Three days from the end of our holiday in Porto, and just 5 days before we were due to move into our flat in London, we received a very blunt email from our Estate Agent informing us that our tenants would not be leaving our property.
Initially, we thought they didn’t have a leg to stand on, given that we’d served notice some two months earlier, but, after appointing a solicitor to deal with the problem, it became very clear that these people could not be physically removed by us, or anyone else except Her Majesty’s Heavies - namely a Court appointed bailiff.
We decided to do some digging around to see who we were dealing with, and after a quick visit to a neighbours house, we discovered that our tenants are in fact Brazilian, and aren’t the girlfriend and boyfriend that we were led to believe they were. They’re a family of four with two children aged around 10 and 14 who are both regularly seen riding their bicycles around the Close.
It also transpired after a visit to the Estate Agent that these people are refusing to leave purely because they’ve discovered a loophole in British Law - a ruling that suggests that they are guaranteed to jump to the very top of the waiting list for a Council property if they are evicted by the Court.
People like this make me (and most others) very angry. Not only are they depriving us of moving back home, but they’re also depriving others of a much needed affordable Council house - people who have possibly waited patiently in line for many years. It’s a blatent fiddle of the system, and to make matters worse (if that were at all possible), us, as landlords, have just one route to getting our property back - through the Court.
If we interfere with them in any way at all, our case for repossession will only take longer - anything up to a year. As it stands, we could be homeless for up to 4 months.
We can’t change the locks or cut their power supply, or send in anyone else to chase them out - in fact, we can’t even knock on the door and have a polite conversation with them without risk of them saying we’re harassing them.
As tenants, they have the right to remain at the property until a Court orders them out. As landlords, we have almost no rights at all.
Interestingly enough, despite us suddenly being homeless, despite us having a child under the age of two and despite us being the lawful owners of the property (which is full of furniture owned by us), we aren’t entitled to emergency Council housing.
Why? Because we are homeowners.
Rulings like this often cause people to get physically violent, and whilst I don’t believe we will, it does get more and more tempting with each day that passes whilst they still live in our home. Almost all of our friends, and most of our family has mentioned at one time or another to ‘change the locks’, and even the lady on the customer service desk of the Nationwide (our mortgage provider) told us to ‘send in the heavies’.
It seems we are not alone in thinking the law in the UK does not work as it should.
It equally seems that a man's home is only his castle once he's spent almost a thousand pounds of his child's college fund, and waited several months to repossess it.
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