Friend evicting elderly tenant

[AppalachianWoman]

Would it change the way you felt about your friend if he evicted an elderly (70+) tenant so he could move into the house instead? The rent was paid upfront through a lifetime of agricultural labor from late childhood but the friend who recently inherited the estate feels they are owed cash payments and the property. The tenant cannot read or write and was widowed a year or two ago, has no children of his own but some step children from his marriage. The friend currently occupies another, smaller, property on the estate and was expected to move into the largest house which is very grand indeed but requires extensive renovation. He is daunted by the work and expense and has instead become fixated on the property the elderly farmhand lives in.

It feels emotionally immature of me to drop a friend over a difference in values but I am shocked that he would even consider this course of action. I don’t want to be friends with someone who acts this way, how can I exit gracefully or should I try to support him as he has supported me emotionally through decades of friendship?

I'd honestly avoid notoriously landlord hating sites such as this

What, so you actually support the type of landlord who will say "I have a tenant who has paid his rent as agreed, in advance, for the rest of his life; but I rather like his house, so I'm planning to kick him out, without repaying any of his rent, and move in there myself"?

We don't hate landlords; we hate bad, greedy, selfish, ruthless, immoral landlords.

Apologies, @ClaireEclair - I got a bit tied up in knots there!

A question for all of the charitable posters:

If your parents die and leave you a house which is rented out, do you let that tenant remain there rent-free, or do you attempt to move in yourself if you're struggling to house yourself for example? Genuine question. We all love to give, but we don't live in a communist country. Yes, I'm sure that the farmhand has been a loyal and hardworking employee. But has he more right to your parents' house than you have?

@AppalachianWoman . Similar happened to me a few years ago when I was in my 60s , as my landlord decided to move his elderly mother into my flat.

If this landlord serves an eviction notice , when it comes to only six weeks left , his tenant will be declared homeless AS HE IS OVER 60 and the council will find him a flat in an independent living complex . This happened to me, I have a nice fairly large flat.

I was told this is the case with all councils in the UK , but it needs to be checked with Shelter .

That laws around tied agricultural tenancies are different. So stop spouting shite and trying to sound clever when you clearly don't have a sodding clue.

Please do the right thing and inform Shelter about this. This poor man needs protection from this monster.

The old man must not 'sign' anything, tell the old man!

Well, he has no legal right as he is a tenant. The OP's friend has inherited the house of which the elderly man is a tenant. Tenant. Not owner.

Honestly, I'd love to house the poor and the vulnerable and the elderly. However, I am not generous enough to leave myself in a worse position than a former employee.

It's all fine in theory. Who would want to evict a loyal employee? Ideally, nobody.

My employers have paid for expenses, hotel accommodation, flights, travel etc. When I left the company (or in the case of this man - retired), I wouldn't expect my employer to continue to pay for me!

To the (thankfully minority of) people agreeing with the landlord that this man is now a 'squatter' grabbing himself an unfair massive freebie: do you also think the same of people who sacrifice a large proportion of their earnings for decades to pay into a pension and then have the 'audacity' to expect to receive what they've already paid for after they retire? No different, really.

Well, perhaps you can educate me with your cleverness and your sodding clue about 'tied agricultural tenancies' of which you have no knowledge as to whether that exists in this case.

The land agent is effectively now employed by your friend. Of course they are all for it. Its a power inbalance and driven by business decisions. What your friend has failed to grasp is that inherited wealth like that only exists because of the people who worked their lives to sustain the estates. To pick and choose which parts of your obligations you should uphold while effectively keeping the spoils is disgraceful. Hate to say it but your friendships dead because you'll never look at them the same. I would tell him why tho. He needs someone to stand up to him.

Is this a real story? I do not quite buy it, to be honest.

How can you pay your rent in advance through a lifetime of labour? And how has he been working since he was an older child? Older child to me means younger than a teenager so 11/12?

Since when has child labour been abolished?

Are you the landowner then?

Yes if someone had worked all their lives for my family who gave him reduced pay in return for lifetime accommodation of course I'd honour it. He has paid for it with labour in advance, often to the great advantage of landowners in the past.

When the current 70 yr old was 14/15 this was still standard model of agricultural employment - cheap labour for landowners as the cottages had little income potential quite often. An illiterate labourer would be unlikely to have started work later than 14 even in 1960s as pupils could be excused the last year if the had jobs to go to - unsurprisingly it was poor kids from poor families who were out at work as early as possible. Its not unusual for agricultural workers of this era to put in 50 -60 plus years of cheap labour to earn that retirement home.

Landowners did fine out of the deal.

Your friend is a sh!t, not to put too fine a point on it.

I would tell him so. And I hope that the tenant has a watertight, iron-clad tenancy contract and can stay there as long as he wants to, or until his death.

This will be very stressful for him though. Does your "friend" not ever think that if it wasn't for all of the hard and doubtless skilled work this man put in to the estate he inherited, then it wouldn't have the value it has now?

