Responsible Renting - the final report

After having got back from holiday, settled back in, and dealt with the back log, etc, I have finally got around to reading what is the final report from the Law Commission on their housing projects.

The new legal team on Nearly Legal got in ahead of me with a rather depressing report, taking the view that the proposals are basically ineffectual, and the government probably won’t take any notice of the report anyway.

There does seem to be a deafening lack of action by the government on the Law Commissions proposals. In particular the Renting Homes report which has been out for several years now. However there are I suppose a number of excuses for this. For example:

• The fact that on the whole the private sector is not working too badly so maybe action here is not as necessary as elsewhere in the economy
• The need for the private rented sector to grow to provide much needed housing and therefore a desire not to 'rock the boat' which may discourage investment, and
• The need for recent initiatives to bed themselves down.

The last of these is I think particularly important. In the space of a couple of years we have had three major changes, the new Housing Health and Rating System, the HMO licensing scheme and the tenancy deposit scheme. Very shortly there will also be the need for landlords to provide environmental performance certificates. These changes all need time to settle down and for landlords to get used to them, before anything else new is brought in.

For example it has taken Local Authorities some time to get to grips with the new licensing scheme which came into force in April 2006. The first year was taken up with setting up the new schemes from scratch, dealing with the initial rush of registrations, and getting used to things. The second year was building on this, so it is only now that Local Authorities are starting to do more enforcement work. I am pleased to see many more reports of enforcement action for landlords default, and no doubt this will continue. It will probably take quite a few more years (bearing in mind the limited staff resources available to most Local Authorities) before they dig out all the recalcitrant landlords, and are able to say that they have most of the HMO landlords in their area properly licensed.

Likewise with the Tenancy deposit scheme. As set out in my earlier post, it appears that many landlords are still not compliant, so again this will take some time to work through.

In the circumstances I think that the Law Commission are right not to go for major change, but to seek to strengthen the existing initiatives. Their main proposals are:

• To make landlord accreditation available everywhere rather than in just a few areas, as now
• To set up a housing standards monitor body to carry out further research, develop a single code of practice, and trial initiatives (such as a scheme for home condition certification)
• To have all letting agents regulated (Everyone agrees with this! Apart from the cowboy letting agents of course)
• And to carry out proper evaluation of any new reforms introduced

This all sounds pretty sensible to me. It will lay a foundation for further work, won’t rock the boat too much and discourage new landlords just now (particularly important in the present economic climate), and probably won’t cost too much. The Law Commission also make the point that there is a cost in doing nothing, as poor housing creates costs elsewhere in the system, and therefore (taking a wider view) expenditure in the field of housing could result in significant savings elsewhere in the economy.

There are a number of other reports which have been published recently (which are set out in the Law Commissions paper), plus there is the report commissioned by the government on the private rented sector being undertaken by the University of York which is yet to be published. It may be that once this is out, and now that the commission has completed its housing project and the government is able to look at it as a whole, together with the other reports, government may now decide to do something. For example take steps to bring the Rented Homes Bill onto the statute book.

If you are interested in housing, it is probably worth getting hold of the report – which can be downloaded from the Law Commission web-site here and in the Landlord-Law Law reform section. As usual it is well written and readable (bearing in mind that it is a legal report). I was pleased to see that Landlord-Law was mentioned favorably (page 17), and also interested to see that the responses via the Landlord-Law answer form provided nearly 30% of the total. There is a very interesting appendix where they report on what people responding to the consultation actually said.

Interesting times ahead!

Tenancy Deposit Protection - 62% failure

Note - the Landlord Law Blog has now moved to www.landlordlawblog.co.uk.

I read a news items on the Deposit Protection Service website today which reported a survey showing that 62% of private landlords are flouting the tenancy deposit rules, and not protecting their tenants deposits.

If this report is true, and I suspect it probably is, or at least very near the truth, then this means that only letting agents and the better landlords are complying – meaning that those the scheme is really aimed at are ignoring it.

One probable reason for this is that the penalties (in particular the provision for the tenant to be awarded a 'fine' of three times the deposit money) appear in reality to be difficult to enforce. This is partly because the legislation is unclear. Upon careful reading it does not actually say that the fine is automatic if the landlord fails to protect within the time limits (although they do appear to indicate that it might be if the landlord is in breach of his schemes rules - there may be grounds for a test case there).

