Tuesday, 22 May 2012

Being forced into private rented accomodation

Posted in: Need to Know | Ask the Experts

27/01/2012 9:25 pm

Asilbek Karimov

Asilbek Karimov

Posts: 1

First of all let me tell you about myself. I am married and have two kids and at the moment i am looking for a job and i am on jobseekers allowance. We are living in a council hostel in one room with 2 children.

We have been living in private rented accomodation which the council found us for the last 3 years, i have been working and paying my rent and never had any arrears. Our rent was £900 pounds a month. One day an agent of my landlord called me and said that the rent will be increased from £900 to £1400 a month from next month. I told them that i recently lost my job and i can not afford to pay unless the council would agree to pay the full amount as i am getting jobseekers allowance. Then i went to the council and explained the situation, they said that the rent is too high and it is over the limit that the council pays for a 2 bedroom property, and they advised me to stay in my flat until the landlord evicts me, then they would put me and my family into a hostel. Eventually we have been evicted which costed me more than £300. As soon as we were evicted the next week i went to collect my letters and i found out that there is another tenant, couple with two kids just like us, living there already and when i asked them they told me that the council housed them there through the same agency and they are paying £1400 a month which initially council refused to pay when i approached them. I was so angry and upset that the council put us through all these, i was so sorry for my children, they lost their friends in the neighbourhood, their performance at school got worse and also now we have to travel for more than 30 mins to their school as our hostel is quite far. I contacted my housing officer and wrote him letters but did not receive any response, after one month i found out that my housing officer left his job in the council and another officer was appointed instead of him. At the beginning when we were being placed into a hostel our previous housing officer asked us if we would consider going into private rented accomodation, we refused after what happened, we did not want to go through all these again.

Yesterday i received a phone call from the council and they are trying to force us to go into private sector saying that we can not stay in the hostel any longer and if we refuse we will be thrown out from the hostel even if we have 2 small children under the age of 6.

What can we do in this situation? Thank you for your attension.

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Anonymous

Anonymous

28/01/2012 8:00 pm

Sounds like you have gotten some very poor advice from the LA. When you went to court ( I take it you were on a Assured Shorthold tenancy or a licence?) did you mention that the LA had told you to stay put until the landlord evicted you?

Unfortunately you are in the world of temp accommodation, where the local housing allowance is king. It might be the council is paying the max permitted for that property £900 and the new couple are covering the shortfall?

As for the Housing Officer leaving....housing has massive turn over of staff, the job on the whole is unrewarding and the number of genuine cases is outweighed by those who just want everything handed to them on a plate (I dont for one second suggest you are this, I see from your post you had a job and got made redundant). It will take a while for you new HO to get up to speed of course.

The over riding issue here is the LA wanting to get you out of the hostel and into Private. Unfortunately yet again you have little control over this. In my days of being a Lettings Officer I once interviewed someone for perm accomodation who had been through 4 hostels and 3 private flats before coming to me. You will be on a non secure agreement at the hostel meaning the council can choose to end it at any time whilst providing you with alternative accomodation, they are doing this so you have little recourse.

As a point of clarification, why would you not want to leave the hostel? I've been to a few and they are not places I would want my daughter to grow up in. Yes you'd like some stability and of course your recent experience of being turned over by the"Rachman" who upped your rent must still burn deep, but why?

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tags Accountability, advice, affordable housing, Allocations, antisocial tenant, arrears, Best Practice, care and support, careers, comment, complaint, council, councils, discrimination, discussion, eviction, HA renting, help, homelessness prevention, Housing, housing association, housing associations, housing policy, rent, urgent

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