Sorting the Rogues from the Ridiculous

The dilemma that you face is the seeming inability of Shelter to recognise that aswell as obvious criminal LL there are criminal tenants.
I would suggest as you have intimated that most LL who are new to the game are not criminal, they just need educating as to their responsibilities.
Most of them are good people who are put in terrible positions by wrongun tenants.
They don't know what they are doing and need assistance.
Trouble is, that it  seems to be you by default that is doing the educating!
There must be acceptance by the likes of Shelter that there are major issues with 'rogue tenants';  just ask LRS.
To allow the likes of Shelter to impress on the public perception that LL are the only problem is clearly disingenuous on the part of Shelter.
There needs to be more balance as to the actual circumstances which you have it seemingly tried to advise Shelter of.
Shelter does not make their case any more valid by continually banging on about rogue LL.
Yes there are 'rogue' LL but there are 'rogue' tenants.
Shelter needs to highlight the issues of bad tenants aswell as bad LL.
After all good LL need good tenants.
Somehow we need to match up the bad LL with the bad tenants; they deserve eachother!!

If only the council would let me wear that helmet when I get called out to an illegal eviction in progress I reckon incidents would dry up. Who would argue with a Centurian?

Paul you are right. I know I will again make myself unpopular with my peers but as I said in the article, landlords have simple needs from tenants, pay the rent and treat the property well. The vast majority of harassment and illegal eviction cases are initiated by tenants failing to do either, which makes the LL angry.

Now I dont say that as an excuse for bad LL responses, there is no excuse in my book for unprofessional behaviour but the trigger point is usually the same and I often sympathise with landlords anger, just not their methods of dealing with it.

For what its worth, the true rogues in my experience are the people on the edge of gangster-ism. People who want to make a lot of money quickly who choose property as the way to do it and have no intention of letting anyone stand in their way, not tenants or their rights, or enforcement teams of councils.

They play a calculated game, staying one step ahead of everyone, secure in the knowledge that as long as they keep their contact details and names utside the loop, then enforcement teams, who have to play by the rules, cant keep up.

The other area where I get regular problems is where both landlords and tenants come from the same foreign national communities, where language is often a barrier and the way that the community interacts within itself, often on a casual basis where friends, contacts and churches form a network that has nothing to do with standard housing law.

I just spent the day running a housing advice stall at Goldsmiths University, talking to 18 and 19 year olds looking to move ut of student accommodation and into house sharing as they face year 2 of their course and want to settle in the area. I was amazed at how little they know about renting. Not one of them had ever heard of deposit protection.

The more I look closely at what needs to change the more I am convinced it is education on both sides, I truly believe that enforcement action would be needed less if landlords and tenants understood the renting world.

It wont eradicate the true Rogues but again, as I said i the article it would free me up to be able to go after the real ones.

Ben red is not your colour!

You are of course right there are two types of people who do the wrong thing, not only in the letting business; those who don't know how to do the right thing and those who don't want to do the right thing and knowing the difference is a problem for all of us.  Only though education, formal and informal, will we solve the problem of those who do not know what they should be doing, both landlords and tenants, and once these people have been put aside and shown the errors of their ways people like you can be more effective in using your big sticks against the others. 

I don't think that there is any mileage in worrying about the names that the bad boys are called  "A Rose by any other name....."

I support Landlord Referencing and Midlands Landlords Accreditation Scheme because the first helps to marginalise the bad tenants and the second to marginalise the bad landlords. 

In my opinion anyone who comes into the business of offering homes to human beings and does not find out what the law requires is either arrogant or stupid and neither makes a good landlord.  Anyone who uses a service and does not intend to pay for it or use it as it should be used also falls into one of these cetegories and neither makes a good tenant.

So people like us must just keep banging on in the hope that those who did not know what they did not know will learn.

The good thing about the powers that BE is that they are never around too long and while they are playing musical chairs we are getting on with the business.

As anyone wearing that helmet knows Roman was not built in a day. 

You should see my other helmets Mary honestly (I have a small collection coz I've loved helmets since I was kid. My favourite is a 14th century Pig Faced Bascinet - google it)

Honestly, after 22 years now dealing with landlord/tenant problems I am absolutely convinced that the skeleton of the problem is an educational one. Enforcement stuff is a specialist area, more closely related to fraud.

One of the students I was giving advice to today about a landlord failing to do repairs and not being able to contact them didnt recall the name of either his landlord or the agent who set it up, HOW CAN YOU NOT KNOW??????

Also cluless amateur landlords fallin foul of depsoit regs or not knowing what a Section 21 notice is once again HOW CAN YOU NOT KNOW????

As I replied to Paul, the willfull landlords are certainly out there, as are the wilfull rip-off tenants but both are relatively small in number and no amount of education will get rid of them.

