The House of Evictions

Flat Justice has now taken on another appeal case. This will be our 5th appeal this year: the First-tier Tribunal Property Chamber just keeps churning out those bad decisions…

Here we have a Nigerian construction worker evicted from his HMO with his wife, locks changed, possessions thrown out in bin bags. A 4 bedroom house in an Additional scheme borough with no licence.

Decision of the FtT:

  • not an eviction…maybe the door was stuck with paint
  • Not a licensable HMO because the tenants may not have been main residents at the address: despite 1 paying council tax there and another claiming Housing Benefit as a main residence. Another was resident for 9 years!

Reading through our client’s statement of the circumstances of his and his wife’s tenancy is like a ghoulish train ride through the chamber of horrors so often found in London’s Private Rented Sector.

Just after they moved in, our client was told about locks being changed. He was also told that he should not let a former tenant (referred to by the landlady as “crazy woman”) back into the property. Previously our client was in another property of the same landlady where the heating had failed. January 2017.

Another tenant, nicknamed by the landlady as “praying man” was thrown out of the house a few months after our client took up his precarious residency.

Again the locks were changed.

One tenant was allegedly using the bath too much. Landlady’s solution: remove the bath taps.

Another tenant was suffering from mental health problems and tried to stab our client a number of times. This tenant also made attempts to commit suicide using plastic wire-ties…and messaged the other tenants with the video footage.

At the end of one week in July last year, 18.30 Friday, our client returns home to find his belongings removed from the room and the locks changed. The landlady doesn’t answer the phone. The police and Greenwich council try to help him get back in but he ends up spending the night on a bus. Night buses and late-night bars, with the occasional couch surf are now our client’s home. This person deserves justice: time to Get Rent Back!