My son (in his 30s) has drink and drug issues and makes bad decisions.
At the end of May, he let a "friend" into his flat and now this person refuses to leave. My son is now working abroad. We were alerted to the situation by an anonymous letter from someone in the street who was concerned about the situation (the person in the house has been to prison and has other criminals over) and also had concerns that our son was intimidated into letting him in. The person occupying does not pay rent (although he has loaned my son a significant amount of money) and done some work on the property. We have paid him for this work on the basis of invoices he has submitted and photos of the work. We have agreed to pay him the money he loaned to our son and part paid him this. He refuses to leave. We have served him (through a solicitor) with a notice to quit but he is still there. Our solicitor is now going to try and get a court order to remove him. The person occupying says he will fight the application as he has a two year old daughter who stays with him some nights and we can't make him homeless. This all started about 8 weeks ago so he has had plenty of time to find somewhere else to live. Solicitor says it will take 3 months to get him out using the legal process. He says he will go if we pay him the full amount of the money our son borrowed, but we don't want to do that until he has moved out. Stalemate! In the meantime, he has had a skip delivered to the flat's parking bay (person is a builder) and this is breaching one of the covenants of the flat as it is only to be used for parking. We think a breach could end up with our son being taken to court by the management company.
We are so upset about the whole thing it would be really good to hear outsiders' objective views of what to do about this and get him out. Is there a way we can safely pay him the money and ensure he moves out? He is a really bad person so we can't trust him.
Sorry for the long read!
PS As soon as he is out, son will sell the flat and son has agreed to repay us the loan and legal costs from sale proceeds.