There was much ado in the press yesterday about Shelter’s “5 point plan for tackling rogue landlords” and I read with interest that more than 86,000 tenants had apparently made complaints about their landlords—none of them mine, I hasten to add!
Are a large percentage of landlords really flouting the law and treating their tenants with contempt?
Looking at Shelter’s statistics, it would be easy to assume so, but as any good politician knows, it is very easy to make statistics work for you. 86,000 complaints might sound like an alarming figure and you would be forgiven for thinking that an awful lot of tenants are living in squalid conditions straight out of a Charles Dickens novel, but in actual fact the figure quoted only represents 2% of tenancies in the private rental sector.
Obviously there ARE rogue landlords out there, taking advantage of the current boom in buy to let and failing to meet their obligations to tenants under the law, but the vast majority are law abiding and compliant.
I strongly believe that the buy to let sector needs regulating, but rather than throw out some emotive statistics, it would be better to encourage greater self-regulation amongst landlords and give the courts powers to enforce heftier penalties on those landlords who fail to make improvements in their properties. Many local authorities are more focussed on introducing licensing schemes for private sector landlords, but whilst this is not a bad thing, they need to start working more with the private sector and recognise that responsible landlords provide an ever-increasing percentage of housing for those in need.
