11 Dec My landlord is Her Majesty’s ambassador to France. Should you serve your tenants before you serve the Queen?
By Hannah Crowe
This entry has been submitted for the BBC student critic of the year award. Entry requirements are: Students will need to submit three examples of work they have produced while in full- or part-time education and published or broadcast in media aimed either solely or predominantly at a student audience.
Within a day of moving in, I had sent an email to my new agency with 17 outstanding maintenance problems that needed to be dealt with as a matter of urgency. The issues existed before my move in, as the people already living in the house told me they were coexisting with faulty light bulbs and cooking alongside 8 bedroom doors that were being stored in the kitchen. At a whopping £5,000 a month for the entire property, I thought the least our agency could do for us was treat this as a home and not a storage facility.
Oh how wrong I was! With a broken shower, broken oven, protruding baby gate fittings, and no access to WiFi, I was miffed. These were just a small handful of issues that would mount over the coming months and drive me up the walls – which were covered in pen, scuff marks and the kind of uninspiring graffiti toddlers surprise you with when your back is turned.
It used to be a family home, we were told, which would explain the baby gate that remained firmly attached to the walls outside my bedroom, and the child safety filter that would pop up on our browser whenever any of us adults tried to access porn.
We finally gained access to the WiFi router which was locked in a bedroom at the front of the house, separated from the living room by a paper thin drywall our landlord erected to boost his rental income and in turn, our misery. The job was a shoddy one, and this meant that anyone who turned the lights on in the living room also turned the lights on in Emily’s bedroom. Sorry Emily, but you’re only allowed to go to sleep once I’ve finished watching my Kardashian marathon – Kim is about to discover she has Psoriasis!
If a glass ceiling was ever difficult to break through, it was the one in our kitchen blanketed in thick green mould. It took the agency a good 2 months to deal with this – I contemplated climbing up there and removing it myself, but as depressing as it was to eat my dinner beneath fungus, I figured I’d feel much more miserable in a hospital bed if I slipped and fell, knowing I’d be heading home to the mouldy ceiling after I was discharged.
It didn’t take us long to work out that our agency had little to no power when it came to sorting out our unremitting list of problems. Each day presented us with a fresh nightmare. Broken washing machine? That’ll be one month of ferrying bags of laundry to your best friend’s house across the river. Oh, the filthy, rotting trellis has snapped and your entire garden is filled with dead roses? We’ll leave that for 3 months, and by the time summer is over and you don’t really need a garden any more, then we’ll send someone round to fix half of it!
I’d argue that despite the blasé approach towards maintenance problems from our agency (which was comprised of a bunch of 20-somethings who would come and go from their jobs like the seasons), they struggled much more to grasp quite how wrong it is to let engineers into our locked bedrooms without giving us a word of notice. One morning I woke up to find a safety fixture had been attached to my window without my prior knowledge or consent. I wasn’t home the day the engineers let themselves into my room, but luckily all of my illegal weapons and class A’s were tucked away safely under my bed!
One day we started to clear out one of the cupboards downstairs, and unearthed a bag of mail addressed to her Majesty’s Ambassador to France and David Cameron’s ex chief of staff, Lord Edward Llewellyn. This was well and truly the straw that broke the camel’s back, and in a property very much a Labour stronghold, we were flabbergasted. Suddenly, everything started to fall into place – we wondered how many other homes this man owned, and how many other tenants were perpetually pissed off at his inability to give an iota of a shit about the people who contributed a tiny sum of money towards his overall income.
LandLord Llewellyn’s twitter account was incredibly active for a man so conveniently out of reach to his tenants. On one of the days during the hellish period 6 of us were without clean clothes, Ed was travelling from Paris to Londres, then back to Paris! It must have been quite exhausting for him, and obviously there wouldn’t have been much time spare during the 4 hours and 40 minutes of travelling for him to send a quick email to our agency to request a new washing machine. Nous en avons marre, Ed!
When it was realised that the contract we had all signed was one that bound us to a bizarre structure separating us from our landlord via two entirely different companies, and one that meant our “agency” can enter the property whenever they wanted without giving notice, we started to panic. Would our oven ever work? Would I ever have the baby gate removed from outside of my bedroom, and would we ever have a set of table and chairs that didn’t collapse when we sat down?
I was reaching the end of my tether and my will to live was becoming so distant that I took to the power of social media to vent my frustrations. I sent Lord Llewellyn a flurry of tweets and tagged some of his colleagues. The next day, I received a phone call from our agency asking me to remove the tweets, and that Mr Llewellyn had been in touch to tell them it was bad for his public image, bless him! Someone came round that night to fix the screeching shower which over the last three months had led to a decline in our hearing, and we were promised our broken light fittings which were broken before we moved in, would be dealt with the following week. This didn’t happen, and by then my energy had been well and truly expensed.
One morning, I was sat working in the kitchen and noticed that two unannounced strangers were standing in my living room. It appeared to be a viewing that I was not made aware of. After complaining to someone from my agency, I received the following email from the “Global Relationship Manager” Melissa, highlighting the reason why my rights as a tenant didn’t seem to exist. And why should they, I was merely a resident after all!
Melissa seemed to be correct, and I had indeed signed a legally binding document that meant Ace Relocations could come and go as they please, along with a convenient little clause that made it clear there was to be no relationship of landlord and tenant.
According to Melissa, this meant that they weren’t in the wrong for allowing an engineer into my bedroom without my consent, or for letting a viewing take place without proper notice. Unfortunately for them, these clauses are not legally binding and unfortunately for me, I had run out of fucks to give and made a promise to myself that this would be the last email I would bother with, because I desperately needed a reference for when my contract finished in January.
One would hope that having such a high serving member of the government as your landlord, would mean you would be in a much stronger position as a tenant. The reasoning behind this being that surely the desire to serve your Queen and country as an ambassador means at the very least, you have some desire to serve the people who help line your pockets every month. To Mr Llewellyn, our rental sum of £5,000 is likely small change, hence the absence of any incentive to keep us happy.
Despite the abolition of extortionate agency fees (I paid £500 in total to move!) and other regulatory improvements back in June, there are still dodgy landlords and even dodgier letting companies operating on the very fringes of morality, propped up by a system which nurtures bogus and unethical set-ups like the one I’ve sadly found myself in. If I’ve learned anything from this experience, it’s that firstly, I need to read contracts with a fine tooth comb, and secondly, you shouldn’t necessarily feel protected by someone because they serve the Queen – although, history has shown that repeatedly..
