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Hundreds of complaints about landlords - only TWO worth prosecuting

A council has admitted that it had received literally hundreds of complaints about landlords, and it investigates each one - yet only two were significant enough to involve a prosecution.

Watford council has responded to media enquiries by admitting that in the last three years it received 421 complaints about landlords, 169 about HMOs, and 759 about services to tenants. 

Yet only what the council calls “a small minority” - to be exact, two - led to prosecutions.

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Councillor Stephen Johnson, portfolio holder for commercial planning and housing, has told the Watford Observer that every complaint is investigated and that the best way to address problems was typically to work with the tenants to cater for their needs.

“Where this doesn’t work we will take formal action and we have cases on going at present” he continued.

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    And how many complaints about Watford Council housing have the council received? A Iot lot more. Sorry, the council will respond they were not complaints they were requests for service. Why then were not all the “complaints” made about private landlords not categorised as request for service or information? Why did the council not tell the tenant to complain to their landlord instead of bothering them? If my experience is repeated it is tenants trying to get a council flat by making up or exaggerating faults with their privately rented property.

    The manipulation of the media by social landlords and charities is appalling but it’s only because we landlords do not organise ourselves and fight back.

    I would be interested to find out about the prosecutions. I would suggest that the breaches would have been cheaper, quicker and more easily resolved by the council doing the work and charging the landlord. In other words there is no benefit in prosecuting landlords it only delays resolving the problem for the tenants.
    Jim Haliburton
    The HMO Daddy

  • PossessionFriendUK PossessionFriend

    So, of 590 Complaints about Landlords ( 421 and 169 )
    only 2 were found worthy of a prosecution - 0.3 % !

  • Philip Drake

    I wonder how many private rental sector landlords (PRS) complained to the council about their (PRS) tenants?

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    Phillip my friend the answer is zero, LL’s are not that silly complaints are the reserved for Tenants. We know and its well documented over the years that virtually all LL prosecutions are following a Tenants complaint to the Council, its lovely easy money for Councils and Courts, not sure if their fees are £10. or £30. per minute there massive anyway.
    The arithmetic is diabolical and don’t make sense, so 169 + 759 = 928 complaints but there were only 421 complaints altogether so where’s the other 507, are they responding to more complaints than they are getting. I wished people would stop talking backwards.

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