No hot water or heating, help!

A friend has asked for my opinion, and help, however despite being a landlord I do not feel fully qualified to give proper advice as I have never experienced a problem with my tenants. All help will be gratefully appreciated and thanks in advance, please see below the tenants statement of events: –

I wish to seek some legal advice on the following matter. Below I lay out the issues and timelines of an ongoing issue we have with our flat and landlord.

Since the third of November 2023, we have not had hot water or heating in our flat. The hot water and heating are centralised in the building, so this has affected all of the flats in the building.

We have been told that the managing agents of the property notified the owners that the boiler would need to be replaced at the end of November by speaking to other residents. The owners decided to move away from a centralised system and switch to a decentralised system, where each owner is responsible for installing a boiler in the flat that they own.

We paid full rent for the month of November, despite there being no hot water or central heating.

In December it was made clear to us by our landlord that this was an ongoing issue and there was not an end date in sight. We therefore approached our landlord and requested a rent reduction in light of not having heating or hot water. We did not have feedback before our rent was due, so we cancelled our direct debit until we had had a conversation and had come to an agreement with our landlord.

We had a phone call and agreed we would pay a reduced amount for the month of December (30% reduction).

We vacated the flat for the last few weeks of December so that we could spend the Christmas season with hot water. We agreed that we would catch back up in early January. Our landlord told us that he would reach out to companies and attempt to get someone in to consult on installing a boiler within the flat.

We also agreed that we would talk about the rent amount for January onwards in the New Year, once there was clear information on the next steps.

We have not had an update since we last spoke in December 2023.

We have not paid the rent amount for both January and February 2024 as we have had no news regarding a resolution and feel that he hasn’t held up his side of the lease agreement.

As a result of not having heating or hot water in the flat, we have incurred significant additional costs on bills due to using huge amounts of electricity to warm up our flat and boil the kettle for hot water. Our monthly EDF bills have increased significantly.

We are now almost at 4 months without heating or hot water and have not paid our rent for 2 consecutive months. We are not clear on what exactly we should do as we clearly feel that the terms in our lease agreement have not been met, which is why we have withheld payment. However, we are also concerned about what it means to be in violation of our responsibilities and are concerned about the steps that our landlord could take.

Based on the above information, please can we have some legal advice on next steps. Our desired resolution is to have heating and hot water back working in our flat as soon as possible.

Thanks,

David

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