I pride myself on being a respectable landlord. My properties are well maintained and I look after my tenants as best I can (within reason). My property rental business is about making money, but not at the expense of vulnerable people. However, after reading about the Dispatches investigation scheduled for 8pm on Channel 4 this evening, it appears that there are rather a lot of unscrupulous people out there who could best be described as “slum landlords”.
In tonight’s Channel 4 documentary from the award winning Dispatches team, veteran reporter, Jon Snow, promises to lift the lid on the shady world of slum landlords, revealing the “shocking conditions in which tenants are forced to live.” With scenes indicative of a Charles Dickens novel, viewers can apparently look forward to seeing squalid properties unfit for human habitation being administered by bullying landlords who pocket huge sums of money at the expense of their vulnerable tenants. Andunlike me, these landlords are regularly raking in millions of pounds per year in income from their poor, beleaguered tenants. There is also mention in the programme of landlords in London capitalising on the lack of rental accommodation by charging desperate tenants money to live in illegal sheds!
Frankly, the conditions described in the programme blurb sound appalling and it is difficult to imagine that landlords in this day and age are able to get away with such abuses. But like lots of landlords, I will be watching Dispatches tonight with a great deal of interest.
