"Every day in every local authority in Tyne and Wear at least one person complains about the condition of their rented home"
Freedom of Information Requests submitted to the Tyne and Wear authorities by local property campaigner Ajay Jagota shows that the five councils received a total 6297 of complaints about the condition of their privately rented properties of the behaviour of their landlord between 2014 and 2016.
2075 complaints were received in 2016 alone – a rise of 3.4% from the 2007 recorded in 2014.
Earlier research showed that only one council – Sunderland – has brought a successful prosecution against a rogue landlord in the same period. The highest number of complaints was received in Newcastle, where complaints rose steadily from 1007 in 2014 to 1127 in 2016 – a rise of 8%.
Sunderland by contrast saw complaints fall from 509 in 2014 to 290 last year. Gateshead and North Tyneside both saw complaint numbers fall from 2014 to 2015 but rising again in 2016, leaving them 7% and 4% below 2014 levels.
South Tyneside council refused to supply the information, claiming although is holds the information it would take an officer 18 hours to retrieve it, what the authority describes as “substantial effort and disproportionate exercise of trawling”. The decision has been appealed.
To put these figures into context, every day in every local authority in Tyne and Wear at least one person complains about the condition of their rented home– yet only one rogue landlord has been convicted in three years.
Ajay Jagota, founder of Protech Deposit replacement insurance solution Dlighted had this to say: “A large amount of these complaints will of course be vexatious, unreasonable or more effectively resolved informally, but nonetheless no-one can look at these figures and say the system works.
With a General Election under way, all the main political parties are making a pitch to voters who rent, but despite my own affiliations, I have a sense that the proposed policies are just tinkering around the edges when more profound reform is needed.
As both a resident of and business owner in South Tyneside I find their decision to refuse our request extraordinary. How can you admit that you hold some information but at the same time claim you don’t know where it is!
If the fact is that they don't have the information to hand you have to asked if they are genuinely aware of the scale of the problem in their authority area and how effectively they can be monitoring it?
It's critical for all good operators in the private rented sector that the rogues are brought to task and the only way that can happen is that the local authority execute the powers invested in them and ensure they take action when complaints are made.”