I am only aware of one case where the tenant succeeded. This was reported in Legal Action Magazine (June 2008) and was where the tenant had actually vacated in response to a section 21 notice served on her. Here the landlord was unable to remedy the position (ie by protecting the deposit out of time) and the Judge reluctantly made the order. However if the tenant had still been in possession, no doubt the landlord would hastily have arranged for the deposit to be protected, and the Judge would then have refused to make the order. The Legal Action report made it clear that the Judge only awarded the fine with reluctance and because the legislation gave him no alternative. (NB I would be very interested to hear of any other cases.)

[Note - since this post was written in July 2008, there have been considerably more cases reported, see the other posts on this blog on tenancy deposits to find them]

What is doubtless happening is that many landlords are taking the view that they will not protect deposits unless tenants threaten court action. However most tenants do not do this. Many will be wholly unaware of the tenancy deposit protection provisions, particularly, for example, if they have only recently come to this country and English is not their first language.

However, even if they are articulate British nationals, most people, even if they have a vague sort of idea that the landlord ought to do something about the deposit, will just assume that either he has done it or that the rules no longer apply. Ordinary people do not go around assuming that their landlords are breaking the law, or threatening court action. Generally people are unfamiliar with the courts and find the very thought of bringing a court claim scary.

One answer I suppose, is to do more to make people aware of the tenancy deposit scheme. Maybe it ought to feature in one of the soaps, there is probably a storyline in there somewhere. The other is to amend the rules to make it clear that if the landlord has not protected the deposit within the time limits, he cannot prevent the tenants succeeding, in a claim for the 'fine', by protecting the deposit out of time.

NB Tenants wanting to bring a claim, should note that there is a do-it-yourself kit (Kit 2) available via my web-site www.landlordlaw.co.uk.

[Note - there a many questions from landlords and tenants in the comments, most of which I have answered (although COMMENTS ON THIS POST ARE NOW CLOSED and no more will be added or answered). Please bear in mind that new cases (and interpretations of the rules) have come along since my answers were given. Note that there are many other more recent posts also on tenancy deposits which you can read via this link.]

[Note 2 - see my post here one year on : Tenancy deposit protction - now only 30% failure]

Thank goodness for Geograph

When I upgraded up web-site recently I left reviewing the Local Authority Directory for a later date. This is a very large section of the site, which covers all local authorities giving the LA web-site and contact details for housing related information. As there are now so many pictures in the rest of the site, I decided it would be nice to put a picture for every page showing an aspect of the LA concerned. However there is one problem here. I have not visited every borough in the country.

Having got the upgrade out of the way, the directory needed to be tackled. But what to do about the pictures? It would be a bit expensive to buy them in, and I was unhappy about just lifting them from the internet. However, I did a trawl via Google images to see what I could find. What I found, was Geograph.

This is an amazing site, sponsored by the Ordnance Survey. Its aim is to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometer of Great Britain and Ireland. The pictures are donated by ordinary people who load them up to the site, where they can be viewed online. What is more, they can be reproduced under the creative commons license on web-sites! Voila, my problem solved!

I have decided that, in accordance with the spirit of the Geograph site, I will only use their images in my 'open access' Local Authority Directory, and will rely on my own and purchased images for the commercial part of the site. There is a fantastic selection of pictures to use, many of them of superb quality! Mind you, artistically speaking, there are also a lot of rubbish quality photos, but good show all the same. It has made the otherwise tedious business of reviewing and updating my directory, fascinating.

So, after doing a few amendments to my template (some of you may have noticed that the amended entries have the H1 orange heading, and the unamended entries still have the blue H3 heading), and checking the housing information from the LA web-site, I can then turn to the more interesting business of looking for a suitable picture on Geograph. This of course has the added bonus that I get to find out where the local authority actually is. This may sound silly, but many authorities have names which give no indication (to the average person) of their location. I now know for example that Allerdale is Cumbria, Broxtowe is in Nottinghamshire, and Calderdale is around Halifax.

It is interesting to see what pictures have been loaded up on geograph. It is clear that many of the photographers are keen railway buffs, as there are a lot of rail tracks, steam engines and the like (I have used one of them for Bury). There are also a lot of very nice pictures of canals and canal boats (eg Charnwood), and of course castles, and countryside.