I couldn't do it to anyone - not if I wasn't desperate, and it doesn't seem that your "friend" is.

I totally agree OP. Bloody awful thing to do to this poor old man. Your friend is lucky enough to have been given so much by his ancestors, and yet cannot extend any generosity towards an elderly man who has helped his family for his entire life.
I would be sternly telling my friend how shocked I was ! Would perhaps the local vicar have a word ? Someone neutral like that might help sway him ?

Morally, your friend is in the wrong and I think you should point that out to him, plus the fact that the local community will think badly of him (if he doesn't care about the moral aspect, realizing that he'll be shunned might have an impact). Regardless of the legalities, turning a vulnerable elderly person (and being illiterate makes him especially vulnerable) out onto the street is very wrong.

As PP's have pointed out, long term a four-bedroom farmhouse might not be suitable accommodation for an elderly person, especially if they have physical ailments. Instead of evicting him right now, your friend might want to make inquiries with the council about alternative accommodation (e.g., a retirement flat) when the time comes.

Anyway, I'd make it clear to your friend that you're shocked by their attitude, and you won't be able to remain friends if they summarily evict this person. Sometimes you have to be blunt.

Thank you for all the advice, I appreciate it and will follow up the links when I can. I thought I would be judged for judging my friend, and for concerning myself with his business. The estate runs at a loss and has done for many years before my friend inherited it from his uncle. It’s a huge burden. Contractors farm the land but everything else is falling into ruin. It’s in England in a very pretty area.

The situation is making me very sad. I don’t want to confront him about it due to personal hardships he is undergoing that are unrelated to this inheritance and because he has unconditionally supported me through similar hardships in my past. It worries me that he is fixated upon the only house he can’t immediately take possession of right now and therefore he will never be happy. I’ve encouraged him to talk at length about the situation as he is not the sole beneficiary of the entire estate but has inherited responsibility for most of it without any formal preparation. I don’t want to abandon him but I will find a way to contact the parish priest to see if they can help the tenant and I will also email some of the other suggestions such as the farming union and the homelessness charities.

In answer to your question, the farm hand does have a right to the house because he wasn't paid decent wages. He was given accommodation in lieu of wages so yes he either needs to be paid for 50+ yrs of work or housed until he dies. He's protected by law in this as it's a common practice in certain industries like farming.

The landowner in question has already got a house he's living in, he just wants the OAP's house.

My response was to @Doodadoo

In simple terms yes he does have more rights to live there

It all depends on what the circumstances, length of time the house has been rented, whether it has an agricultural occupancy, or the tenants have a signed AST for 12 months or they are sitting tenants.

Even if your family are on the streets you can’t just tell another family/couple/person to move out because you own the house and you want to move in

It has nothing to do with being charitable. There are laws that protect the tenant to stop this sort of thing from happening. It isn’t the 1960s where if you bought a place with a tenant in you just paid a few heavies to go round and throw the family and all their belongings into the streets.

I knew of an elderly lady, she'd gone into service at about 16, stayed working in that house until she died in her 80's. She stayed in the kitchen, the even more elderly lady of the house would sit in a different room. I found it very sad, the two of them there, mostly on their own, but no company to each other, still maintaining outdated social roles.

What if the council doesn't have a property available?

Council accommodation is like hen's teeth nowadays, and the waiting lists are massive. Apart rom which, this is the man's ^home" with memories - a place he's worked for and presumably is content in. Why should he move if he isn't legally obliged to?

And even if it is legal, ethically it is a horrible thing to do.

Dear Doodadoo,
It has been the custom in the past for properties on agricultural land to be "tied" to workers on that land. It has also been customary for verbal agreements to be struck as to the holding of the occupants of those properties, and for that agreement to be "lifetime". My grandfather had such a verbal contract with a landlord of whom he was a normal tenant, which was rescinded at short notice when the LL's daughter wanted the house when she got married. (My grandfather was respected in the village and known for starting up a branch of Joseph Arch's Agricultural Labourers Union. Not everyone repected him for that.) Grandad was able to buy a small farm freehold, so not to bad an outcome. That was between the wars. During my lifetime, on the other side of the family, my father's cousin was a gamekeeper with a verbal contract for lifetime occupation, not just for him, but his wife if she outlived him. Which she did, and the contract dissolved, leaving her, and her learning disabled son homeless. Fortunately, his employer, a well respected charity for the learning disadvantaged, managed to house them.
The agricultural world doesn't work like city folks think.
People who own things they intend to keep shouldn't make promises they intend to break, or to allow their inheritors to break.

A relative of mine worked some tenanted land and lived in a tied cottage he had been born in. When he became very elderly and could no longer work, he told the estate he had to retire. They gave him a year to find somewhere else to live. A big deal at his age.
Another younger relative lives in a tied cottage as an agricultural worker. I hope he will be okay.

So much for Noblesse Olibge.