UK Landlord Forum / Life

Advise please : My lead tenant (the husband) who pays the bills would like to terminate his contract with 2 months notice which I have accepted. His wife who is heavily pregnant ( 7 1/2 months due Sept ) is accusing the husband of abusing her and police was called. The wife wants her husband to leave the flat sooner than the 2 months.Now the wife wants to stay in the flat but has no money to pay the next month. She was asking for help from Council so she can stay or move out from the flat but Council is saying she can stay in the flat till after the baby is born and continue to rent and be paid by council? We do not accept DSS in the first place.
But we are opposing this because we need to do total repairs to the whole bathroom and kitchen floor.
Kindly advise on the following:
Q1. Does she have the right to stay in the flat when the lead tenant (husband) who pays the bills will be leaving very soon.
Q2. Can I refuse to accept her to remain in the flat as she is on basic salary and is getting benefits from council, therefore cannot afford a two bedroom £1100/c month
Q3. My partner wants to live in the flat and will have to do major repairs to toilet and kitchen soon as the contract terminates in Sept 30.
Q4. What happens when the council says she has the right to stay because she is due to deliver next month. What will be my next move?
Q5 What are my rights as landlord? Can I refuse her because my partner wants to occupy the property soon?
Q6 What will be the consequences I will have to face if she insist to stay or if council says she must stay due to having a baby soon?
Please advice soon and thank you.
.

If one Tenant in a joint tenancy ends the tenancy, they end it for both / all Tenants. Any Tenant who wishes to continue the tenancy will need to agree a new tenancy, with you (not with the Council).

Yet, it seems like there could be a moral aspect to this situation too... hmm.

You obviously can issue notice to quit,and refuse to accept her as a new tenant.There may be reasons why your attitude comes across as so hard-nosed.You may be having your own problems,or they may have been nightmare tenants.I know you did not sign up as a social worker,but it is as it is.Would you feel comfortable having her leave hospital with a newborn,not knowing if she had a roof over her head? In your position I would be having a conversation with the woman,finding out if she has had offers of help from relatives or a woman's refuge.Have you spoken to the council to see if they will offer her an affordable place to live? I would be surprised if they would cover the full rent of your property,but it depends on going rates in your area I suppose. I can fully understand it is a nuisance you could do without,but I doubt if this is how she saw her life panning out either.

Quote from: heavykarma on August 02, 2019, 10:04:08 AMYou obviously can issue notice to quit,and refuse to accept her as a new tenant.

Just pointing-out that one of the Tenants has already served notice, which has been accepted by the Landlord.

Yes,missed that.I was a bit absorbed in the human misery aspect of the sorry tale.

Well, I was listening to Country music at the time... "we call them strong, those who can face this world alone, who seem to get by on their own, those who will never take the fall..." ...imagine how I felt.

Oh dear,I am welling up,so many memories.I hope Cork tries to do the right thing,for his/her sake if nothing else.Karma never loses an address.

Q1. Does she have the right to stay in the flat when the lead tenant (husband) who pays the bills will be leaving very soon.

She doesn't have the legal right, no.  She has a moral right to stay there.

Q2. Can I refuse to accept her to remain in the flat as she is on basic salary and is getting benefits from council, therefore cannot afford a two bedroom £1100/c month.

In law, yes you can.  In ethics this should be out of the question.

Q3. My partner wants to live in the flat and will have to do major repairs to toilet and kitchen soon as the contract terminates in Sept 30.

Noted.

Q4. What happens when the council says she has the right to stay because she is due to deliver next month. What will be my next move?

They won't say that, because she doesn't have the legal right to stay.

Q5 What are my rights as landlord? Can I refuse her because my partner wants to occupy the property soon?

A landlord can do that.  A gentleman never could.  Nor indeed could a lady, if you're of the feminine persuasion.

Q6 What will be the consequences I will have to face if she insist to stay or if council says she must stay due to having a baby soon?

In law, neither she nor the Council can enforce that.

Advice

In a domestic abuse situation the correct outcome is for her to be re-housed because her husband knows where she lives.  Domestic abuse means that she ought to be in a place of safety.  She will probably not see this -- abused women usually don't.

Go and see her.  Reassure her that you will not throw her and her newborn baby out into the street.  Then go on to explain that she needs to ask the Council to move her to a women's refuge where she'll get the support she needs.  This will take time and she will live in your property in the meantime.

As soon as you lawfully can, i.e. as soon as the husband's tenancy ends, change all the locks at your expense.  If he lets himself back in and hurts her, you're in a disastrous position legally as well as ethically.  Right now, and I mean literally today, fit a door chain and a peephole to the front door.

Excellent response above,hope it is taken on board.

Hi,
Thanks for all the valuable response.
The time has come, our tenant has given birth and the current contract we had given over two months ago is finishing at the end of this month Sept. The husband has left for the other woman but is still staying on and off at our property with his present wife. Hours ago today the rent was not paid. I dropped the wife a message to ask what is the present progress of leaving the property this weekend. She said that she has not found any place to move to and his husband should have spoken to me about their intentions to stay but have not heard from the husband at all. Soon after I sent my message the money was put into our account and replied that we should meet very soon to discuss matters.
The questions I have to ask for your advise please before we meet :
1. Does this mean that when she paid the rent that obviously they will continue to stay at our property this coming month having no new contract?
2. Or shall we start giving them a new contract on a monthly basis or 6 monthly basis until she finds a new place?
3. Will the contract be for the husband and wife even if the husband says he has moved out or comes in and out of the flat?
4. What is the most sensible immediate legal action that we should do very soon ?

