Enforcement not legislation – PRS Hit Squads

Ben if you ever leave the LA, let me know & I'm giving you a job working for us!

Cheers Ben! Fascinating stuff as usual.

Why don't you just ....

Nah! Only joking I'm sure you've thought through it all a thousand times.

Something is obviously wrong in the state of Denmark.

Reply to the comment left by "HB Welcome" at "04/10/2013 - 19:37":

I genuinely thank you for that HBW. I cant tell you the number of times I have offloaded about cases to freinds who say “But why don’t you just….”. It really annoys me, as if, as you suggest we haven’t considered all angles, given that this is what we deal with day in day out.

Some of us leave it at the door at 5pm but I just cant find it whithin myself to do that. Those who do, have an easier life.

I am sitting on the bog at 4am still thinking how I can solve the problem.

Dealing with criminal landlords is a legal business and what I have come to understand after a lifetime of being involved in this is that the law has little to do with justice or fairness. It’s just a convoluted game, like Monopoly and the law allows more people to walk than it regulates.

My missus and other people not directly involved use common sense thinking, but that isn’t what the law is about

I once trained a group of 40 coppers on landlord/tenant law and I spoke of my annoyance in trying to get sufficient evidence to prosecute a case given the conditions I set out earlier. I said “It’s so frustrating trying to get sufficient evidence when you personally KNOW what people are up to that it’s no wonder that you lot fit people up from time to time”

There was a horrible minute’s frozen silence, when I thought I’d made a joke too far and then a roar of recognition.

Reply to the comment left by "Anthony Altman" at "04/10/2013 - 17:13":

“The simple fact is that putting 50 landlords in court on technicalities earns them more kudos than 1 landlord in court on life threatening offences”.

Anthony today my Landlord law Newsround mentioned this very thing http://www.landlordlawblog.co.uk/2013/10/04/ben-reeve-lewis-friday-newsround-114/?doing_wp_cron=1380915259.1216070652008056640625

I wrote:-
Last Friday I attended a conference for council enforcement officers and housing advice types.

One of the workshops was on the vexed subject of landlord licensing and methods for tackling the well known ‘Rogue landlords’.

Or ‘Rouge’ landlords as they are becoming increasingly known as, what with spell-checkers failing to pick up the frequent misspelling.

We were given outlines of 4 different schemes.
• Southend’s self regulation idea,
• Enfield’s kick them in the nuts approach (my preferred favourite),
• Richmond’s additional licensing and predictably
• Newham’s hair-trigger blunderbuss that blasts anyone unfortunate enough to walk through the door scheme.

Stand by your wife
Having been appraised of the different working methods and discussed the pros and cons of each we were invited to stand in a designated place representing the scheme we preferred. A bit like ‘Runaround’ the old kids TV show hosted by Mike “Frank Butcher” Reid.
Out of the 50 souls in our room only 1 stood on the Newham spot. He was from Newham. I asked him afterwards if he had freely chosen it and he said “Well…….its like having 3 supermodels and your wife in a line. You have to stand by your wife don’t you?”. Ha-ha.

It occurred to me that the result of the exercise was pretty much predictable given the jobs of the people doing it, people working the frontline dealing with ‘rouged’ landlords on a daily basis. Had the exercise been done with elected councillors the result would probably have been different.

And if it had been elected councillors at election time, different again.

To my mind the Newham model has more to do with political capital than coalface practicalities, which is why you have to monitor the politicians on this, not the enforcement officers who are trying to get the job done.

As Lester Freemon in "The Wire" says in trying to deconstruct what is actually going on, "Follow the money".

Reply to the comment left by "Ben Reeve-Lewis" at "04/10/2013 - 19:06":

Promotion to where you deserve to be Ben, CONGRATULATIONS, it's been too long coming but I know you will use your new position to kick arse, take out the crooks and show the likes of Sir Robin Wales of Newham how it should be done and for a fraction of the cost. Good on you my friend 🙂
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Reply to the comment left by "Mark Alexander" at "05/10/2013 - 00:07":

Thanks Mark. It's money-where-mouth-is time haha I've banged on about this for years and managed to persuade my bosses to trust me on this.

99% of the others in the multi agency team have said "At last, we might get somewhere!!!!!" while the remaining 1% seem to view it like a turkey at christmas, having to shake off the cynicism and do some work.

I'll keep P118 readers up to date as things develop.

Reply to the comment left by "Ben Reeve-Lewis" at "04/10/2013 - 19:06":

Well done Ben!

Does this mean more money for you??

Sharon

LOL Ben spot on you understand the politics i will be cheering you on as you do what has to be done hopefully without interference

Reply to the comment left by "Sharon Crossland" at "05/10/2013 - 09:35":

It should do later on Sharon yeah. But in typical council red tape styleee my duties would have to be reassessed and re-graded using a formula and as the post has never existed before nobody quite knows what my duties will entail, I'm sort of making it up as I go along. Once I can that the post involves XY and Z the process can begin.

If I worked in the private sector I would just get bunged for it. Hell, if it works out I might even take it off the councils hands and privatise myself. We can do that these days, in fact even the council encourages it, better to have 2,000 self employed people than loads of staff with sick pay and holidays

Reply to the comment left by "Anthony Altman" at "05/10/2013 - 09:49":

Without interference? Chance would be a fine thing.

Having worked for councils the majority of my working life my prediction is this:-
stage one: I'll be watched like a hawk for the first few weeks and have all my most exciting and radical ideas sat on by senior managers.
stage 2: I'll start telling them less and less of what I am up to and they will leave me alone.
Stage 3: start doing the things they dont want me to do
Stage 4: get the succeses and THEN tell them what youve been doing
Stage 5: those same managers and councillors step forward and claim all the credit for the project

Haha Twas ever thus Anthony, you just need to understand how it worls and build this into your mental game plan