A bizarre situation has arisen with a Labour council securing a banning order on a landlord – who now has to evict up to 80 tenants as a result.

The Bristol Live news website is reporting that local landlord Naomi Knapp was issued with a banning order in 2022, confirmed on appeal in May this year.

Knapp’s tenants were reassured by the council that the order did ‘not necessarily mean they will need to leave their properties’, but now all the tenants have now been asked to leave by December 1.

The terms of the banning order gave Knapp six months to comply with the order by either selling the homes as rented properties with a sitting tenant, or passing ownership and control over to someone else, so she is not the registered landlord. 

Bristol Live reports that the council claims Knapp has failed to arrange alternative resolution to the problem so is now having to evict the 60 to 80 tenants believed to be in properties in her ownership.

Knapp told Bristol Live that the lettings agencies she uses have issued Section 21 notices against every single one of her tenants in all of her properties, giving them until December 1 – six months from the confirmation that the banning order would stand – to move out. 

She is reported to have applied to the Property Tribunal which issued the original order for a variation which would give her tenants more time. She says she now wants to sell her properties and no longer be a landlord.

She says: “The empty ones I’ve been putting on the market, and I have managed to sell a couple, but the housing market has pretty much frozen, especially for homes with sitting tenants.

“It just feels so unfair. The action taken by the council related to four or five of my properties, and yes I did have issues with a couple of them. 

“There were repairs that weren’t fixed, but this was at the the time of Covid and it was pretty impossible to find people to go and fix repairs in a timely way.”

You can read the full Bristol Live story here.