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Hello and welcome to this week’s Home Front. Private renters are not as powerless as they might think when they encounter a rogue landlord.
When Rachel Taylor, 36, moved out of her £1,215-a-month one-bedroom flat in east London, she was shocked to discover her deposit of £1,644 was not returned by her landlord.
“I was texting my landlord asking for my deposit to be returned and he wasn’t replying. I suddenly panicked,” she says.
For Rachel, at the time, the figure represented half her monthly income as a university course leader and lecturer. She was moving out of the flat, where she lived alone, and into a houseshare in an effort to save money.
“I really needed the money back because my ex-boyfriend had moved out of the flat, leaving me to pay for everything – rent and bills – alone.”
But, then, after a quick Google session, Rachel discovered that if her deposit wasn’t properly protected then she had legal recourse. This came in the form of something known as a Rent Repayment Order (RRO).
An RRO is a court order requiring a landlord who has committed certain offences – including not properly protecting tenants’ deposits in an accredited deposit protection service – to repay rent.
Once an RRO has been applied, a landlord can be compelled to repay up to 12 months’ rent, universal credit housing costs or housing benefit. In order to get an RRO, tenants or local authorities must apply to a first-tier tribunal.
If successful, the amount owed under the RRO is enforceable as if it were a debt in the county court. This means that bailiffs can be instructed to collect the debt and that the court can also order the debtor’s employer to deduct money from their wages or benefits or arrange for the money to be paid directly by the debtor’s bank (known as a third-party debt order).
“I was surprised that I didn’t already know about RROs,” Rachel explains. “I wouldn’t have looked it up if the landlord hadn’t taken so long to reply and made me feel anxious. I’m not sure I would even have begun legal proceedings if he’d returned it quickly, so he could have gotten away with it.”
Rachel decided to engage “no win, no fee” solicitors whom she found during her Google search. However, it’s worth noting that other grassroots organisations exist, such as Flat Justice which specialise solely in obtaining RROs.
As well as not protecting a deposit, the other offences that could mean a landlord is liable for an RRO include renting out an unlicensed House in Multiple Occupation (HMO), using or threatening violence to secure entry into a property, illegal eviction or harassment, failure to comply with an improvement notice or continuing to operate as a landlord after being banned from doing so.
Rachel’s landlord returned her deposit after she had started legal proceedings against him. However, because she now knew that a breach of the law had occurred, she continued to pursue an RRO.
In June 2024, Rachel and her solicitor took her former landlord to court. He didn’t even bother to attend.
Rachel was awarded a total of six months’ rent – amounting to £9,864 – and £445.97 in interest.
“The judge quickly decided to award everything to me,” Rachel says. “The judge said it was ‘clear cut’ and the landlord hadn’t sent any representation so that was that.”
Rachel’s “no win, no fee” solicitor took just over £2,000 of her total settlement as payment for their work.
It took until December for Rachel’s compensation to hit her account. This was because they had to find her landlord who was not responding to any correspondence.
“It all went on so long that I started to think I might never get my money. But it felt amazing when I saw it in my bank account,” Rachel says.
The compensation has been what Rachel describes as a “life-changing amount of money.”
“I’ve just bought a flat of my own for the first time and I’ve used the money to pay for the solicitors’ fees,” she says. “I’ve also got a bit left over a safety net in case anything goes wrong.”
Rachel wishes more people knew about RROs. “I think lots of people could use this support… I even have friends who have had similar problems with deposits which weren’t protected but they didn’t realise they could get help,” she concludes.
Guy Morris, director of Flat Justice, said “this recourse is something people are only just finding out about.”
“The new Renters’ Rights Bill has generated a bit of publicity for RROs, and I hope it will mean people find out more as a result. This is one of the few ways that tenants have of accessing justice without needing to use a solicitor,” Morris said.
Flat Justice has a “zero-barrier” approach to RROs. This means they will still help people who don’t qualify for help with legal fees.
You can find out more about Rent Repayment Orders on Flat Justice’s website or on the housing charity Shelter’s website.
If you’ve had a problem with your landlord, I’d love to hear from you [email protected]
There’s a lot of concern about whether we have enough construction workers to build the 1.5 million new homes that Labour has promised over the next few years.
According to the Home Builders Federation (HBF) and the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) we need another 25,000 bricklayers, 3,000 extra plumbers, 4,000 additional plasterers, 10,000 more carpenters, and 3,000 new electricians.
Does this stack up?
In short, yes. In recent years, housebuilders have been warning that the construction industry has lost skilled workers since Brexit. Added to that, I hear from builders regularly that they have a growing problem with the skilled workers they have left retiring and not being replaced by younger people.
The Government is currently working with the CITB and the National House-Building Council (NHBC) to launch new skills hubs.
However, it will take time to recruit younger workers and train them up. So, unless Labour gets moving quickly, it’s fair to say they may struggle to get new housing built because, out simply, we don’t have the builders to build it.
And, that’s before we even start talking about the shortage of skilled planning and building control officers.
Do you have something to say about the construction worker shortage? Are you a construction skills teacher? I’d love to talk – [email protected]
Since the Government announced that it would need to take down Grenfell Tower a few weeks ago, I’ve had a few questions from readers “asking what happens next with the Grenfell Inquiry?”
This is a good question.
Last year, the first phase of the Grenfell Inquiry made several recommendations for the Government. These included fire safety recommendations for existing buildings and the creation of a single regulator for the construction industry to ensure the safety of new buildings.
My understanding is that we might hear something from Labour about their progress on these recommendations this week. Perhaps at PMQs. Let’s hope that’s the case because action on building safety is long overdue.
Send in your questions to: @Victoria_Spratt, on X, formerly Twitter, @vicky.spratt on Instagram or via email [email protected]
Over the weekend, I started watching Apple Cider Vinegar on Netflix. It’s the story of Belle Gibson, a disgraced Australian wellness influencer who faked having cancer and built a career around selling people a lifestyle based around foods which, she said, could boost their health.
I remember the period in which Gibson rose to prominence well. In the early 2010s I was in my early twenties, everyone was swapping cows’ milk for soy milk and trying to procure chia seeds from British supermarkets that didn’t stock them. I, as most young women do, also dabbled in some of these trends.
It’s all too easy to sneer at the wellness industry and the people who are suckered in by its more nefarious elements. However, what I took away from Apple Cider Vinegar is that the obsessive and compulsive drive to control diet seems more like a desperate effort to claim agency in a world where, increasingly, forces beyond our control – our deteriorating environment, volatile politics and increasingly harsh economic backdrop – deprive us of it.
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