Some of the pictures I have chosen for the site are city scenes, such as Brent and Bromley, others are of special buildings, such as in Cambridge and Canterbury, or show a well known scene in different weather conditions - Looe in winter, and Exmouth beach before a storm, plus a nice sunset for Brighton. There are also a few statutes, such as in Cannock Chase and (my favourite) Cheltenham. Some, such as Dover and Ely could only have one subject. As you can see, it has been fun.

A condition of using the photos under the creative commons license is that the photographer must be credited, and the fact that it is published under the creative commons license must be acknowledged. I have done this in the alt text, which you can see by hovering your mouse over the image, as well as mentioning it in the notes which will go (eventually) on every directory page.

At the time of writing this blog entry I am part way through the E’s so I have quite a lot of work still to do! Mind you, not all the LA Directory pictures are geograph ones, but most of them are.

As a grateful user of Geograph images, I have loaded up some of my own pictures to the site, and will continue to do so, so I can give back as well as take. I hope that some of you readers will also visit Geograph and find it as interesting as I have.

Putting audio files on Landlord-Law

I think it was an article in the excellent Internet Newsletter, from Delia Venables which first gave me the idea to put sound files on Landlord-Law. I was also inspired by the podcasts on the i-legal.info site from solicitors Fisher Jones Greenwood, plus of course the pioneering work done by Justin Patten (although irritatingly I never seem to be able to access his blog site).

But would these solutions be right for Landlord-Law? How could I best use sound files to help members and prospective members? One obvious use (it seemed to me) was to provide answers to the questions which people thinking of joining often ring me up to ask. Explanatory pods (as I originally called them) scattered around the site with help and information. Perhaps people would be more likely to listen to these, than to read the information which is already there and which the people who ring me up (irritatingly) never seem to have looked at. Plus, maybe it would make them more likely to want to join. (!!)

What about our members? How could sound files help them? Well I know that many people do not like reading. This seems strange to me as I seem to have spent most of my life reading one thing or another, and can’t imagine not reading, but I am told that this is the case. And, some of the Landlord-Law articles are a bit long. Perhaps it would help the non readers if they could listen to them instead. Plus some people with busy lives do not have time for much reading. It might be helpful for them if they could download sound files and listen to them on the move.

But how to do it? My experience is only with word files. I needed to learn about sound. I am enormously indebted here to Claire Sandbrook, the CEO of Shergroup who very kindly invited me to a brilliant training day being done for her company by Karen Ainley of Mosaic Publicity. This gave me that initial injection of information and confidence which I needed to start. I bought the equipment recommended by Karen (basically a Marantz PMD 660 solid state recorder and mike), three books on podcasting (reading again!), and got going.

It is actually much more work than you would think doing sound files. First you have to write the scripts (I tried doing it 'off the cuff' but kept forgetting what I needed to say). Then you have to record it. This is also harder than you would think, plus you have to find somewhere to record where there is no background noise (my office was no good – too much traffic outside). Then you have to edit the sound file, and cut out all the coughs, clicks, sniffs and gurgles that always creep in and sound ghastly, as well as all the places where you get it wrong!. Then you listen to it and decide that it is not good enough and needs to be done again ...

So I had sound files. Professional sound engineers will probably wince if they listen to them, but they are at least fairly clear and you can hear what I am saying. (And I will learn more and get better over time!) Gill, my web-designer had once again come up trumps with some fabulous new icons, and sorted out the site so it could take mp3 files. By this time I had decided to call the files 'audios'. 'Pods' sounded silly, and the files are not podcasts in the normal sense.

So there you have it. We have audio. I hope you enjoy them and do not get too fed up with the sound of my voice. Why not go to the Landlord-Law site and have a listen now?

The future is orange

If you visit Landlord-Law today, particularly if you have not been there for a while, you will find that it has become rather, well, bright! We have had a bit of an upgrade.

After a rather depressing start to the year (for various reasons) I decided that things needed a bit of a shake up and commissioned my web-designer, Gill, to do me a radical new web-site design. "Nothing is sacrosanct", I told her, "well, apart from the logo of course". Naturally therefore a new logo was one of the first things she did.

