Housing Law – Support for Tenants

Your first point of contact should be the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, you can visit your local office, ring your local office or chat to them online on their website. They have a large amount of information about common questions and problems tenants have. They can also point you towards a law firm that holds a Legal Aid contract for Housing matters.

No. In order to formally and lawfully evict you, your landlord will need to apply to the Courts for a Possession Order. If you do not vacate the property, a landlord can only re-enter the property and change the locks once they have obtained a Possession Order and executed a Warrant of Possession through the County Court Bailiffs.

In order to pursue a Disrepair Claim, you will need to keep a log of:

• each item of disrepair at the property
• when you reported this to your landlord and
• what your landlord’s response was.

A claim for disrepair can include damages for any items damaged/destroyed as a result of the disrepair, a partial refund of any rent you have paid since the landlord was on notice of the disrepair and did not carry out the necessary repairs, plus potentially an order requiring the landlord to carry out the repairs.

Before you can bring a claim through the courts, you will likely need to obtain an expert surveyor’s report which comments on the disrepair, confirms whether it falls under the landlord’s obligations of repair under Section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 and advises what is required to remedy the disrepair.

It is also worth noting that there may be express terms in your tenancy agreement which set out what exactly your landlords repairs obligations are. These may be more onerous than the obligations that are implied by statute into all assured shorthold tenancy agreements.

For all tenancies per Section 11 Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, a landlord must keep in repair and proper working order the installations in the property that supply:

• gas and electricity
• heating and hot water
• water and sanitation

Your landlord must keep the structure and exterior of a property in repair. Your landlord would be responsible for repairing the structure when it causes damp and mould problems within your home. Your landlord cannot avoid their implied duty to carry out repairs by stating in the tenancy agreement they are not responsible.

Your landlord has a duty to ensure your home is fit for human habitation, pursuant to section 9A of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 which was inserted by the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018. A property might be unfit for occupation because of:

• disrepair
• damp and mould
• water or sanitation problems
• health and safety hazards