Note that this post is primarily about UK politics, so if you’re here for technical content, you may want to just skip it. Some of the content and jargon assumes you’re at least vaguely familiar with the news of the past year or so.
This year the UK marked the return of Labour to the government, after fourteen years of successive Conservative governments, and a number of policies that I’ll just define as controversial – even though I have a clear opinion – because what I want to focus on here has nothing to do with said policies.
With the new government came a lot of new MPs, and with them, came closer scrutiny — which is both healthy and welcome in my opinion. And one of the topics over the summer, was the discovery that the MP with the most dwellings leased to tenants this time was a Labour MP: Jas Athwal, MP for Ilford South.
This by itself got a few headlines, because the role of landlord is usually associated with posh, stuck-up Conservative types, not Labour — particularly given there’s a vocal fraction of Labour supporters despising landlord as a whole group. But it is also not unexpected: given the change in distribution of the Parliament, it was a low chance for a Conservative landlord to be elected in the first place.
That is not, though, what piqued my interest. Instead it was the follow-up stories about the horrible state of the flats, and the hypocrisy of Mr Athwal not having followed the very same scheme the Council he was a leader of established. Though the part that was interesting to me was rather the way his primary defense had been that of using his agent as the scapegoat:
“I’m shocked at the reported condition of a number of the properties and have asked the managing agent for an explanation and immediate action to rectify any issues,” he said.
“I know it’s my responsibility to have issues addressed as soon as they arise and have met the property management company to understand failures in communication.
The thing is, I can believe him, when he says that the agency did not make him aware of the existing issues — I have after all rented in London for over seven years now, and between my own experience and that of my friends, I can guarantee that agents do their best not to let the actual property owner know about issues that need to be addressed. That is their primary business: to provide plausible deniability for landlords when it turns out they have been mis-managing a property!
I have shared previously our horrible experiences with Dexters, who was managing the flat we lived in up until the Lockdown. While our landlord turned out to be a splendid and professional person, the agency’s behaviour was intentionally engineered to protect the landlord from even knowing how terrible the experience of tenants can be.
First of all, once you have an agency, you’re not required to provide contact details to reach the landlord in the first place. In our case, the flat was owned by a limited company, with Dexters acting as the agent of said company. While we had a name, which we could match to Companies House registration, we were provided no phone number nor email address. When I got fed up enough with Dexters that I felt I needed to go over their head, the only option I found was to send a letter to the virtual address the company was registered at, in the hope that the turnkey accounting company would be able to forward it to the actual person behind it — which they did.
But that only worked because our landlord cared. I wasn’t contacting him with any legal authority, I wasn’t even trying to burst the plausible deniability bubble — he could have just as well ignored the letter, it wasn’t registered mail or anything like that. So we got very lucky.
But otherwise, Dexters did exactly what they are meant to do — I do repeat they’re a terrible property management company, and having released the keys to our flat to a third party without our, or the landlord’s, consent put our landlord in a vulnerable position as well, but the primary objective of property management agencies is to shield the landlord from knowing how bad things can be.
As an agency, Dexters avoided reaching out to the landlord no matter what happened. Part of the rent money didn’t show up on their system (because their bank charged them to receive a GBP SWIFT transaction)? Landlord doesn’t know. The building is overrun by short-term rentals (not just Airbnb, but also more organized operations)? Landlord doesn’t hear it from either Dexters or the building’s company. Ventilation doesn’t work? Deal yourself with the builder. The external window had its lock removed because it was damaged? I believe the following tenant received it as-is.
The silliest case was when my then-girlfriend-now-wife was moving in with me: we needed to get the lease terms changed to include her name. Dexters didn’t even ask the landlord, leaving us waiting for an answer, until I told them explicitly that either they’d get the approval sorted, or I’d be taking the mutual break clause the month before first scheduled Brexit deadline. When we talked with him and checked the timeline, up until that point they hadn’t even notified him I wanted to add my partner to the lease.
Again, I want to repeat this here, that this is behaving exactly as intended. The agencies primary role is to wrap the problems with enough plausible deniability so that the landlord either doesn’t get to know, or at the very least get to feign ignorance, of any problem the tenants might have. With very few cases, where maintenance needed to happen, our landlord was not aware of any of the struggles or issues we’ve been reporting through the agency.
And this is where I’m fairly annoyed by how the reporting of Mr Athwal’s case turned — instead of taking this as an opportunity to discuss the role of rental agencies in today’s housing market, or to push for regulation around the use intermediaries designed around plausible deniability. But instead, it turned to partisan politics, and we just ended up with the local Conservative interested in what’s going on only because the landlord was Labour. A squandered opportunity.
What we need is higher protection for tenants’ quality of life — not necessarily focusing solely on the worst case scenario of eviction, but rather covering the more mundane situation of people being locked into a lease for a place that is not being maintained. As I type this, the flat my wife and I lease is without heating, while the first snow hit London — it’s the same HVAC system that failed in the summer when the balcony reached 45°C. There’s no provision in the AST contract for us to request remedy in this situation, our only option would be to break the lease, and move out early.
Indeed, the harrowing conditions suffered from some tenants are effectively a workaround to the lack of eviction powers — the ban on no-fault evictions, which is necessary to avoid rents skyrocketing the moment a modicum of demand shows up, effectively normalized the complete disregard for maintenance and living conditions, pushing tenants from breaking out of their tenancy agreements by their own initiative, rather than requiring the landlords to suggest an eviction.
What I personally would like to see is for a regulator to be created, providing up to date guidelines for rentals, starting from a review of the AST wordings used by most agencies, and defining clear SLA (Service Level Agreements) to apply to maintenance requests coming from tenants, and extend the Housing Ombudsman scope to include at the minimum private tenants going through rental agencies — currently the participation in its scheme is only mandatory for housing associations and local authorities.
I’ll be sending this post to my MP, as well as share it as widely as it might make sense, in the inane hope that something can be done to bring back sanity, and dignity, to tenants throughout the UK.