housing

For the past few weeks Brighton SolFed and friends have been supporting a tenant that got evicted with a week's notice!
The tenant, a Spanish immigrant that doesn't speak English at all, had been living in a sub-letted shared room with an other sub-lettee in deplorable conditions of mold. Solidarity Federation helped mediating with the live-in sub-letter, but they refused any facilitation of eviction and responded by violently scaring the tenant to leave the property. After a huge show of support in front of the landlord's flat - where almost 20 members and friends turned up to help -  temporary accommodation was found for the tenant.

The sub-letter still refuses to open communication with Brighton SolFed, even to retrieve the flat's keys. They haven't acknowledged the physical and psychological abuses. Abuse of poor and vulnerable tenants is not uncommon. We should organise to respond to those abuses!

Brighton lettings agency G4Lets is facing a growing campaign by two groups of tenants organising with Brighton SolFed for the return of their deposits and for compensation after they lived in damp, mice-infested accommodation for a year, and were subsequently charged for pre-existing damage at the properties when they requested the return of their deposits. Both sets of tenants were students at the time of their tenancies.

Three groups of tenants organising with Brighton Solidarity Federation Housing Union over the past three months have each secured victories in their disputes. Working with our Housing Union, these tenants used the everyday tactics of solidarity and mutual support to take direct action – to win back stolen cash and to improve their conditions.

The first dispute was a group of tenants whose landlord and lettings agencies had left them living in damp, infested accommodation for a year. The landlord switched agencies half way through the tenancy, though both failed to address the problems in the house. After a direct action campaign, the landlord and the two agencies paid out £3900 in relation to the damp issue. Together with the tenancy deposit the campaign had demanded to be returned in full, the six tenants received just over £6000 as a result of the campaign.

Ledbury Estate tenants and supporters demonstrated on Sunday 17th Sept after several days with no heating. Ledbury Estate flats in Southwark have been declared unsafe due to cracks in the 13 storey towerblocks, which the tenants have been protesting about for years, and Southwark Council has told the tenants they will need to be decanted so the blocks can be repaired. The cracks are big enough to see daylight through and are a fire risk as well as a risk to the integrity of the building.

The gas has been cut off as a safety measure forcing tenants to go to shower in a nearby leisure centre and their only cooking facilities are small two-ring mini cookers. Now with the onset of colder autumn weather there is no heating for the tenants at all as the electrical power supply cannot cope with high load so no fan heaters or plug in radiators are permitted. One block has already had an overnight total power failure.

Brighton lettings agency MTM is facing a growing campaign by a group of tenants organising with Brighton SolFed for compensation after they paid £34,320 in rent to live in damp (pictured) and infested accommodation for a year. Recently, the landlady made a series of threats against the tenants. These include informing their places of study about the dispute, and attempting to get them blacklisted by agencies in the city and “all landlord associations in the country”. Regarding the former threat, we have informed the landlady that the tenants' places of study are already aware of the issues these tenants faced and have been sympathetic toward the situation.

Brighton Solidarity Federation has started a dispute with MTM lettings on the Lewes road. A group of tenants have been organising with SolFed after they were rented a house with serious damp and mould problems, infestations, and poor furniture that the landlady had promised to replace.

The tenants were introduced to the landlady by a different letting agency in the city, which was intermittently involved in the tenancy for the first six months. Administration was then transferred to MTM. The first letting agency refunded the tenants their agency fees, totalling £1200, on Thursday 24th August, after a brief picket protesting against the agency for introducing the tenants to this poor-quality accommodation.  

On 31st July, members of Brighton Solidarity Federation, along with Bobby Carver and members of his campaign, met with Brighton & Hove City Council’s Executive Director for Neighbourhoods, Communities & Housing, Larissa Reed. You can read more about how this meeting came about here.

Prior to the meeting, ourselves and the Bobby Carver Campaign had issued three clear public demands to the council, which were based on Bobby’s – and others' – experience of the council’s housing department. The demands were as follows:

1. An end to at-a-distance housing suitability assessments
2. That third-party groups are allowed to attend these assessments
3. That any assessments that had exceeded the 8-week deadline were carried out within two weeks of the meeting

UPDATE: since the publication of this article on the afternoon of Monday 10th July 2017, Larissa Reed, Executive Director for Neighbourhoods, Communities & Housing at Brighton council has been in touch to arrange a meeting with Brighton SolFed and the Bobby Carver campaign within the next two weeks. We look forward to hearing how the issues raised below are going to be addressed, and about the changes the council is going to put in place to ensure 'the safest homes possible' for everyone...

A prospective tenant contacted Brighton SolFed after she was poorly treated by an agency. The list of grievances will be sadly familiar to anyone who has or does rent in Brighton. For example, after the agency had received the £840 fee for the four tenants moving into the house, they: changed the length of the agreement from twelve to eleven months; gave the tenants misleading information about insurance and tried to pressure them into more expensive agreements; made absurd requests for the paperwork required by their guarantor; added additional fees for this paperwork; forced expensive insurance schemes on international tenants; went back on a promise to fix up the bathroom; were generally unresponsive and misleading when they could be contacted, and moved the moving in date back whilst still expecting the tenants to pay rent from the first date.

For the past three months, Brighton Solidarity Federation has been organising with a tenant whose flat is in a serious state of disrepair, in order to try and get these repair works done. What follows is an account of the council's systematic failure to fulfil their duties toward this tenant.