Deep-clean your HMOs every week to stop Covid, urges Labour chief

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Covid has led to many campaigns to help tenants and landlords survive the pandemic, but Labour has taken the biscuit with its latest effort.

The party is urging HMO landlords to only rent rooms out if they are en-suite, and to under-take weekly deep-cleans of their properties.

The idea has been floated by its Northampton wing, whose leader Danielle Stone (pictured) has raised concerns that HMOs in the city, where tenants live communally sharing both washing, toilet and cooking facilities, are helping spread the virus.

“All HMOs should be en-suites. Strangers sharing bathrooms makes Covid-secure hygiene impossible. It makes social isolation, sheltering, or quarantining next-to impossible,” she said.

“Where different households share an entrance way and communal areas there should be a requirement for landlords to undertake a weekly deep clean.”

Greencore outbreak

Her comments follow the infamous Greencore foodplant ‘super-spreading’ incident which, in part, was blamed on many of its workforce living in the same HMOs, but also car-sharing to work.

The city has some 1,0000 large and small HMOs registered within its mandatory and additional licensing schemes, and Stone has said that some landlords’ sloppy approach to providing hygienic facilities is helping create Covid-spreading traps.

“In this day and age it should be taken for granted that everyone should have access to their own bathrooms,” she told local media.

Her party has also gone a step further and urged local landlords to ‘be responsible’ and only rent out rooms within their HMOs if they have en-suite bathrooms until the pandemic dies down.

“In Northampton we have many families living in overcrowded conditions. This means parents and children are on top of each other, without adequate storage, room to play, room to study,” says Stone.

Discuss: Are HMOs the way forward for the UK rental market?
Read more: Bill that will change the way HMOs are managed.

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LATEST: Greens launch plan to give tenants ‘rent reduction’ rights

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The green party in Scotland has launched an all-out war against landlords and the private rented sector during its online-only national conference over the weekend.

The Scots arm of the Green Party in the UK has six MSPs, and its housing spokesperson Andy Wightman, who is MSP for Lothian, gave a tub-thumping speech to the party’s supporters yesterday, calling for radical measures on housing.

Blaming Scotland’s poverty problems squarely on high rents and landlords’ ability to evict via ‘no fault’ notices, Wightman said it was time for the party to offer a ‘new deal for housing’ to voters.

This is to include rent controls, giving tenants the right to request rent reductions if they are struggling financially, and preventing landlords from evicting tenants when they want to sell their property.

Wightman also heavily criticised the Scottish National Party (SNP) for its approach to the private rental sector during the Covid pandemic.

Landlords

This includes: “Standing up for landlords when the pandemic hit us whilst joining with the Tories to block my proposals for better protection for tenants,” he said.

“In no other country in Europe would a Private Sector Resilience group set up to safeguard tenants during the coronavirus pandemic have no representatives of tenants on it.

“The odds are always stacked in favour of the wealthy, whether they be the big land owners, landlords, or corporates. And As a result, the rich get richer and the poor poorer.

“This is not an accident. It’s a policy choice. Time and time again we’ve seen the SNP choose to side with powerful vested interests rather than the public interest.”

Read more: Stop hitting landlords over the head with a stick, industry urges.

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Covid pressures drive council to make harsh choices over property licensing

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Slough Borough Council has revealed that it is to wage a campaign against rogue and non-compliant landlords over the next six months but de-prioritise inspecting the 1,700 already-licensed properties within its three licensing schemes, and is already preparing to take four persistent offenders to court.

Since July 2019 hundreds of small and large HMOs, and a larger number of properties covered by a two-ward selective scheme, have had to be licenced at a cost of between £400 and £750 per property for five years.

But ‘teething problems’ with its IT system, which landlords are forced to use to apply for a licence, plus problems recruiting staff and the huge financial and logistical challenges of Covid, have led its housing team to focus on chasing up the rogue and non-compliant element of the PRS.

Unprofessional

“The rationale for prioritising unlicensed properties is that unprofessional, negligent and rogue landlords that pose the greatest risk to tenants can often be identified by their absence from the licensing schemes; so it follows that focussing resources on identifying unlicensed properties will have the greatest benefit to residents,” a report submitted to the council says.

Slough says it has therefore decided not to undertake large-scale inspection of licenced properties, although it will continue to react to individual cases where tenants alert it to poorly-managed properties.

The immediate focus for the team in the next six months is to locate as many unlicensed properties as possible and to robustly enforce against those who persistently fail to make a licence application, as it is these landlords who are most likely to put their tenants at risk of harm.”

Read more: How to be compliant with landlord legislation.

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Mortgage Express (Rosinca Mortgages) will not allow transfer of equity?

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Has anyone any advice for the following situation: 3 BTL properties with Mortgage Express (now Rosinca Mortgages) which still have 8 years left on a 25-year interest-only mortgage term.

The properties are jointly owned by myself and my Brother.

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Council HMO guidance – Now more confused than when I started?

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I’ve read Bexley Council and Government guidance but am just more confused than when I started.

I have converted my house into 3 separate living ‘units’, I’m not calling them flats as they don’t meet building regulations (I do have planning permission for the extension and conversion works).

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Landlord given suspended sentence and £20,000 fine after tenant dies in HMO blaze

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A criminal landlord has been handed a suspended jail sentence after a tenant died in a house fire at his sub-standard HMO.

Tenant Evaldas Grisciukas died in the fire which started in his first-floor bedroom on Hitchin Road in Luton on 27^th March last year, despite two other tenants attempting to save him. One was badly burnt and suffered smoke inhalation.

The court heard that seven people were living in the house at the time of the fire; it had no fire doors and some fire detection that wasn’t linked between rooms and might not even have been working.

Landlord Bhagwent Sagoo, of Old Bedford Road, Luton, admitted failing to take general fire precautions, putting tenants at risk of death or serious injury. 

He accepted that he was the manager of the property but said he believed it had been let as a single tenancy.  

The judge ruled that he ought to have known who was in the house and would have done, if he had carried out regular inspections. Sagoo was jailed for four months, suspended for 12 months, and fined £20,000 with £12,000 costs.

Luton Councillor Tom Shaw (below), portfolio holder for housing, says: “We are committed to keeping residents safe and inadequate fire safety in a HMO just isn’t acceptable. We expect landlords to put the safety of their tenants first and are pleased to see this sentencing handed down.

“We will continue to work towards ensuring landlords keep their properties in good condition and adhere to safety regulations, or face prosecution.”

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