Rogue traders

I could smell the fungi before I could see it. Most of the wallpaper had peeled above the teenager’s bed. I estimated that the worst of it was about 10 inches from the girl’s pillow and that she must have been ingesting the substance for months. This was one of two small bedrooms in 48-year-old Hazel’s home, in Bury, Greater Manchester, which she shared with two teenage daughters. I could not enter through the front door, it had been boarded up five months earlier, after a break-in.

When we were planning our recent Dispatches programme on rogue landlords we discovered three competing landlords with more than 250 rented properties in the Bury area, each manifesting evidence of gross neglect and abuse of their residents.

I have worked in the homelessness field for some 40 years, and am now chair of the New Horizon Youth Centre close to London’s Euston Station. I worked there full-time as director from 1970 to 1973. That was a period of acute housing crisis: many of our young people lived in squats, or exploitative hostels. Then there was a period when social housing was augmented by housing associations with whom we secured a number of very successful placements.

Today New Horizon is back to square one, the shortages now so grave that many of the places we once had access to are going to more ‘stable’ people. So we are back in the age of the private rented sector. Buy-to-let has spawned a new breed of landlords who have little idea of what mass provision of housing for socially vulnerable people entails. Theirs is an equation of mortgages over dependable direct benefits payments. The result is a mismatch in which vast exploitation and abuse is almost endemic. If anything goes wrong with a tenant’s benefits, the landlord panics and looks to eviction to save his bank payments. It also leads to landlords spending less on maintenance.

At the same time, there is an acute, maybe understandable, reluctance by councils to act when this exploitation is drawn to their attention. In an age of cuts, where are the staff? Where indeed can the exploited be rehoused?

We need something on the scale of a post-war house building programme. We need a strategy to ensure that exploitation quite simply doesn’t pay. As a news man, I find it extraordinary that Britain’s acute housing crisis does not attract equal billing with other main concerns - health and education.

It seems to me that with the National Housing Federation’s annual conference around the corner, it’s time to highlight what is happening in the private rented sector. That backwash of easy mortgage money that played into the financial meltdown of 2008 has left a vast human crisis.

Our exposé of rogue landlords on Dispatches demands a new approach to regulation - at the very least, a national register of landlords to provide a basis for monitoring and tracking the best and worst of them.

Jon Snow is a Channel 4 News presenter