My landlord let out a flat to me in November 2021.
I subsequently discovered through blown electrician devices and failed electrician visits who told him the system needed to be replaced. The landlord didn’t have a Valid EICR report (expired 2019) and subsequenty knew but still decided to rent out the flat. I had my own EICR report carried out before leaving and they found numerous C2 and C3 issues, lack of fire rated fixings, no earthing on circuits and other issues. This is on top of other serious harassment issues and misleading statements by the landlord before renting the property.
The same property is up for rent on OpenRent once again without the valid reports/fixes since he was very quick to relist. I reported to OpenRent but they don’t care.
My question is, Can a tenant apply for an RRO under the Housing and Planning Act of 2016, or can this only be done by the authorities?
A tenant can apply for an RRO, but my understanding is that unless you’ve involved the relevant authorities, (the Council in this case) and they have taken the relevant action under the electrical installation legislation and/or HHSRS, then you may have difficulty making any case stick. You should get some legal advice from Shelter or CAB in the first instance.
In the meantime, write formally to Openrent with a complaint about the landlord.
Thanks. I have informed OpenRent. They dismissed the issue and said it was a matter between tenant and landlord, despite being in breach of their own T&C’s 2.1.9 and 2.1.10. I have opened a case with the TPO againts OpenRent so they can get some pressure to sort out the new listing so new tenants are not scammed.
The council has been informed, the EHO who replying to my emails but he’s not telling me what he’s doing or what he plans to do, which is strange.
You should contact a firm of conditional fee lawyers, (no win, no fee types) and put your case to them. If they don’t offer to take the case, it usually means you have little hope of winning.
I seriously despise tenants who rent a property knowing they will be using RRO in the future. LL should have the property per the law but this tenant is completely slippery and will probably be hunting for a defective property again - just creating a bad tenant. Beware tenants can be this malicious even though they rented knowing of the defects.
@Tranquil1 not exactly a fair comment. I despise landlords who have multi-year running issue with their leaseholder neighbours in the same building and failing to inform tenants of previous and on-going disputes. Such as conflict over shared/access to terrace, lack of sound proofing between old victorian house, water ingress into the terrace and into a kitchen below due to dodgy building works (landlord can’t get it insured) and a load of other issues which I did not previously mention.
In my case I took the brunt of the neighbours aggression downstairs and had a huge sound system underneath my bedroom playing until 4am in the morning which is when the neighbour went to sleep (Elderly person with a weird sleep schedule). The landlord knew about this, and other issues but failed to inform me. The landlord only told me after 4 months of harassment that the previous tenants might have left due to having a baby and couldn’t stay there because they previously used ear plugs to sleep but couldn’t do that once they had a baby.
I had aggression from the first day of moving in. The next tenants are going to have a nightmare but the landlord has no obligations to inform the new tenants.
Always speak to the other leaseholders before agreeing to an AST as you may be unaware of on-going legal issues or neighbour conflicts.
In my case my landlord had spent years ignoring the neighbour downstairs and the neighbours only way of getting revenge was to attack the tenants of the landlord, both verbally and physically. I won’t be pursuing an RRO, despite spending £4,000 in total on moving companies within a year. I also spent £2k on landscaping during the summer and trellis/fence repairs on my own budget, so not exactly a ‘tenant hunting for issues’.
The council will investigate once new tenants are in and the landlord is in breach
Landlords who fly like this
make me see red. I wouldn’t rent out a property I wasn’t prepared to live in myself. Why do the Crap
landlords never meet the Crap tenants
I don’t blame any tenant wanting to take these selfish greedy lazy landlords to task when they so obviously and illegally flaunt the law.
It isn’t clear anyone has flaunted the law. There are 2 root causes, (i) who has legal access to the terrace, and (ii) did the building work cause water to ingress into the kitchen below. The first should be easy to solve, it should be in the deeds. If the people below have no right of access then they have no grounds to complain. If they had legal rights to access it would be easy for them to enforce their rights, they could just call the police when the landlord tried to block them from using their terrace. My guess is that the previous owner of the property allowed the people downstairs to use the terrace even though they had no legal right of access, but this landlord put an end to that. Then it could be that the people downstairs make up stories about water ingress to make landlord life miserable. You know what they say, there is always three sides to every story…
