Poor housing conditions

You should always approach your landlord first to improve the condition of your home. If you cannot do this, or if the problems have not been dealt with, we have legal powers to ensure that certain types of improvements are made.

What can we do?

We have a number of main types of legal power we can use.

The examples given are not a complete list. You should get in touch with us even if your particular problem is not listed.

We ensure that you are free from nuisance and items that are prejudicial to your health
Although there is legal debate about the scope of this power, it is likely to include items like broken heating, toilets not working and broken windows - things that present fairly immediate problems for the people living in the property. Problems like this should normally be dealt with within weeks of a visit from us.

We ensure that your property is free from substantial disrepair
This relates to the basic living standards of the whole house or accommodation and includes available gardens and paths within the boundary of the premises.

We will first need to carry out a full risk assessment of the whole premises to identify any significant hazards before we can decide what can and cannot be done using legislative powers.

We ensure that your property has an adequate means of escape in case of fire
We can insist on a range of measures to ensure that you can leave your home safely if there is a fire.

These can include everything from fitting alarm systems and improving doors and flooring to slow down the spread of fire to getting the right type of lock on a communal front door. This sort of work will typically take months or longer.

We ensure that your property is adequately managed
This power is mainly used where there is more than one tenant and usually shared facilities. It might cover repairing a broken fire alarm, fixing loose carpets or cleaning in common parts of the property.

The time taken to deal with the problem may depend on how serious it is and how long it will realistically take to fix.

We ensure that certain houses in multiple occupation are licensed

Certain houses in multiple occupation (HMO's) need to be licensed with us. Licenses will need to be reviewed on a regular basis to help improve and maintain standards in such HMO's.

What happens when a complaint is received?
When a complaint is received by us about the condition of a rented property we will visit and decide what needs to be done. This assessment is primarily based on a hazard rating of the living conditions and the associated legal powers available to us to insist that landlords keep their properties up to a certain standard.

Any items that present an immediate risk to the occupants of the property will be dealt with first. More substantial problems, including fire protection, will be dealt with over a longer period.

We issue legal instructions to landlords in the form of notices. These set out the problems that need to be put right and the time scales that the landlord or manager has to keep to.

If the landlord does nothing or not enough in response to the notice we can do the work ourselves and charge the landlord, as well as prosecuting them for non-compliance.