Enough! to the injustices of the housing industry
We probably know that scene from Dicken’s novel where the titular pauper orphan boy holds up his gruel bowl before his benefactor and asks for a second helping. We are used to being in Oliver Twist’s shoes – the dependant far smaller than those in authority over us, ‘fortunate’ to be in the care of an institution. We are used to being told that their benevolent provision has saved us from the streets and the gutter but we must now submit to their regimes, their fees, their rules. If we do not pay directly but live from charity we especially must accept the menu and portions given to us. We do not return to the front of the room, to the powerful one’s area, and in public ask for more. Oliver asked politely and suppliantly, holding his bowl out, but at the level of the man in front of him.
A beadle is but one example of one of our many kinds of administrators claiming authority – often more than they really have.
I hereon concentratate on those relating to housing: local authorities, legal figures, and most of all, landlords.
Did you know that judges are in fact just senior administrators?
Administrators tend not to be chosen by the people. Landlords are those who aren’t even called to office; there is no calling or bar for them in any sense.
Like the likes of beadle, landlords claim that they too are providing something – shelter – which you would suffer without. How magnanimous of them. So it’s quite reasonable for them to have to charge you – they do have to make a living, of course. And what’s wrong with making money? Investing is shrewd. Buying and selling, gaining lucrative planning permissions, making good returns, are all skills. It is a legitimate and necessary business.
I wish to stop there and get us to roll over this stone.
And then I wish us to think about the injustice of evictions, and I’ll share some of my recent experience on that, including the legal system, the council, and charities meant to assist those facing homelessness.
My story began last summer, when on the day that covid rules ended (but so did the moratorium on eviction and rent raises), my landlord asked for more. He knew of my long term financial difficulties and that thanks to the government shutting down businesses and expecting us to stay at home for many months that I was unlikely – like so many of you – to have improved my situation during the pandemic period.
A day is coming, and is now here, where it is Oliver who has the right of refusal. It is those who hitherto charged us who raise up their bowl to us. May we? Nope. Landlords, along with others we pay our bills to, have already had so much from us. They’ve hoarded gruel and the bowls it goes in for too long. They have made us beg them for something to eat. They have made a roof over our heads and the supplies that go with it something that is conditional on us placating them. They have made it their gift, not our right. They have made this placation an endless abasement, a debt that we are never released from.
I recently pointed out that that is slavery.
I want us to think about landlordism – yes, that’s the term for it – as hoarding resources and selling them back to us, as I have already written of regarding utilities (gas, electricity, water). It is known as rentier capitalism – that of hiring out resources permanently, which the users never own, even though most housing (unlike a wedding dress or a holiday vehicle or hotel) is a long term need. The landlords set the prices, not us the dweller/consumers. We can choose to some extent where we live and with whom we contract, but unless we own outright (and are not in a managed property), third parties claim rights to repossess that home and to have control over what goes on in it – who lives with us, whatcauses we promote outside of it, expecting us to submit to inspections and repairs, and often paying their bedfellow – the insurers.
In the last couple of years, the disparity of power and the poor behaviour of many landlords (including the failures of the legal system) have been exposed to the point that a sea change is occurring, internationally.
This is the water that is surrounding King Cnut:
In Britain, the hated legislation that contains the clause which gives the landlords the right to move you on without reason or automatic recompense is the housing act of 1988 (no capitals, any more than I give for the established church). Although its section 21 is infamous – that’s the bit that allows the judiciary power to arbitarily order your forcable ejection and create you homeless – the whole act is objectionable. It was created in a little chain of acts under our then conservative government (deliberately lower case). I may surprise by saying that in one sense, I support ex-prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s moves to sell off council housing because I want people to own their homes and I do not not think that councils are good landlords. There is much intrusion into tenants’ homes and lives, and if you’ve ever tried to get on a housing list – even and especially in a crisis – you’ll know how rubbish they are. I will talk more about that later. I do not support getting everyone on a mortgage, for it is a swindle and gives your power to banks, and makes you another kind of slave. At least this slow filling bucket with a hole does lead to eventually stopping casting money in a bucket, and the bucket becomes yours to do with as you wish – except for tax. Renters’ buckets never fill and they never get the bucket at the end.
