Ahhhhh… Here we go again. John Healey, Minister for Housing has, once again, highlighted proposals for more protection of the consumer in the private rented sector (PRS). As a result of the 2009 consultation, he has highlighted measures that he hopes will improve the standards of the PRS. The salient points are
1. A new national helpline funded by voluntary organisations
2. Increasing the threshold of annual AST rental value from £25,000 to £100,000.
So what does this mean for you?
We can see two issues that immediately spring to mind, and a third, more controversial observation that seems to appear throughout legislative changes to do with the property sector recently;
1. Although the increase is welcomed, most landlords will not be affected as the increase will only affect the more affluent areas of the country where rental prices are higher than average. However, those landlords that issued tenancies for values above £25,000 after April 2007 (bear with me on this!) will now fall into the Housing Act 2004 in case of any legal issues concerning the tenancy. Can anyone see where we are going on this?
What about the deposits that were taken at the start of the tenancy? Strictly, these deposits will now need to be registered immediately with one of the approved schemes. Not a problem in itself, albeit this may incur a cost, but, the Act clearly states that a deposit must be registered withi 10 days of recieving the deposit. So, are all these landlords automatically in default? Will they be fined THREE TIMES THE DEPOSIT and potentially lose all of the rent paid so far? Mmmmm, has this been thought through properly?
2. The new helpline will be run by ‘voluntary’ organisations and funded by them. Has any landlord tried to talk to the CAB regarding an AST before? Whilst we are sure that they try the best that they can, our experience of so called ‘help’ ranges from ‘not my speciality’ to blatant obstruction of a landlord attempting to gain legal possession of a property by telling a tenant to ‘stay put’ as the landlord will take ‘two months’ to evict you. We do not wish to make any allegations of wrongdoing, but clearly a voluntary helpline where the organisation has no knowledge or experience of the industry could do more harm than good. We welcome an advisory service, but it needs to be run by professionals who know the legal framework. An example could be Propertymark or NFOPP running the scheme.
3. The third point, is a little controversial, but needs making; all throughout the consultation processes (Rugg Report etc etc) they have concentrated on the PRS. Does any legislative changes equally apply to the social housing market??? We think not.
