Campaigners urge action for Bristol tenants

An east Bristol community group is renewing its calls for a charter protecting tenants’ rights in the city, as new research highlights the plight of some private renters in the region.

Easton-based Acorn Bristol will stage a demonstration against letting agents’ fees, insecure short-term tenancy agreements and associated ‘revenge evictions’ in Redfield this Saturday.

More than 1,500 people, including Labour’s Bristol West Parliamentary candidate Thangam Debbonaire and several local councillors, recently backed the organisation’s campaign to establish a ‘Bristol Ethical Lettings Charter’. Acorn has held preliminary talks with Bristol City Council around the possibilities of working together to implement it.

A member of the local authority’s landlord liaison team praised the group’s engagement with tenants but said it was “too early” to comment on whether it would endorse the scheme.

“Landlords and agents need to reduce fees and grant longer tenancies so we have more room to negotiate,” said Acorn member Anny Cullum.

“Local people’s main concerns are over the state of their housing, but they’re worried about complaining because they’re on short-term contracts and may have been evicted in the past.”

The results of a survey of more than 4,500 private renters, undertaken by YouGov on behalf of Shelter and British Gas, were published this month and underline the scale of residents’ fears.

One in 12 respondents across the South West said they were afraid to report disrepair because they feared being evicted. Under the terms of commonly used ’rolling’ contracts, landlords can serve two months’ notice on tenants at any time once an initial six- or 12-month agreement has come to an end – meaning they face both upheaval and a further round of agents’ fees to secure a new home.

The BS5 postcode area has twice Bristol’s average rate of privately rented homes, and in 2012 was found to generate 25 per cent of complaints against landlords. One resident, who asked not to be named, told Bristol24/7 that she had been made to leave her “nice but rundown” home of four years after repeatedly reporting serious disrepair and an infestation of rats.

“We kept telling the landlord that we thought problems with the house, which was collapsing into the garden, might have something to do with the rats – you could see the gaps where they’d been chewing to get into the kitchen,” she said.

“They’d come around and do a bit of plastering, a temporary fix without really sorting things out. Then the landlord suddenly told me one of his children was moving back to Bristol and was going to move into that house – strange, given that it came after a period in which we kept raising issues about it.”

At the end of November, MPs will debate Liberal Democrat Sarah Teather’s Tenancies (Reform) Bill, which if passed would prevent landlords serving eviction notices on tenants who have complained legitimately about their housing conditions.

Peter Stephenson, the managing director of Redfield-based Piper Property – which doesn’t charge tenancy fees – said that “education” is needed to improve landlord-tenant relations.

“Landlords should be looking at their business model – if I maintain my property well, thereby achieving more rent, that’s a better proposition for me. If I look after my tenants, they stay longer. If we can educate landlords that that’s the way to approach lettings, it’ll work better for everyone.”