Last week Shelter launched the latest phase of its evict rogue landlords campaign. We contacted every local authority in England to build a picture of both the scale of the problem with rogue landlords, and what is being done to tackle it.
The results showed that across the country complaints about landlords had reached a staggering 86,628 in the last year. Yet despite the sharp increase, only 270 landlords were successfully prosecuted during that period.
Click here to read the full article Zero tolerance for rogue private landlords to tackle illegal behaviour
NetRent Comment
The author of this article is Kay Boycott who is director of campaigns, policy and communications at Shelter. Shelter is an organisation that appears to have no scruples when it comes to twisting facts and figures to suit it's own propaganda.
Shelter does not believe in fair comment, Shelter does not believe in debate and Shelter has no compunction in presenting supposition as fact. For instance, Shelter claims that complaints were made about more than 86,000 landlords and does not explain that there are over 3.4 million privately rented properties in the UK. That means that just 2.5% of properties were complained against. Just 270 prosecutions were successful. That is just 0.03% of the total landlord population.
And yet if you listen to Shelter you would assume that every landlord is a crook who is fleecing poor innocent tenants. Shelter never mention rogue tenants. Shelter ignore the damage that a significant minority of tenant cause - only landlords are to blame.
Perhaps Shelter could review our Facebook pages and the photographs that make up The Damage That Some Tenants Do and explain why they choose to ignore the fact that there are many more rogue tenants than rogue landlords.
Perhaps when they've done that Shelter can actually work with the private rented sector to raise standards rather than simply run spurious campaigns designed solely to grab headlines.
