EXPOSED: a case that blows huge holes in the UK’s letting agent regulation and Right to Rent laws

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The government has asked landlords to help it regulate the private rental market and yet when things do go wrong, landlords can feel as if they’ve been left to the sharks, one woman claims.

A landlord has contacted us
to highlight her nightmare experiences of renting a one-bedroom flat in London because
she wants to highlight the ‘huge holes’ in the way both letting agents, and the
Right to Rent scheme, are policed in the UK.

38-year-old Rachael Phiri,
who lives in Northampton but rents out a property in Dagenham, East London
(pictured), has had her flat since 2004 but only recently discovered that her
agent had been renting out the property to a friend for £300 a month less than
market value, leaving her thousands of pounds out of pocket.

After dispensing with the
original agent’s services, the second one then promised to help her evict the
tenant after the family – which had started as a single man but then developed
into a family of four – made it difficult for her to inspect the property or
get contractors in to deal with a mould problem.

Basic mistakes

Phiri says she discovered
that her new agent, who she had paid to serve a Section 21 eviction notice on
the tenant, had made so many basic mistakes within the document that it was
‘useless’ and she subsequently had to serve a new one herself.

To add insult to injury, she
then found out that the Nigerian-born tenant was an illegal immigrant and,
after reporting this to the Home Office, nothing has happened, and he and his
family remain in situ.

It also transpired that
neither agent was registered with a redress scheme and that the first agent had
not placed the tenant’s deposit within an authorised deposit protection scheme.

Phiri is astounded that
neither the agents, nor the tenant, have been tackled by regulators despite her
reporting all three to the relevant authorities, and that the regulatory system
seems in capable of protecting her from rogue operators.

“I am have been ripped off by two rogue agents and cannot get access to the tenant who is rude and aggressive towards me, even though he has no right to rent in the UK – leaving me exposed,” she says. “How did it come to this?”.

Read more about the eviction process.

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