To be a bit shocked at the landlord who is evicting 200 families because they are on housing benefit

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Heard this and 'Wow' - I was shocked.

He's being interviewed on C4 News.

He'd rather rent them to Eatern Europeans who are working.

He said that if house prices go up then rents should go up.

He said he's not the only landlord doing this.

Wow!

So some local authority will have to find new housing for all these people.

Where will this end?

I am stunned.

I saw Wilson on the local news last night and thought he was the most reprehensible piece of shit I'd come across in a long while and some of the posts on this thread definitely seem to confirm that.

The government desperately needs to bring in some serious controls to the private rental market if there's to be any hope for future generations owning our even renting decent homes of their own.

That someone owns that many properties at all, let alone in one town is shocking and appalling. There absolutely should be an upper limit. If the govt can insist that builders must build a percentage of social housing when new estates go up, surely the could insist that a proportion of private rentals must also be let to HB tenants? This wouldn't apply to LL's with one or two properties to rent, but anyone with over 5 rental properties for instance.

I also think (and have done for years) that there should be an upper limit on the number of rental properties owned by an individual who also has another job (or perhaps an upper limit on the income made from rental properties in addition to their main job).

It's not true that the growth was due to a net increase of claimants in work. That implies a causation that probably exists to some degree, but certainly not to the degree argued by these liars in the press.

I'm afraid it absolutely is true. I'm not implying anything about where the growth in claims has come from, or anything to do with what the 'flow' of claims has been.

But the simple facts of the matter are that between the two dates the number of HB claimants increased and most of this is because of the increase in number of in work claimants. This is indisputable.

Shitbags of the highest order. Peter Rachman would be ashamed of some of their practices.

Initially I thought 'well all this bad publicity will knacker them, no one in their right minds would rent a house from them now.'

Then I realised that they had a virtual monopoly on private rental in their area, so people are pretty much forced to deal with these shysters.

Proof if ever you needed it that an unregulated property market is unhealthy.

The problem with the Wilsons is that they've created a monopoly and have been bailed out by the banks. The simply outbid on every single cheap house in the Ashford area, buying virtually every day for years, until they held a vast swathe of the properties in the town. They gained almost complete control of the rental market - but also created that market by acquiring all the properties that were normally bought by people as starter homes.

When they got into financial difficulty a couple of years ago the banks didn't foreclose (the old adage that if you owe the bank a million you've got a problem, if you owe the bank £50m the bank's got a problem, is very true) and offered them preferential interest rates to keep them afloat. They are too big to fail, and have been bailed out as a consequence.

No, that's not true Plateofcrumbs.

The reason for the growth is quite simply that more people are coming on (around 1.5 million in a year) housing benefit than are leaving (around 1.2 million)

You cannot say the growth occurred because of claimants in work, because we don't know that that is true.

If you find that more applicants had names beginning with 'S' than before then you could say that the the growth is because of the increase in the number of people with names beginning with 'S'. But that wouldn't be true.

It's the Bangladeshi Butter Index. Correlation does not prove causation.

I thourght even before this news their dodgy reputation was well known and is odd they could afford so many houses and get so much credit.

As for figures in work.

theres so many people on low hours or zer hours contract technically they working but need housing benefit.

cost of living going up and rent huge outgoing.
our private rent lot more than peoples mortages.

3 bed round here 800-900p er month.

It's weird, people here are saying 'we'll he's a businessman acting as a businessman' etc and you kind of think 'oh yeah, fair enough, of course' ... Then you go away and think WTF! We live in a society where providing people with a HOME (which is surely a human basic requirement) is a business ? To make profit from???? That's so strange!

Oh the Wilsons have form for this. Here's a report from 2010 which claims that tenants were unable to secure repairs. I think Watchdog did a feature on them around the same time.

Most decent builders/plumbers/electricians won't touch their properties because Mr Wilson bodges most of the repair work himself, so no one wants their name associated with the houses.

The wiring in the cellar of the place I rented was done by him, it was dangerous and against wiring regs and he refused pointblank to pay for an electrician to fix it, there were exposed wires in both bedrooms and the kitchen from broken sockets which he had masking taped over, I complained and he kept trying to tell me it was safe, it took my Dad (who is a fully qualified electrician with 35 years experience) hours to make the house safe as he kept finding faults, he had to replace 6 sockets, 4 light fittings and rewire the entire cellar and Mr Wilsons response was to send a letter reminding me all work on the house should be run past him first and that he would not be paying for it (I hadn't expected him to pay, Dad didn't charge me).

I know a single mum with 3 kids, who at the time were very young, whose gas boiler was playing up and when she called him Mr Willson came round and shouted at her not to be so stupid, it was fine, luckily her kids Dad was round for contact that afternoon and paid someone to come and look at it, turns out there was a bad carbon dioxide leak.

They managed to keep their houses full then because the majority of private rents that accepted HB belonged to them so there was no choice, now they will have Eastern European tenants who won't have the local knowledge to avoid them.

why cant local authorities check the safety of private properties they paying for?

amazed sickened how much this couple has gotton away with and why they not being investigated and punished somehow for their wrongdoings which could have caused fires and deaths.

Apologies to everyone who isn't interested in pedantry, but I can't let a good statistics argument lie.

Agapanthers - I've never heard of the Bangladeshi Butter Index, I just had to look that up. And it's nothing like that at all.