It’s a bit different, the new site design. But after all there is no law which says that legal web-sites should be boring, and it is certainly not that. I told Gill that I wanted bright colours ("proper colours") and put an absolute ban on all pastels. Bless her, she did a stonking design.

"What do you think about having a few pictures?" she asked hesitatingly, one day (Landlord-Law 1 being almost entirely text based). "Yes", I said, "why not? Perhaps a few". Which is why you now see at least one photograph on every page, together with Wils cartoons, which I decided to use more lavishly (after all I do have about 6 years worth!)

The use of photos grew like Topsy. After uploading a couple, I was so stuck by how nice they looked, that I decided to use a few more … It was then quite a job to find sufficient. All of our holiday photos have been raided, and in additional I took quite a lot of pictures locally – luckily Norwich has a wide variety of housing types, so I could do the full range, from modern flats to (only one so far) a thatched cottage, plus endless terraced houses.

Most of the photos are by me, the majority taken within about 20 minutes walk from where I live, the rest having been taken on holidays and on the way home from a recent trip to Manchester. My husband took a few, and there are a few purchased photographs from http://www.istockphoto.com. I intend to change the photos from time to time and upload new ones as and when I take them – a new interest in life!

Another new feature of the site, is that it incorporates this blog! If you have not accessed the blog from the site, take a look – it is here.

Of course it is only when I have to check it over that I realise what a very large web-site Landlord-Law has become. I seem to have been working night and day on it for weeks on end (well about three I suppose) so it will be nice to step back a bit, and have a break. Although there are quite a few new things I want to do for the site, and my publisher is talking about a new book …

How to choose the right tenancy agreement- some guidance for landlords

Many landlords don’t bother too much about their tenancy agreement. They consider it to be a disagreeable necessity, something filled with legal ‘mumbo jumbo’, and just try to get the shortest and/or cheapest one they can find.

This is a mistake. A tenancy agreement sets out the rights and obligations between you and your tenant/s, and needs to be clear and unequivocal. You also need to use the correct agreement for the type of tenancy concerned.

Most tenancies nowadays will be an assured shorthold tenancy (AST). However if:

• the rent is over £25K
  
• the tenant is living in self contained premises in the same building as the landlord, or
  
• the tenant is a limited company

the tenancy cannot be an AST (which are regulated by the Housing Act 1988), and will governed by the underlying ‘common law’. You need to use a slightly different form of tenancy agreement which makes this clear. Otherwise mistakes could be made in error, for example by your legal advisor, if he is not made aware of the type of tenancy concerned. This could result in a claim for possession (for example) being thrown out by the court.

Assuming the tenancy is an AST, slightly different forms of agreement need to be used depending on whether:

• there is one or more tenants occupying the whole flat or house, or
  
• there are a number of tenants who all have a separate tenancy agreement for their own room, with shared use of the rest of the property

Other things you need to take into account are:

- Whether, if the term is over six months, you will want allow either party to end the agreement early. This is done by including a break clause

- Whether you will want the rent to be a weekly or monthly rent (most rent is paid monthly).

- Whether you will allow the tenant to have pets (in which case it may be advisable to use a tenancy agreement specially designed for this)

- Whether you will pay the utility bills or whether you will want the tenants to be responsible for this (for example landlords often pay the bills in shared houses).

Finally, when choosing a tenancy agreement it is a good idea to look for one which is written in a plain English style. These are much easier for both you and the tenant to understand, and tenants are more likely to read and comply with something they can read easily.

Landlords will find more information in the Landlord-Law Which Tenancy Agreement guide.

Banks swiping our cash

An article in the Observer today 'Banks exploiting obscure law to raid accounts and recover debts' prompts me to remind readers on housing benefit (HB), or landlords of tenants on housing benefits, of the advantages of using Credit Unions.

If you find it difficult to keep your bank account under control, you are always at risk that your housing benefit is going to be used up and will not be available to pay out to your landlord, thus putting your home at risk. Under the new rules which came into force last year, the new housing benefit, Local Housing Allowance (LHA), has to be paid (save in a few circumstances) to the tenant. Whereas before tenants could ask that it be paid direct to landlords, to safeguard their home.

