Am I Able To Claim Compensation (Sewage Leak)

jurassicpartridge

This might be a long post so scroll down if you want the abridged version.


Before Christmas (around the 16th), I started to notice a sewage-like smell in the basement floor of my house (I rent, by the way). I gave it a couple of days, and when the smell persisted I contacted my landlord and put in a maintenance request. The maintenance team never came, and since I was leaving to go home for Christmas, I forgot all about it. Anyway, fast-forward to the 2nd of January when I had arrived back at my house. My house has steps leading up to the front door and just outside the basement doors where the steps down ended was a sea of raw sewage (faeces, urine, and toilet paper all slurried together). The smell was god-awful so I immediately contacted the landlord and told them exactly what the problem was. The maintenance man arrived (with no tools or anything like that, I might add, despite my outlining the whole problem to the landlord...), he said he would have to come back the next day with some more equipment. The next day he unblocked the drain (or so he said) and put some acid and bleach down. So the water has been drained, only be left with this awful brown paste outside the house (about a meter squared area). He said (on the 4th of Jan) that someone would be round soon with some heavy-duty equipment to get rid of the stuff - it's now the 14th of Jan and nobody has been - am I entitled to any compensation? There are clearly health risks with this, and it's horrible to have outside your house.



Abridged version: There's loads of poo outside my house because of a broken drain, and it's been there for ages, am I entitled to any compensation?