UK Landlord Forum / Life

We let a two bed house in London to the private sector leasing with Lewisham council for £950 per month (agreed in April 2022 on a three years contract). We gave three month notice on 1 February this year with the contract ending before the end of April. The council won't returned the property. We don't know what legal action we can take. The council said they would return the property within six months and we are still waiting and they keep delaying which given they are only paying £950 is not surprising. We can't seem to issue a section 21 notice as it does not apply if the council is the tenant. We are at a lost to get the property back. This came about as we wanted to increase the rent to at least cover the mortgage to around £1,500 which the council did not agree. Two bed houses rent for £2,000 in the area. Please advise what we can do to recover the property. We are at a complete lost.

You need some proper legal advice, because a number of the things that you can do might backfire unless you do them properly.

If you end the tenancy with people still in the property, they will become your tenants, and you really don't want that.

Who provided the contract? And what, if anything does it say about increasing the rent?

Thank you for replying.

The contract was provided by the council. There is no rent increase clause. The rent has been at that level for four years and in the past it's only been at the end of the term of the contract (so after 3 years) that the rent gets renegotiated.

I am tempted to serve a formal notice of rent increase. Any advice on who to get legal advice from?

It's a commercial contract, so, once it's ended, I suspect that you can just serve notice of the new rent. But this is an area I'm not that familiar with.
Which also means I can't give any recommendations, sorry. But anyone advertising as a specialist in property law who you feel comfortable with their advice is probably good enough. Someone who knows what's involved will probably make that clear in the first couple of minutes.