Quite a few credit unions offer a service whereby they will ringfence any HB/LHA paid in, so it gets paid out to the landlord and cannot be used for any other purpose. I am compiling a list of credit unions offering this service on my Landlord Law site which you can see here. If you know of, or work for, any other credit unions offering this service, please let me know and I will add them to the list.

Credit unions would also be a safe haven for money being saved up for other purposes, to keep it safe from regular banks offsetting it against debts, as described in the Observer article.

Letting to tenants with pets

The Dogs Trust estimate that in the region of 40% of us in the UK have pets. Probably mostly dogs, cats and caged birds. As about 12-15% of the population live in rented accommodation it is fair to say that there must be many potential tenants looking for accommodation who have pets.

However many landlords routinely reject all pets as a matter of course, worried about the potential damage they could do to the property and its contents, and virtually all tenancy agreements have clauses prohibiting pets as standard.

However a report available on the Dogs Trust 'lets with pets' web-site challenges this viewpoint and suggests that many landlords are foolish to reject out of hand many people who would, along with their pets, prove to be excellent tenants. A survey carried out by the Dogs Trust also shows that

• 78% of pet owners reported that they had experienced difficulties finding privately rented accommodation that would allow their pets
  
• 54% of pet owners were never able to find a suitable property that accepted pets, and
  
• 8% of people had to rehome their pet

A landlord therefore who is willing to allow pets in his property will find that he has a much larger pool of potential tenants and is likely to let his property quicker, and to tenants who will probably stay for longer, meaning fewer voids.

In order to assist landlords, at Landlord-Law we have produced a new tenancy agreement specifically for landlords letting to tenants with pets. It contains special 'pets' clauses in the terms and conditions and fields for details of the pets, their vet, and someone who will look after them in case of emergency. You can read about it in the article 'Letting to tenants with pets' which you can download from here.

Another unfair decision against a landlord

I did an advice today for a lady who had brought proceedings for possession (acting in person) on the basis of over £12,000 in arrears of rent. However the Judge put back the date for possession for over seven weeks (during which periode of time it is virtually certain that the tenant will pay no rent) because the daughter of the tenant was due to take her 'O' levels and he did not want her to be disturbed.

I have seen a lot of unreasonable decisions, but I have to say that this takes the biscuit! Why should my client be responsible (effectively) for the cost of housing her tenants daugher during her 'O' levels? Bearing in mind that even once the date for possession arrives, it will then take up to six weeks or more to actually obtain a bailiffs appointment.

No wonder the Law Commission in their Renting Homes consultation (see last post) received so many complaints from landlords about Judges use of their discretion in possession claims!

They propose to solve the problem, by the way, by making the exercise of a Judge's discretion statutorily structured. This means that the Judge will have a checklist of questions they must answer before coming to a decision. Let us hope (if it happens) that it helps them come to more sensible decisions.

Mind you, if my lady had used our repossession service instead of going alone, we would have made sure that the claim form was drafted properly, which would have ensured that the very most time the Judge could have given would have been six weeks - and I expect my barrister would have made sure that the period was actually much less than this. But if landlords will act in person ....

Tessa on the radio

I was on the radio last week! I got rung up I think on Monday by a lady from Radio Solent (Hampshire, miles away from me in Norwich) saying that they wanted to do a feature on lodgers and would I go on and talk a bit? Well I’m always willing to give it a go if it means publicity for Landlord-law (such a capitalist!) so I said yes, why not?

Although I would have preferred to be interviewed on proper landlord law, my site does cover lodger stuff. Apparently there is not much on the net on lodgers so when she did her re-searching, my site was pretty high up on the list (perhaps partly due to my www.lodger.org.uk domain name).

They were not able to do the first day they suggested as someone important in sport died and they had to do a feature on him, but we did it on the Friday.

As it was in Hampshire and I am in Norwich it was done on the phone. You get rung up and they then put you on hold but you can hear the program. When you are on the air they clue you in by asking a question with your name in it so you know when to answer. It is all very immediate and frantic on the radio, quite fun, but there were constant interruptions for things like traffic reports, or updates on a charity auction they were doing. I just sat there and spoke when asked to.