I also deal with mortgage borrowers facing repossession and you would be surprised how many dont know what type of mortgage they have, or in many cases how much their monthly payments are. And I kid you not, it is not uncommon for people to come with problems on a secured loan for £20,000 who dont even remember taking it out!!!!!!

Mortgage Rescue is a scheme whereby a housing association buys out a borrowers debts and leaves them in the family home as housing association tenants. Last year I got told by someone from the HOmes and Communites Agency who adminsters the scheme that within 6 months of becoming a social tenant with no debts 34% of them are in 2 month's rent arrears

Do you not feel sometimes that you are not dealing with adults but effective juveniles witrh no recognition of what or why they have done things with no acceptance of what they have done.
sometimes it must feel like you could give them a damn good thrashing to wake them up and realise they are in the adult world and to accept responsibility for their actions.
I think it could be almost said that the situations people get themselves into is a lack of parental oversight( and yes I am still told off by my mum; and she is never wrong!),and I am 50 odd!!!
There just appears to be a level of immaturity amongst supposed adults which our parents would never have indulged in, they couldn't they had to deal with real world issues, no easy credit for them.
I have too say I think adults today are no way as mature as our parents were when they had us.
There just seems to be a dumbing down of responsibilities to blame everyone else apart from ourselves.
When will we become as mature as our parents!!?

Oh I wouldnt set my parents up an example of how to do things Paul haha although I agree I dont remember growing up around any of my parents friends who believed that someone else would dig them out of the crapper if things went wrong.

My partner's West Indian immigrant family too. Her mum wokred long hours as a nurse and her dad, a Bus conductor, used to hand make furniture in the evenings and at weekends to make extra dosh and when he turned funny on her mum it was the neighbours who took Frazzy in for a while so they could sort their differences, no Social Services, and when her neighbour's dad turned funny Frazzy's mum took their daughter in, so both Frazz and her mate have this weird black and white extended family.

And when I first met her, when she was facing mortgage difficulties because she had just started her own business she worked all day building it up, cleaned houses on a Wednesday afternoon, taught Salsa in the evening, worked as a letting agent on Saturdays and stacked shelves in Sainsbury's from 11pm to 7am, 4 nights a week for a year until her biusiness took off. It never occurred to her to sign on.

I do get fed up when clients tell me they are council tenants and when I tell them I only deal with private they say they have a private lanldord. They consider themselves council tenants because the council pays the rent, and very often they dont know how much the rent even is, because the council pay it.

My parents were council tenants and so were Frazzy's but the mindset was different then. Something has changed. I hate the demonisation of council tenants and people on benefits that is going on but I can sadly think of many who fit the sterotype.

On a more optimistic tip I was listening on Radio 4 at the weekend about the huge rise in entrepreneurs, young people starting their own thing because there arent any jobs, that can only be a good thing, althoguh I would imagine it will be a steep learning curve for many

Is this the heads of family gathering round the table telling the children how they should view the world of letting ? Well the kids prefer to view things as part of life not part of some artificial framework built up to perform a pseudo moral impression of life itself. When the dust has settled and HMO and legislation dissappear from our Nanny state perhaps we once again will come to our happy landlord-tenant balance - oh yes the very one Ben mentioned. And by the way Ben you are a very very naughty boy for broadcasting the gubbins and mystique behind techniques exacted on us in the definition of a firmer definition.

Twas a response to an email Gareth not a copywrite quote, if Shelter are so keen on the term they should be prepared to stand by it.

I have said in my article that I agree with Shelter's definition of the problem. It is huge and it is the very huge-ness (is that a real word?) that is part of the problem against the background of cuts in council teams and staff. We dont have the resources to deal with the amount of cases we get. I picked up my third illegal eviction of the week at 10am this morning, that's 3 in less than 24 hours.

But the term Rogue is not helpful to me who has to take action against them and the reasons behind using the term as set out in Shelter's reply to me also worries me because to my mind it creates pantomime villains which simplifies the real problem.

What councils should look at is creating teams of people who work closely with landlords and leave the enforcement stuff to a couple of specialists

No, I do indeed agree with such under-airings of veneered words, the like of which you have made on 'rogue'. Not sure if any of mine are real words either!

Clearly a less emotional word to describe wrongun tenants and LL is needed.
How about referring to these 'rogues' as
deviant LL and deviant tenants.
Such a descriptor word clearly means not conforming to the norm.
For tenants that is paying your rent and conforming to all the terms of your AST.
For LL it is to meet ALL the terms of the contract and ensuring you supply the services that the tenant is paying for.
Perhaps Shelter could be encouraged in future to use this descriptor word when discussing 'rogue' tenants and LL!?