., oh dear, you are really reaching lol.

Clogged shower drain.., not nice but erm, unclog it (if its a hair problem)? If worse comes to worse you can get drain unclogging chemicals from most supermarkets. If that doesn't fix it you will have to call on the LA. But most of the time it will. I have no problems buying a plunger and seeing if that helps. I don't consider that worth calling a LL or LA about. but then I have enough mountains in my life already.., mole hills I tend to prefer to just deal with.

FBaby

So now I am stuck for at least 4 days without a cooker and no way to pay for my gas.

Does this mean that they've agreed to repair/replace the cooker?

You need to be careful about what you complain about. Some repairs will definitely be the responsibility of the LL (as above assuming the cooker is on the inventory), others won't (for instance the meter if it is with the supplier, in this case, it's up to you to contact them), and the rest will be a grey area and willingness to do something about it will be dependent on the type of property (old vs new) and the monthly rental (less likely to get a positive response if the rent is on the lower end of market value to take into consideration the state of the place).