I listened to myself later via the BBC listen again feature and I suppose I was not too awful, although I ummed a bit. But you do, don’t you, when you are thinking of what to say? I don’t think there were any real bad bits, although I suspect that they knew when I was struggling as they would cut in with a charity auction update, which let me off the hook a couple of times.

Anyway, I have now ‘done’ radio. Did anyone hear me? What did you think?

Where has all the money gone?

I see from the Law Society Gazette this week (p5) that the County Courts made a profit of £45.5 million pounds last year. So why, when I was speaking to the manager of our local court last night, did she tell me that they have a massive turnover of staff because they cannot afford to pay them properly, and that they have horrendous listing problems because they cannot afford to use enough Deputy District Judges? Where is all this money going to?

By the way, turn over to page 21 of the Gazette and you will see a bit about me!!!

The Rent Arrears Action Plan

In view of the current financial situation, I have added a new members only service to my Landlord-Law site, a Rent Arrears Action Plan. This is in five parts (the first part being preliminary information) and contains detailed guidance to landlords on what they should do from the moment their tenant first falls into arrears, up to considering court action. It contains precedent letters which can be printed off and used, the possession notices, and checklists, so landlords can keep a record of what they have done.

It is important that rent arrears are dealt with promptly, not only for the landlord but also for the tenant. If rent arrears are allowed to build up (and I have seen some horrendous rent arrears in my time) then they will get to such a state that the tenant will never be able to pay them off. Whereas if the tenant starts dealing with them at an early stage, it may be possible for an installment plan to be arranged, which will allow the tenant to stay in the property. The landlord will then not be faced with the expensive of court proceedings, a large rent arrears bill, and all the bother of having to find a new tenant. Often when people fall into debt they will pay the person or company which is shouting the loudest. So if the landlord does not do anything, this will often result in the tenant giving other debts priority.

Even if the tenant cannot afford, long term, to stay in the property, if things are dealt with promptly then it may be possible for things to be kept under control until the landlord can evict the tenant under the cheaper section 21 procedure. This will allow the tenant to apply for local authority housing which, if the tenant has a family, they will be entitled to. However if the tenant is being evicted for serious rent arrears, the tenant may also have lost the right to be re-housed if the Local Authority consider he is responsible for the eviction himself (i.e. because he did not pay rent when he should have done).

Most landlords are reasonably humane people and will want to help their tenants if they can. However, many will not know what to do when tenants fall into arrears, or understand the situation their tenants are in vis a vis Local Authority re-housing. Hopefully this new service will be of assistance.

Out of season holiday lets

I did some work for a client today who runs a couple of holiday homes in a converted barn near her country home. She sometimes lets these out on short term lets out of season but is now regretting it, or at least the most recent let. This was to a lady who, having moved in on the understanding that she would have to go in May when the holiday makers start coming, has now decided that she is going to stay on, as indeed is her right technically. Which puts my client in a difficult position.

So my lady came to me to draft up a section 21 notice, which has been done and which will be served on the tenant tomorrow. But it is looking increasingly unlikely that she will move out much before the autumn, so my client is in problems with her holiday customers, some of whom booked up to stay in the holiday cottages over a year ago. She is hoping that they do not sue.

It is very difficult to get over to clients sometimes the difficulty of getting tenants out. "Oh, I told her she could only stay until April" I hear them say about their tenants. But telling them this is meaningless if the tenant is determined to stay, and has the legal right to do so. And a letter politely asking them to leave in 14 days when the holiday makers arrive is almost worse than useless. Any request to a tenant to vacate when their rights have not been followed (i.e. the right to have a proper form of possession notice served on them first) can technically be harassment, which is a criminal offence.

If you have a holiday cottage, it is always a risk letting it to a tenant on an out of season holiday let. If you only let to holiday makers you have the right to move them out at the end of their holiday period without going to court, as holiday lets are one of the exceptions under the Protection from Eviction Act 1977. However if your residential tenant refuses to go, you have to get a court order, and by the time this has been done, even using the so called 'accelerated procedure' the holiday period could be almost over and you will have a lot of disgruntled customers.

In an effort to help things, I have now prepared a special out of season holiday let form, for members of my Landlord-Law service (to be found in my student lets section, as this sort of arrangement often works best with students who do not want to stay in the property over the summer anyway). The agreement specifically states that the property is let as a holiday home at other times of the year and provides for the rent, if the tenant stays on after the end of the fixed term, to go up to the holiday rent rate. This should hopefully discourage tenants from staying on.