Imagine you're at a party and at 8pm there are 15 people in the living room and 10 people in the kitchen. During the evening people arrive at the party, leave the party and mingle about between the living room and kitchen. Come midnight there are 16 people in the living room and 15 people in the kitchen. There are now more at the party overall and this can be mostly attributed to a larger number of people in the kitchen. We don't know WHY there are more people in the kitchen. Maybe they are new arrivals at the party, maybe they came from living room, maybe they're the same people who were there earlier, maybe they're completely different. But the party has got bigger and the growth is from the kitchen.

Local authority advised tenants to hold back rent over safety, that's why Mr Wilson evicted a load of families last year, they were all the ones that had dared to complain.

I think it's worth pointing out that record numbers of people are now in work.

www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/february-2013/sty-uk-employment-increases-by-154-000.html

Aga/Plate
The key aspect that is not disputed is the word significant isn't it?

So we can say (from the Building and Social Housing Foundation independent research) that the number of HB claimants rose to record levels in Dec 2011, and a significant number of new claimants at that time were likely to be in work?

The BSHF also say that in December 2011 almost a quarter of all households who rented their accommodation and were in employment received Housing Benefit. I wonder how many of these will be susceptible to copycat evictions.

Catkins thats appalling. Peoples lives are at risk here and a plumber is 3 grand out of pocket simply for doing his job properly and having integrity (a word those 2 bastards would have to look up in a dictionary)

Dannan another bloody dangerous situation. Thank God for your Dad.

If I'm being terribly cynical, I think the Wilsons are planning something. They are going to evict 200 families at the same time. I suspect that Ashford Council will not be able to cope with such a sudden influx of homeless people - they have limited council stock and nearly all the private rental stock is owned by the Wilsons, so those evicted have nowhere else to go locally.

Who wants to bet that Fergus will suddenly offer to rent his now empty properties to Ashford Council to house the hundreds he's just evicted? At an 'emergency' homeless accommodation rates.

2.5 million people unemployed is not 'record numbers of people in work'.

Yes Cat, there's something whiffy about the whole thing.

Why has anyone been allowed to monopolize a local economy like this? Clearly we learnt nothing from the likes of Hoogstraten.

Personally I'd love to see the LA able to make a few compulsory purchase orders! (But doubt that could ever happen ).

Yes Nosewiper, it doesn't make sense. They are planning to evict 20% of their stock in one go - 200 households. They say that 100 of those are not in arrears, and I'd like to know what 'arrears' really means for the other 100 - it could just mean short delays or lags in HB processing for many, rather than people refusing to pay all their rent.

Do they really think they can immediately fill 200 houses with Poles?

They have admitted being in a financially precarious position and only kept afloat by depressed interest rates, and from what Dannan says above Fergus is doing repairs himself, rather than paying qualified tradespeople. Fergus's performance on C4 News last night was a clear and unashamed (albeit legal) threat to tenants - ask for repairs and I'll evict you.

Ashford Council is simply going to tell people to stay put until eviction notices are served - otherwise they are intentionally homeless. That's 200 legal actions the Wilsons will need to take. Very expensive.

They can't afford to create massive voids like this. They can't afford mass legal action. And strangely they are seeking maximum publicity. Stinging the Council for homelessness accommodation is the only explanation I can think of.

It should not be possible to own more than a couple of rental properties. His tenants remain tenants rather than homeowners because of greedy landlords like this buying up cheap housing stock forcing low earners to rent rather than buy. It should not be possible to own more than two rental properties. It should be illegal. Why does he need all this money? I think him and his wife are the real low life scum in society. Him and all the rich avoiding tax and businesses avoiding tax and peers in the House of Lords claiming their expenses for no work and MPs fiddling or even claiming expenses they're entitled to. Why do we blame the poor?!

I am a (accidental) landlord btw, my single rental property is my pension now in the absence of a work pension and prices in my area have fallen so house is in negative equity. I have never raised the rent. I actually lowered it. If house prices go up that doesn't mean rent goes up! That means landlords benefit twice and home ownership is further out of reach for tenants.

My experience of private landlords is pretty dreadful. Here in glasgow HMOs are now regulated to some extent after a few students died in a house fire because their windows were barred and there were no smoke alarms

It's shocking how some landlords monopolise entire buildings and allow them to fall into disrepair. I have looked at flats where I can see daylight through the roof of the stairwell.

We have recently bought a flat which was ex HMO - their licence was turned down after the downstairs neighbour was flooded nine times.

We have smoke alarms everywhere - DP has found the most horrendous wiring in one room and our gas meter was condemned as unsafe as soon as we moved in.

Most landlords who own multiple properties don't seem to give a shit. And the argumebt that 'it's a business' does not mean the owner should have no morality at all.

I am shocked at what I'm reading on this thread about landlords.

We desperately need tighter regulations.

I remember when it was possible to get your rent registered, someone from the council would come and decided what it was worth and the landlord had to abide by that amount.

I had it done and the LL was very upset 'how could you do this to me' blah blah blah

That's still the case in much of Europe, Lazysuzanne, and I think we desperately need to bring it back here. Also, proper security of tenure - these six month contracts are no basis on which to provide a home. The only way that tenants get anything approaching security now is if they lock themselves into a long lease, but if that lease doesn't have a break clause then the tenants remain liable for the rent for the entire period of the lease, which is madness - why should a tenant be more tied to a property in tighter terms than a homeowner (who can always sell at any time)?

It's embarrassing, why must we have such an anachronistic set up :(

Evil exploitative landlords, it's almost feudal.

Catkins, I think you may be onto something there, especially with the number of his properties that are already empty from before he evicted this lot.

Plus, I've just walked past my old house and there's still a beer can I forgot to take off the window sill when we left in June which surely if you were seriously trying to get a tenant you would move, it can't smell nice by now!