By accepting rent, you are agreeing that the tenancy should continue.  A new contract is not necessary.  The terms of the old contract roll on except that there's no longer an end date.  The husband will likely not want this because he will want his name off the tenancy.

An unscrupulous, mean landlord who was in your situation might write to the wife telling her that the tenancy ends at the end of September, she will be trespassing if she remains after that date, and any payments she makes in the meantime are mesne profits.  A thoroughly vicious landlord might even be able to engineer a situation where he's entitled to double rent, although considering your tenants' impecunious state the chances of actually receiving this seem rather small.

Such disgraceful landlords do exist and they bring the rest of us into disrepute.  She is a recently-abandoned domestic abuse survivor with a newborn baby, and to evict her would be despicable.

If I was in your position I would not take any legal action right now.

Looking at your original post,the baby can be no more than days old.The rent was paid,you can continue on a periodic basis.You said before that you needed the place back urgently for your own use,but I assume that is not the case now.If there are no arrears,and they are not trashing the place,can't you cut her a bit of slack ?.Someone in her position would be a strong candidate for post-natal depression,having you hound her in this callous way won't help one bit.If it's any comfort,I expect she will want to be out of there as soon as possible.I know I would.

Cutting a Tenant a bit of slack feels different when the rent is £1,100 per month and it already seems decided that the Council will not be able to pay up to that amount, so amassing more and more arrears for months into the future is not really any good for anyone. The Council won't begin to act (as we all know) until the Tenant is homeless, right? So it might be the course of action (however "vicious" or "callous" it may seem on the face of it) to aim towards the remaining Tenant, and baby, being re-homed in as easy and planned way as possible - no-one on this forum truly expects the Council will jump-up and say "just wait a minute, we've got a house here for you, you can leave this privately rented place"... if I was the Landlord then I would go to this meeting with an open mind.

It might be the case that the Tenant also wants to leave and go into a Council property and, if so, maybe the Landlord and Tenant can work together to get something agreed. But if the Tenant would like to stay and knows they cannot pay the rent, or even top-up the rent, then surely it's unrealistic and the Landlord is the opposite of "vicious" and "callous" for not just accepting that this Tenant will mount up more and more arrears, and they will be out-of-pocket too. That simply makes no sense for any party involved. The Landlord is running a [kind of] business... the Tenant is paying for a product... if the Tenant can pay for the product, in its entirety, then that's where the leeway should begin.

On the face of it, I think the OP's claim that they wanted the property for personal use is probably just something they'd added... to add weight to it all, y'know? I doubt that's real. I think they're grasping because they're in a situation that seems scary to them... just like I'm sure it does to the Tenant as well.

There's no benefit to any party to a) allowing a Tenant to remain in a property they can't afford, b) dropping the rent under its market value to cater for this lack of affordability based on emotive input, c) nor in evicting a Tenant who can pay, either with Council support or not (saying "We do not accept DSS in the first place." demonstrates a closed-mind and doesn't really fly these days... besides, as clearly demonstrated, a Tenant's situation can change overnight).

By cutting a bit of slack I obviously don't mean ignore the situation,but there is such a thing as appropriate timing.Would an extra few weeks really make such a difference to the outcome? The original post said that they were not intending to relet,so I assume rent is not crucial to the financial planning.Sadly,it would not surprise me one bit if the woman took her violent bloke back,and the rent was paid again.He may have made the latest payment to keep his options open.
I suppose one has to have a certain admiration for the landlord,not even pretending to be the tiniest bit sympathetic.You have often said that being a landlord is a people business.Well,people's lives can be messy and inconvenient,and this landlord is lucky if they have not experienced this before now.

That tenant may well be able to pay her rent.  She may need a bit of assistance from the Child Maintenance Service to prompt that newborn's father to make his due contribution.

From the information that we have, I'm not clear whether newborn's father is the same person as departing husband.

Quote from: heavykarma on September 25, 2019, 09:02:45 AM
By cutting a bit of slack I obviously don't mean ignore the situation,but there is such a thing as appropriate timing.Would an extra few weeks really make such a difference to the outcome? The original post said that they were not intending to relet,so I assume rent is not crucial to the financial planning.Sadly,it would not surprise me one bit if the woman took her violent bloke back,and the rent was paid again.He may have made the latest payment to keep his options open.
I suppose one has to have a certain admiration for the landlord,not even pretending to be the tiniest bit sympathetic.You have often said that being a landlord is a people business.Well,people's lives can be messy and inconvenient,and this landlord is lucky if they have not experienced this before now.

My advice to the OP was really to go along to the meeting with an open mind and try to find out what the Tenant wants / intends... the Landlord may find what both parties want intercepts nicely... right now, everyone is making assumptions, one way or another. If the Tenant says they really want to get into Council accommodation but would need a Section 21 to facilitate that... then everyone might be so very pleased. If the Tenant says that they intend to stay, and pay no rent or bumble along paying part, until forcibly evicted then possibly less so...

That's what I mean by timing.So soon after giving birth the woman will be feeling fragile,not to say sleep-deprived.Trying to get her to discuss a realistic plan of action could be like trying to pin jelly to the wall.In the landlord's shoes I would be talking to the husband to find out what (if any) part he will be playing in the rent payment or rehousing.