Rental rant

We are a nation where home ownership, rather than renting, is seen as normal. Perhaps that's why, from what I've seen, the media tends to take the side of landlords where there is a dispute between tenants and landlords. For example this article I saw today about landlords not being paid rent because local government can now pay housing benefit to tenants rather than landlords. (I'm slightly confused when they say this only began to happen last year- it happened to me nearly three years ago, although it was a slightly different system).

I'm not saying this doesn't happen- I'm sure it does. But the article says nothing about what percentage of tenants don't run off without paying their rent, or anything about the struggles tenants go through to have enough to live on. It says nothing about what happens when the amount of benefit and the amount of rent don't add up. If it comes to a choice between paying the fuel bill and buying food, or rent, what do you do?

And given that we have actively encouraged a debt culture of 'buy now, pay later' over the last couple of decades is it surprising if people perhaps don't take falling into arrears as seriously as they once did? There seems to be a presumption in the media- or am I reading too much into it?- that the tenants are to blame, that they aren't paying because they don't want to. Rather than recognising that mostly these are people who are struggling to get by, and need help.

The article also says nothing about the standards of the rented properties, or whether the rents charged by private landlords are fair. Having lived in and visited a variety of rented properties, I know there are widely different standards and rents, and that the two don't always correlate. Do those landlords keep the house in a state where they would be happy to live in it themselves? Or is the paint peeling, is the heating broken, are there rats in the kitchen? A year or two ago many landlords objected to the new deposit guarantee scheme the government brought in to protect tenants who often find it hard to get landlords to return the deposit they pay on taking up the tenancy. Again the landlords were the ones who got media coverage for their complaints at government 'interference' in their business arrangements. But most landlords aren't businessmen, but people wanting extra money on top of their day job, with little time to devote to looking after their properties and even less willingness to spend money on them. So is it any wonder that the properties are often in bad shape, and landlords seize the opportunity to make tenants pay for things that in reality, are just the consequences of not enough attention being given to the property. For example, piece of furniture or equipment broke through improper use, it would be fair enough to charge that to the tenants, taking it out of their deposit. But if it broke while being used correctly, just because it was old or improperly maintained, that's not the tenants fault but the landlords', and the tenant shouldn't have to pay. So should we sympathise with landlords because they can no longer get away with this kind of thing? Or with tenants who are now slightly more protected from it? Of course, not all landlords are like this, some are brilliant, but there will always be some who try to make as much profit from as little input as possible.

If we can't provide adequate accommodation for those in difficulties, because of homelessness, joblessness or family breakdown, what do we expect people to do? I know someone who, through no fault of his own, suffering from severe mental illness would be on the streets or in a homeless shelter if it wasn't for the help and support of friends and church.

Perhaps we should be providing more support and encouragement to landlords to take on these higher risk tenants. There has been a lot of fuss lately about government trying to help people at risk of loosing their homes through defaulting on mortgage payments- perhaps some kind of similar scheme could be extended to rental tenants, who are usually on lower incomes and the more vulnerable. Plus better training of council staff (at least in York, where in my experience you can find out more from the council website than council staff) so that they can actually help and advise people who are in danger of falling behind what help is available, rather than in one or two cases I know giving them wrong information which leads to more struggle and difficulty.

Surely it's better to try to deal with the problem here, to stop people becoming homeless in the first place, than to have to try and pick up the pieces of shattered lives once people have lost everything and are living on the streets?