Living the Rental Nightmare
My partner D and I are both 65. He is in poor health. We have lived in our current ground floor flat on St Leonards seafront for five years.
We originally lived together in Tunbridge Wells, where I had a housing association tenancy. After ten years’ occupation I exercised my right to buy. Six years later, both of us became ill. We decided that our best option was to sell our home and live off the balance of the proceeds while we coped with the debilitating treatment.
We had personal connections in St Leonards, and I was attracted by its strong art connections. So in 2008 we rented a flat on St Leonards seafront at a modest rent. Over the next 15 years we moved a few times. In 2018 we moved to a ground floor at Marina. The leasehold owner lived in the basement flat below, and I thought we had a good relationship.
A SUDDEN RENT JUMP
In late 2021 this owner told me that she needed to raise money and was therefore going to increase our rent by £100 per month. She assumed we could get increased benefit to cover this. She became angry when I explained to her that this was not the case. I wrote to her to say that we could just pay the increase if we were careful. But she responded on the telephone that she had now decided to sell the flat. She served an eviction notice under section 21 in February 2022 giving us four months to leave.
At first, she did not pursue it. However, she clearly felt that we had obstructed her recovery of the flat unreasonably, and from that point on our relationship deteriorated rapidly. She shouted at me in the street and made me feel uncomfortable every time our paths crossed. D was, by this time, quite ill with cancer.
Last July the owner served another section 21 notice. Eventually we were ordered to vacate by 25 October last year, though I had applied for a longer period of notice on the grounds of D’s illness. After intervention by the Brighton Housing Trust, the vacation date was extended to 22 November.
AN OVERWHELMED COUNCIL
I applied for re-housing to Hastings Borough Council. They wouldn’t offer any assistance until an eviction notice had been turned into a court order. They clearly had far too many needy people for the amount of homes available. Phone calls went unanswered. They did offer us a two-bedroom flat on the ninth floor of a tower block in Hollington. I replied that, for health reasons, I didn’t feel it was suitable. I was told that the only alternative might be a single room for up to two years!
I looked at available lettings in the private sector, but was told that we needed to show that our annual income was 30 times the monthly rent. That meant that, for a flat in London Road advertised at £850 per month, we would need to show income above £25,000. We couldn’t, and never would.
A CRUEL SYSTEM
However, Brighton Housing Trust continued to give us amazing help – I don’t know what we would have done without them. And eventually the council has offered us somewhere acceptable to live. By the time this article is published we expect to have moved in.
I don’t blame the owner of our Marina flat for wanting us out. But she seems to have blamed us for a situation we didn’t create. I don’t blame any individual for the catastrophic housing problem. There is just something wrong with the system. Something very wrong.
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The section 21 notices should be banned and in fact should never have come into being in the first place.
This should actually be made a criminal offence for people to kick people out of their homes without giving a good reason and with just two months notice.
These no fault evictions were approved in the courts quite a while ago, over one year, but didn’t yet get passed in law and now have been put back even further!
I’m sure the reason is clear, because the law is on the side of the landlord whereas countries like Germany and Portugal the laws are on the side of the tenants.
The UK is still a snobby, class divided society unfortunately and this I’m sure is at the heart of it.
In Germany for instance when you rent a place it is called unbefristed which means unlimited, and it would be very very difficult indeed to get anybody out of something that they had rented unless they were so anti social that they burned the place down or something like that, and if they have children it’s even harder to get people out.
This law is also counterproductive to the government which obviously haven’t given it enough thought, because when people can kick people out like that then children often get put into care or the family get put in a hotel or hotel together, and where is the money coming from, of course from the taxpayer, that affects the economy as well, our government is so stupid it’s unbelievable, NO common sense whatsoever.