Sorry - this is a bit of a long one:
I have lived in my current home for 4 years. It is a 100(ish) year old mid-terraced farm cottage with horrendous damp. This was not obvious when I moved in and as the matters have arisen I have informed my landlord...
In the last two years I have had to repeatedly scrub the walls in the back of my kitchen to get rid of the black mould - I have now just resorted to putting a curtain across that part of the kitchen and not using the area at all. The agents were informed and I remind them every month when I go in to pay rent - but they are yet to actually do anything about it. I also have to wash dishes as I use them as there is damp in the cupboards so even when clean they have been exposed to lord knows what...
The front and back doors are both rotting - the back is now taped up with thick "black and nasty" (courtesy of an army friend!) to stop the draughts. The front door has a howling gale around the edges, despite my putting the foam insulating tape around it - and when it is wet and windy (which in Yorkshire is a lot of the time) the carpet inside the door (currently about 1msq) becomes saturated with water being blown under.
I also have an inexplicable damp patch in the middle of the floor in my sitting room - it only appears when it is really wet outside so I can only imagine that there is a split pipe under the floor that backs up...
Repairs were done to my bedroom ceiling last year after some tiles fell off the roof, but it took 4 months for them to even come out and look at it - by which time I was catching water in 5 buckets. This repair work is now leaking again and they refused to deal with any of the other problems when they were in doing that...
I really love the area I live in and the house is very sweet (despite being damp and draughty) - I cannot afford anywhere else within the area and am loathe to move. The Agent (who is notoriously shit) has informed me that my rent is going up at Easter - despite fact that I am only £50 a moth less than the house next door which has another bedroom, bathroom, downstairs loo, utility room, garage and twice the size of garden to mine. I pointed this out to him and he said that it "had to go up because it hadn't been raised in 4 years" - which is very true, but surely it is depending on market value, rather than that they fancy getting a bit more cash out of it...
I will consider paying the extra £50 a month - but only if they do the repairs (and perhaps fit a new kitchen/bathroom - which are circa 1980 and very delapidated). The problem is that I have been telling the agents about it for literally years and they do nothing about it. When I was being snippy about the rent rise I did point out that if it was being hiked to get me out the landlord would probably have to spend £8k to £10k just making it habitable for any other tennant. I was just given a gallic shrug...
What are my rights and how on earth do I do to get the house sorted out? I am loathe to go through the courts as this is a very small community and although the landlord (who owns this village and the next) is known for being a tight git - it wouldn't stand me in good stead for getting another rented property locally. I would basically have to be prepared to completely leave the area if it backfired.