But the late and controversial Maggie’s push to get us owning, not renting, affected landlords. I’ve seen figures that under 10% were renting around the time of this act. Landlords felt that they had less legal rights than tenants now (good, that is the right way round) and that their market was too small. Rent capping – making limits on how much could be charged – was spoiling their favourite doctrine: the free market.
So my understanding is that this act of 1988 was created to encourage a wider rental housing market with the freedom for landlords to charge what they want.
The infamous section 21 of that act gives the landlord the right to move tenants on at their whim, mostly to create more wealth for themselves. That’s right: the power of arbitrary homelessness is purely so that landlords are able to make more money. They can move on people who simply aren’t paying the rent that they’d like – or who stand up to them (eg over not doing repairs, dealing with anti social behaviour, or for turning up at tenants’ without sufficient warning – all of which are illegal).
Please sit with that a moment.
The clause about non payment of rent (section 8) which is internationally considered a common and reasonable reason to to evict is also about making wealth for the landlord, and is also unfair. We should and do have the right to withhold payment – for shoddy service (interpersonally), for lack or faulty goods (a home not fit for habitation, and breaking the intrinsic right to quietly enjoy), and if we have overpaid. To undermine this right is to create serious inequality and is a human rights issue. It is a form of slavery to say your home is at risk if you don’t keep paying for something which costs the owner little, which the landlords generally didn’t even build, and which never ends, and that rights are one-sided.
Why should landlords keep getting for doing little to nothing? Especially when it keeps us in work we maybe don’t like, giving a high proportion of our income away to them, whether we’re rich or poor.
Those who attack the notions that rent is theft and that most landlords are bad are landlords themselves, or attached to them. They’re feudal enough to consider that they offer a service that we would be without, if it weren’t for them. There’s still a lick of that old school “I own you”, “respect me, I’m your landlord.” They expect to act like that beadle and for us to be Oliver Twists, up to that point of the double helping.
I found this piece ‘The Myth of the Good Landlord’ by Tom Lavin very interesting, although I reject his solution: government ownership, at any level, is not public ownership and certainly not the people’s. Let us not confuse them; for the government is not benign – you just give it greater power and create it as a huge landlord.
I also have written several pieces of my own, often in emails to policy makers. I was not happy with the stance and [utter lack of] assistance of Shelter – Britain’s most famous housing charity – nor the Citizen’s Advice Bureau (there’s something legally dubious about the word ‘citizen’ – it means owing allegiance to your nation in return for protection.)
There are those who might protest that they are good and busy landlords, kept busy by the government’s growing demands. I have found that this list is less about real tenants’ safety and rights, and more about landlord compliance to checks which are lucrative to those that undertake them (such as gas engineers), and as one writer argued, is about keeping your chattels (ie us rent payers) still valuable (ie able to pay and not dead or suing due to gas leaks).
I was shocked at how much of a countersuit against eviction depends on not only on checking our electric and gas – even during the years we’re meant to have limited who came into our homes! – but on having a valid Energy Performance Certificates (whose real value I query).
Council workers asked me this first: they actually confessed (I recorded Mr PT at Norwich City say it) that their concern at the homelessness prevention team is to establish if they have any legal requirement to help; they and will dump you if not, not caring if you die in the gutter. This council spied on me after the notice period expired (still when covid was meant to be rife and restrictions in place), hoping that if I seemed to have moved on (rather than face the violence of bailiffs) that they could wash their hands of me, which they think they did.
They are wrong – read the below.