I interview Dalek Sec

We are huge Doctor Who fans in our house, so when I bought some lapel mikes for my recording equipment, my son Patrick insisted that I interview him as a Dalek. Landlord and tenant law on Skaro seemed the obvious choice of topic, although purists will realise that of course this interview is impossible as Skaro was destroyed in the time war. We only thought of that afterwards.

We did not really have a script but made it up as we went along having discussed a few ideas first. It was Patrick’s idea to mention the oncoming storm (if you have watched the new series you will understand this), my husband suggested enslaving the Thals, and I was determined to escape via a ventilation shaft.

I have loaded the interview up to my web-site as a bit of Christmas fun, and you can listen to it here.

Have you time for the Times?

I was sitting at my computer about three weeks ago, wondering how I was going to fit everything into my day, when I was rung up by a journalist from The Times.

"I’m doing a feature on online sources of information for Landlords" he said ("goody, goody" I thought) "and I would like to mention your Landlord-Law website." ("Yippee!!") " But to do the article I need to speak to one of your web-site members, today, and this really needs to be someone who would agree to have their photograph taken. I know it’s a bit short notice but could you find someone by about 4.00pm this afternoon…"

Well after a lot of ringing around I managed to find him three loyal members in the end, by lunchtime, one of whom was the nice Mr Thornton who he finally used. The article however did not appear until today, about three weeks later, when I had forgotten all about it. Typical! I will have to see if my newsagent can get me a copy.

You can see the article online here. I can’t see the photo of Mr Thornton though, although he told me it had been taken. Maybe it is in the printed edition.

Nice article though. I particularly like the 'respected solicitor and author' bit. Sometimes I feel I could do with a bit more respect, particularly from my family (fat chance). But I note that I answer the Q&A once a fortnight not once a month.

He also mentioned this blog! I had a look at the Times moneyweblog he referred to but could not find any entries on landlord matters. So you are better off sticking with the Landlord-Law Blog! Why not bookmark it now? Or better still subscribe to the RSS feed! (You can do this by scrolling right down to the bottom of the screen and clicking the subscribe to posts link).

VAT changes – how these are being dealt with on the Landlord-Law site

Mr Darlings reduction of the VAT rate to 15% from 17.5% has created a bit of a headache for myself and doubtless lots of other UK traders. This blog seems to be the best place to explain the way I have decided to deal with the various prices on Landlord-Law.

For me to change the Landlord-Law membership fees (4.70/£15/£70.50) would involve my web-designer doing work to the site (which I would have to pay for), as online membership purchase is completely automatic and done via a secure server. Were I to drop the prices, the benefit to the customers would be very small - £0.10p, £0.31p, and £1 respectively. As the Landlord-Law service is (in my view) pretty good value anyway, I am going to leave these prices as they are. Sorry!

For the other prices, I have decided to deal with them as follows.

Where the online price is based on an ex VAT round figure I have reduced my price to take account of the VAT fall. This includes Kits 1, 2, 3, and 4 non member prices, all the possession proceedings, and the tenancy amendments service.

Where the total price was chosen because it is a nice round figure, in particular the £75 advice fee, this has been left as it is. I put a lot of work into the advice given and I think clients can (effectively) pay another £1.60. I have also left the possession notice drafting fixed fee of £75 (although this is not used much as most people use the online forms), and the members kit prices for kits 3, 4 and 5. Members buying kits get a lot of support via the online forum so I am not going to reduce these prices.

The other two prices are the non members kit 5 price, which I have reduced to £95 (a bit more than the VAT drop) and my tenancy agreement check price, which has gone up to £391 (a slight increase on the previous fee).

I will take a view on prices generally next year if Mr Darling puts the VAT up again.

Student lettings - new agreements on Landlord-Law

I am just finishing a fairly long running project (about 2 months) to develop some new special tenancy agreements for student lets, for my Landlord-Law site.

Developed initially in response to a query from one of my members on the discussion forum, they are designed to deal with two particular problems with student lets:

• The fact that they are generally signed when the previous tenants are still in occupation (which could potentially cause major problems if they refused to move out, as legally they are entitled to do), and
  
• The fact that landlords will want to let the property for the whole year, but many students will not want to live there over the summer.

