Fighting for Tenants’ Rights: Securing Justice in a Housing Disrepair Case

The Housing Team at Hodge Jones & Allen Solicitors (HJA) have been defending the rights of tenants since 1977 and we understand how your life can be turned upside down when a landlord refuses to carry out repairs to your home.

With this blog series, each week we plan to share the details of another successful settlement to show tenants that help is available to get results and gain compensation.

This week’ Housing Disrepair case was conducted by Anita Barylska and is as follows:

The clients came to us in August 2023 to seek advice and representation regarding continuous leaks into their bedroom every time it rained, due to a faulty roof. They could see daylight through the cracks of the roof and there were also damp and mould issues in other rooms in the property, which posed serious health issues to the entire family, including children.

Our clients had been regularly reporting the disrepair for at least two years but their landlord, a local housing association, has taken little to no action to address the problem, and the disrepair had continued to deteriorate over time. The issue was also reported to the environmental health team at the local council but despite being issued with an improvement notice, the landlord was very slow to take action. Our clients were offered £150 in compensation but that was highly inadequate and insufficient to cover the losses that they had incurred to date.

On accepting instructions, HJA prepared a letter of claim to the landlord which called for an urgent investigation of the leaks and an agreement to address the disrepair. We also instructed an expert surveyor to inspect the property and prepare an independent report of the conditions at the property. As the landlord was slow to provide a substantive reply to the letter of claim, we proceeded to serve our expert report on them and request a confirmation that the identified works were agreed upon.

More time had passed and despite our attempts to agree the scope of works with the landlord, they have failed to substantively respond to the claim. Further, while not engaging with Hodge Jones & Allen, the landlord proceeded to contact our clients directly and arrange for works to the roof, the scope of which was unclear and not approved by an expert. Within a matter of weeks, it transpired that the works that had been carried out in the meantime had been inadequate and had quickly caused deterioration of the leak!

To ensure that our clients would not end up with inadequate repairs and no right to compensation, in early 2024 we issued the claim in court. After the claim was formally served on the landlords, they filed a defence in which they stated that most of the required works at the property had been now completed to a good standard. HJA immediately reacted to the same and preserved the existing evidence by obtaining and filing with the court a second contemporaneous expert report in which the contrary position was evidenced by the expert.

The case was listed for a trial in late 2024 and we continued to prepare for the same. Among others, we obtained and disclosed further evidence from the local council, which further illustrated that the landlord had been now in breach of the improvement notice.

While preparing for the trial, HJA continued to negotiate with the landlord to explore the possibility of a settlement. Although the landlord was willing to negotiate, their initial offers of damages in the region of £1,000 – £4,400 were inadequate and could not be accepted. Following a period of extended negotiations, shortly before the trial, HJA secured a settlement of damages of £7,250 and an agreement that works at the property would be completed in accordance with our expert’s recommendations within sixty days. The clients were very pleased with the outcome.

Our Housing Team is ranked tier 2 by Legal 500 and band 1 by Chambers & Partners legal directories. The team is seen as an industry leader in social housing law and it is dedicated to providing exceptional service for all of its clients in disrepair, possession and homelessness. The Housing Team is recognised for its advancement of the law in high-profile cases in the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court.

If you need help with housing disrepair, you can try our housing disrepair compensation calculator or talk to our housing law specialists today. Call us on 0330 822 3451 or request a call back.