Surely I’m not expected legally to have this tenant in my property forevermore??

[Saywhetw]

Tenant been in property since 2017. I need to sell. Solicitor telling me we can’t used section 21 as I didn’t provide the right information at the time of the tenancy and also didn’t carry out electrical report or gas safety checks. This was oversight on our part. We can’t seem to use section 8 as tenant paid rent and isn’t a nuisance or anything but she literally won’t move even though we’ve asked repeatedly she just says she hadn’t got anywhere to go. It doesn’t seem right there’s no way out of this?? Solicitor said best they can do is write a letter asking her to vacate. I will get a second opinion tomorrow but really panicking now

surely what you are proposing would just create monopolies which would drive prices up and standards down? And also create a depressing homogeneity in the housing market ,

Theres far too much militancy on this thread.

Militancy? You mean clarity of thought and social conscience.

The person who should rightfully own a property is the person who does the work which earns the money which pays for the property. The tenant.

Anyone who interferes in that process is a leech, a vampire, a profiteering ghoul who exploits and steals what should not be theirs.

There should be zero profit available in buying or letting residential property.

Imagine swanning around as a landlord thinking it is right that you own a property which others have worked their arses to pay for.

Delusional. Devoid of intellect or ethics. A pestilence in our society.

The OP literally said it's because she's selling up. And my comment literally stated that I did not condone the inactions of the landlord.

They don't. Most of them are dire and don't have a clue.

If a landlord wishes to increase the rent they certainly won't be evicting the current tenants in order to do so. Why would they? They'll simply increase the rent.

i had to get a non rent paying coke snorting DJ out of my house, and the solicitors just sent them a copy of the gas safety again along with a section 21 letter on the day the tenancy ended. It’s good to hand deliver as it’s very common to pretend they’ve never received notice. Failing that, there’s a thing in America called cash for keys where you just pay them off to move out. Can be cheaper than months of unpaid rent

@Saywhetw , landlord here. I’m sure this isn’t what you want to hear but try offering her a financial incentive, it costs to move.

You have given your tenant every bit of power in the universe. No gas safety certificate, no electricity certificate. Did you issue tenant with EPC and How to Rent document from government website and put deposit into a deposit scheme? Does the tenant even have a proper tenancy contract? You have brought all of this on yourself OP. I have sympathy for your tenant.

I’m not clear what your point is? I wasn’t talking about rent increases.

How would housing work in your ideal world? Would it all be state controlled or privately owned?

This only works if there is full social housing, which there has never been.

So there has always been some private renting.

Good regulation, enforced, that is applied fairly to both LLs and Tenants is whats needed.
There are plenty of very shitty tenants as well as LLs.

But as seen on this thread, LLs don't get EICRs or even Gas safe certificates & no one cares or enforces current regs, which is why i think the new RRB is pointless.

Plus the costs in the bill, such as a LL register, will just be passed on to the Tenant.

Councils have not the staff to investigate poor LLs register or not.

That's a shame if that has been your experience, but remember not all EA are the same. I work with a few EA as part of my job and they are all highly qualified and do regular training.

It looks like very recently there's been a new court judgment interpreting this more sympathetically to landlords... Found this on search posted the same day as this thread. Not sure if anyone else has posted it to op yet, there's a lot of pages to go through. Hopefully their solicitors are keeping track of this stuff!

www.hja.net/expert-comments/blog/commercial-property-disputes/gas-safety-certificates-and-section-21-notices-important-new-update-for-landlords/

Good, someone else found that 2025 case. Their argument was that the gs certificate becomes out of date so you can later remedy not having served it in order to serve section 21. You still would have broken the law OP.

www.hja.net/expert-comments/blog/commercial-property-disputes/gas-safety-certificates-and-section-21-notices-important-new-update-for-landlords/

Hope you are reading some updates.

Why? It doesn’t cause “monopolies” elsewhere and the mad rush of hobby landlords has both reduced standards and raised rents.

What is so bad about expecting someone making money out of peoples’ homes being held responsible for basic standards and safety of those homes? Time and again rental problems are the result of hobby landlords failing to do the basics in terms of safety and maintenance and trying to milk a mediocre property for all its worth.

My sympathies will aways been with the victims of crap landlords, not the people trying to maximise their buck whilst evading responsibilities.

Basic safety checks on gas and electric are the very least a tenant should be able to expect when handing over their hard earned money.

Way before hobby LL's we had appalling standards and conditions, hence the move to council housing.

We have some crappy LLs now because there is no enforcement, councils simply don't have people doing the checks, nor the budgets to prosecute.

Tenants often too scared to complain is another reason.

Yes I know there were poor standards, that is what I grew up in. There were no shortage of damp, mouldy houses and poorly maintained property in council stock either, which could also be poorly managed and operating colour bars/random bars and bribery and corruption were hardly rare. Council properties were not a guarantee of fair access or quality.

Some councils were good, some large rental bodies were good (Peabody for example) and post Rachman there were more regulations to manage smaller landlords (where small would be a number of properties not just one or two). Tenants also had more protection after Rachman. There were good and bad under low spending and high spending governments.

What was much less common was the plague of hobby landlords. Too many of these, like the OP, don’t even carry out basic safety checks and who don’t understand the rental business well enough to know that squeezing property for both income and capital growth means a shit deal for tenants. They simply buy into the idea of easy money and are a plague on the rental market because they either don’t know their responsibilities or simply don’t care.

Tenants too scared to complain has been a common feature of the hobby landlord sector where tenants know that any complaint is likely to result in eviction with a month’s notice. The new act may not be perfect but it goes some way to redressing the problems of hobby (or amateur if you prefer) landlords.

There is no enforcement, hence the OP had no safety certs for 8 years.

Thats the issue & yes you re bang on the money with tenants scared to complain.

With the new RRB, LLs can still evict the tenant and sell or if there is no enforcement, evict and rent out again, within the 12 months.

My concern with the new bill is costs are going to be passed on in increased rents.

@Saywhetw

So what did you decide to do? Did you get more legal advice? Go down the cash for keys route?

Somewhat bizarrely the tennant didn’t want to see the safety certs? My tenants were always given a copy of them. If they didn’t get one, they would have queried that I’m sure. So did the tenant think they were safe? It appears a bit ad hoc from everyone involved. The big warning here is to pay for a managing agent. So much easier but landlords like op won’t pay up. We saw it as protection for us and tenant and in 20 years of being a LL we only used s21 once. Most people want to be decent landlords but so many people think they can do this as a hobby alongside pension saving and won’t pay the agents. My agent was great. I didn’t want tenants I could never get out so when they gave up the tenancies, I sold. Too much stress now to be a landlord. It has to be a business.

Lots of tenants either don’t know what they are supposed to expect from their landlord or they don’t want to kick up a fuss.

Or they could be well informed and have kept quiet knowing that this “oversight” means they might never a S21.

@LastToBePicked I think most people read up on what they should receive. Obviously my tenants got everything and a detailed condition check every year and on moving in but each side in an agreement needs to know the law and best practise.

I deal with a lot of tenants with housing difficulties in my line of work and there’s a full range from absolutely clueless through to people who could probably pass an exam in housing law. But it’s really not uncommon at all for people to have very little idea of their rights and take what they are told by the landlord/letting agents as gospel.

What we see in much of western Europe is large, professional landlords managing their properties for stable income eg pension funds.

Not Sue and Derek who watched a couple of episodes of Homes Under the Hammer and decided that anyone could be a landlord.