It was initially just going to be one agreement. However when I put it out to consultation with the membership, some of them wanted one part and others wanted another, and some said that they would definitely not want that part, so in the end I decided to do a number of different agreements using different combinations.

Then another member sent me his standard agreement for out of season holiday lets so I thought that perhaps I would do one of them too.

So there will eventually be four different types, although at the time of typing this I have not yet loaded up the out of season holiday let one.

Its been a bit of a time for tenancy drafting recently. Apart from these student agreements, I have been asked by clients to do an under 18 tenant (signing jointly with her guarantor), an assured tenancy for an elderly couple renting a flat intended for the rest of their lifetime, and a memorandum for protected tenancies. Heigh Ho!

HMO licensing – tenants entitled to rent refund

I was interested to read the report here about a landlord in Liverpool who was convicted of operating a House in Multiple Occupation (HMO) without a license, and fined £3,000 plus costs. The Council then wrote to all his tenants, who successfully claimed back a part of their rent.

The rent refund application must be made to the Residential Property Tribunal (RPT) who can order the landlord to pay back up to 12 months rent to his tenants. In this case the RPT ordered the landlord to refund three months rent. This totalled £3,900, so in total this landlords failure to obtain a license for his property has cost him over £7,000 (if the costs order is taken into account).

Tenants wanting to make a similar application will find a pdf giving guidance and other information linked from the right hand margin of this page on my web-site www.landlordlaw.co.uk.

Landlords who are worried that their property might need a license, should contact their Local Authority asap. For contact details see the Landlord-Law Local Authority Directory.

Note that we are still compiling our list of HMO licence fees charged by different Local Authorities.

HMOs again

I have seen a couple of reports recently on the internet (here and here) saying that a study by Heritable Bank has recommended that the HMO system be reviewed, as there is such a wide discrepancy between the license fees charged by different local authorities, and also a wide variation in the way they deal with licensing generally.

Strangely, I cannot find any mention of this report on the Heritable Bank web-site, although maybe I am not looking in the right place.

However everyone who has anything to do with residential landlord and tenant law and practice, must know of this wide variation in license fees, which many feel is wholly unacceptable. It has been mentioned several times on this blog, and I have also been developing a list of different license fees, which you will find here. Fees on this list run from about £30-50 per room or unit to £1,100 for Newcastle (as mentioned in the articles). In fact though, the most expensive Local Authority to my knowledge is Southend. However they cunningly disguise their high charge by saying that it is £660 for two years, whereas most authorities charge for a five year period. The Southend fee for a five year period works out at £1,650.

There is no doubt that the new HMO regulations have greatly upset landlords, and I believe that many former HMO landlords have now sold up altogether. On the whole I do not think that the regulations are too excessive. The worst problem, that of the wash hand basin requirement for large HMOs, has now been dealt with. The regulations were only introduced last year and perhaps should be given a bit longer to bed in before any revisions are made. However I do think that the wide fee variation is generally undesirable and this aspect should be looked at. Whether it will or not, is of course another matter.

New developments on Landlord Law

Several things I have been planning for a while will come to fruition shortly.

The Newsletter
The Landlord Law newsletter is an important part of my service. However, the newsletter mailer I have been using almost since we started in 2001, is now a bit old and clunky. I am therefore changing to using a professional company, Constant Contact. My web designer Gill and I have been working on the new template, which looks great!

However the new service requires the database to be re-created. The annual members list will be uploaded, so annual Landlord Law members don't need to do anything. However I do need all those on my free newsletter list to sign up again, which you can do here. The first of the new newsletters will be sent out later today (12 November) so if you want to receive it you should sign up now!

However all is not lost if you read this too late, as you will be able to read the most recent newsletter on the site (something else I have wanted to do for a while). I will be putting a link to todays newsletter on the site shortly.

A new blog
My web designer and I are also working on a new blog design, which should go live in a week or so. At that time the blog url will change (as we are coming off blogger) so watch this space, as you will need to amend any links you may have. However my feedburner feed url should not change.

If you receive the new newsletter today, let me know what you think.

[Later - the mailing went out all right, you can see the new newsletter here.]