Whilst it is an admirable act to provide private rented accommodation to people, it is absolutely disgraceful to offer accommodation if the property un-maintained and in a major state of disrepair. These kind of private landlords are making exceptional profits from the rental income which they receive from local councils and hard working people, yet they invest absolutely nothing back into their properties for the effective long term upkeep and maintenance standards of them.
In fact my own landlord back in 2014 who is the director of Worcester Lettings & Developments is one of the top receivers of housing benefit in the City of Worcester. Official statistics and research conducted by The Daily Mirror discovered that Worcester Lettings & Developments received a grand total of £147,026 in Housing Benefit payments in 2014. Thus making them the top receiver of housing benefit payments in the City of Worcester. Very little investment has been put back into the maintenance and fixing the major issues of disrepair amongst the various properties this company rents out to benefit claimants.
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| Worcester Lettings Receipt of HB Payments: £147,026.00 |
This kind of selfish greed just destroys the lives of the tenants who are made to live in such rundown properties and these issues can have serious ramifications on a persons well being both physically and mentally, which I personally find completely abhorrent & morally wrong on every level.
Across the UK there are now more than 9 Million people in privately rented accommodation, which includes over 1.3 Million families with young children. Unfortunately in many areas of Britain it is extremely difficult for anyone on benefits to be able to rent accommodation in the private sector. There are often a select minority of Private Landlords in all towns and cities across the UK who are willing to accept tenants on housing benefit.
The very real problems that we have in the UK right now are that Homelessness and tenants living in poorly maintained & inadequate housing are all contributing towards a national housing crisis. When I make mention of Private Landlords who fail to keep their properties up to standard and consistently shirk their responsibilities to their tenants, it is important to remember that this is the case for some and not all private landlords. Mainly some of these dodgy private landlords that I speak of are mainly renting properties to people in receipt of housing benefit. It seems that they have a loathing contempt for anyone who depends on benefits and they must see it as acceptable to ignore maintenance issues as their main focus is to extract as much rental income from the property as possible without putting a penny back in as investment towards the long-term upkeep of their entire property portfolio in some areas of the country.
It is completely unacceptable and downright disgraceful for any businessman to make a business which in essence makes exceptional profits from other people’s suffering and misfortune. The only people who ever pay the price for such corrupted behaviour are the tenants themselves and all too often we are seeing people’s Physical & Mental health being degraded when they’re stuck in poorly maintained properties in the private sector.
Unfortunately U.K. Legislation is currently protecting these breed of rogue landlords as although they are duty bound to keep their properties to certain standards of maintenance, the law allows them to evict tenants who follow official protocol and report these issues to the council for action to be taken. The law should be in favour of the tenants who are often made to pay the ultimate price of their physical and metal health living in such situations of squalor on a day to day basis.
In my own situation I am currently renting a one bedroom flat in a not so affluent area of Worcester from a landlord who I have since found to be one of the worst landlords in the city. The flat I’m currently renting has major maintenance issues including but not limited to, a leaking roof which has made the bedroom in the property completely inhabitable. The leak is coming from the roof because the property has a flat roof construction with no felt or insulation of any kind in place. This causes water to leak into the corner wall of the bedroom and the surrounding walls which you can see from the photos in this article. In the winter months this causes the temperature inside the property to plummet and last winter these conditions almost killed me.
I have notified the landlord about these issues on several occasions now and each time I am consistently fobbed off by the landlord who says he will get the maintenance guy round. I have only ever seen this maintenance guy on 2 occasions the first being when I viewed the property in the Summer of 2014. At this time the severe maintenance issues were not apparent to me as the weather was dry and the issues must have been masked over in order to get a tenant moved into the property. The second time I saw the maintenance guy was when he came round to have a look at the leak in the roof in Winter last year and at this point he simply looked at the roof and stated “Oh it’s not as bad as I thought it would be, I’ll let the landlord know”, this was the last time I saw the maintenance guy. Although he does spend a lot of time parked outside the landlords property in his pretty little blue van that the landlord bought for him, he apparently doesn’t actually do a great deal of work. I’ve seen him in the local newsagents on a number of occasions buying 40 cigarettes at a time and just going and sitting in his van outside the landlords well maintained property on Tolladine Road, Worcester and doing absolutely nothing whilst the landlords tenants are suffering in dilapidated Properties with maintenance issues completely unaddressed.
This is part of a wider problem in the U.K. right now and seems to commonly prevail in Worcester amongst private landlords who rent properties to people in receipt of housing benefit. It increasingly seems that these landlords find it acceptable to degrade and punish their tenants for being on housing benefits. They see it as acceptable to ignore maintenance issues and force their tenants to live in states of severe disrepair whilst they reap the profits from their tenants suffering and get to go to sleep in a warm bed each night with a nice well maintained roof over their heads. I really don’t know how these landlords are able to sleep at night knowing full well the misery and suffering they are causing their tenants, I suggest that these people lack any sort of empathy or common respect for people and they most certainly lack a good heart.
I am all for good business ethics and I will always wholeheartedly recommend a good business when I come across one as you can see from my review articles posted on this website. However when there are rogue businesses in operation who make exceptional profits from the suffering of others, this is something that I am firmly against and I will use every opportunity I have to speak out against bad business ethics and corruption which nobody should tolerate in this country as it is abhorrently disgraceful.
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Original Article written by Sy Hawkes & Published on August 11th 2015
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