If you move before you’re pushed, the council can claim that you made yourself voluntarily homeless and thus you are not assisted; if you sit tight in a home you’re not welcome in with a legal case over you, you wonder if you’ll actually receive the papers inviting you to court to defend yourself and whether you’ll receive a fair hearing, and warning – or could the bailiffs just turn up? (You should have several warnings and opportunities to defend but I found that legal post doesn’t always arrive). Living with that fear is very stressful, as I heard other local families state on news last Christmas.
I say this not to scare, but to illustrate the injustice of the system which we must fight against.
I’ve wondered how much of my own experience to share. I’m aware of attempted repercussions, but I remind that it’s only slander/libel if it’s untrue; and that speaking out is whistleblowing, which is protected, and it is about protecting others from particular companies and individuals, and calling them to account to to make reparations. I write nothing to be vindictive or vexatious, although I believe I have been on the receiving end of both of those from those to whom I allude; my home and income was lost through the bloody-minded actions of others – especially particular individuals at the supposed Housing Options department and revenues and benefits at Norwich City Council, HMCTS (the court service), and my former landlord – a man who’s been investing in multiple properties since the 1970s, and had over 30 tenants when I moved in, on top of a presumed public pension and other business.
I had lived long term in a tiny one room home, not fit for purpose and with no commercial value, unable to move on. “A bolt hole, suboptimal at best,” said one visitor – “not a serious home”. “It’s the second worst home I’ve seen in Norwich” said another. “I wouldn’t swap with you.” Yet my landlord had received tens of thousands for my just being there.
Those concerned have been individually and personally put on permanent notice, and know who they are. At this time, I will just name my landlord, Clem Vogler of Norfolk. He is on the net for several reasons – his Dec 2018 Telegraph article on helping landlords avoid the new tax rules (he saved over £50,000) in which he confirms the size of his £4m property portfolio, and his work for infamous Golden Eye International, which is verified on his own website.
As for his interactions with me, his own words and actions convict him. Both are utterly provable and undeniable.
There will be repercussions for any repercussions.
I will here point out that
-the court, with its huge backlog, processed his forms (at Christmas) in under a week but failed to serve my countersuit over some months, despite his form missing sections
-the council wanted instrusive forms and compliance from me (as did HMCTS) to do anything
-there is strong circumstantial evidence of collusion
-the unfairness that Rent Repayment Orders (designed to punish rogue landlords) do not benefit council tenants or benefit recipients nor those with live-in landlords, and are again about those checks
-few lawyers seem really interested in championing tenants, especially if you need support to pay their fees (that legal dress down piece is coming). A real champion I found was a Californian firm – do look at what tenants were awarded. I like reading their site for empowerment.
Don’t feel that if this isn’t where you live that no-one can help.
I hope this inspires any genuine lawyers and paralegals to assist in this battle, and any true judges.
We need a new legal system, and many are looking to People’s Courts and Grand Juries.
I think it’s time that homes simply were: perhaps we could pay to buy, repair or build one but not to live in it, certainly not to the tune of what we’re used to paying. Homes need to be given to the those who live in them. As for landlord being compensated – they have been, all along. It’s called rent.
All those who have been part of the injustice should be ashamed
Every bully landlord – and bank – and those who support them (such as bailiffs) needs to make reparations, now.
We need to end this slavery and the system that makes it not only possible, but pretends that it’s normative.
My fomer landlords wrote in to the Telegraph nearly 30 years ago with his views on tyrants. The irony is clear: it is not just political dictators at a national level who are tyrants, it is anyone who ill uses (often self-given) power.
I was put at risk by Clem’s actions, and those of those courts and council, like so many others. Those doing so in these last couple of years especially are reprehensible and are guilty of crimes and liable for all the distress they caused, your losses, inconvenience, detriment to your income, relationships, health…… there are many in an eviction.
There are consequences for evicting people and all injustice – certainly in the next world, but I’d like them in this, now.
And I wish to see the end of landlordism and bully banks. The new world is here. Beadle’s bowl is empty.
Elspeth R - A skewed world view 