Private Tenants challenge discrimination and profiteering by Haringey Letting Agents

Community Housing Inspection of Haringey Letting Agents

Saturday 6 October, meet at 12noon outside Turnpike Lane tube station

We at Haringey Housing Action Group are seeing more and more tenants, including those who are entitled to welfare benefits who cannot find anywhere to live in Haringey. This is due to discrimination against anyone on benefits by Letting Agents, and unaffordable rents. We will be taking to the streets on October 6th in Haringey to challenge these practices and step up our ongoing campaign to reverse the trend in rent inflation, extortionate charges for prospective tenants and policies where anyone on welfare benefits is turned away. We intend to create a public audit of the practices carried out by Letting Agents to ‘Name and Shame’ some of them and force changes to be made.

We will be investigating the practices of local letting agents on our high streets, to uncover any unwelcome practices:

  • Discriminating against housing benefit claimants
  • Extortionate charges to prospective and existing tenants
  • Encouraging short term tenancies to maximise renewal fees
  • Inflating rents

We’ve had enough of such dodgy behaviour and are demanding changes. Bring hi-vis vests, clipboards and pens if you want to take part in the inspection or just come along to support others and let everyone else know what we’re doing.

Over 20,000 households in Haringey rent their homes from private landlords, and about half of these are claiming housing benefit.  The greedy and discriminatory practices of letting agents are a huge problem for Haringey as well as London as a whole.

Our demands:

  • Bring rents down. In a recent report, one in five landlords had increased their rents because their letting agent had encouraged them to.  This was five times as many who had done so because of increased mortgage costs.
  • No letting agent fees for tenants. Agency ‘fees’, reference ‘checks’, admin ‘fees’, leaving ‘fees’’ are all costs that have been created over the past few years by and for Letting Agents, to increase their profits and exploit the basic need of tenants to find a home.
  • Longer and more secure tenancies.
  • No discrimination against people on housing benefit.

Organised by Haringey Housing Action Group, Haringey Private Tenants Action Group and Haringey Solidarity Group

Haringey Housing Action Group
Haringey Housing Action Group has been supporting local residents with housing problems for about three years.  Our aim is to support people in a way that they feel empowered to take action to resolve their own housing problems. We also encourage people with similar experiences to support each other and find solutions.  We currently meet twice a month and carry out outreach sessions in the borough. We are open to residents with any kind of tenure. Over the last 18 months, we have been increasingly seeing people who are in private rented accommodation. and affected by the lack of affordable homes in Haringey.

Contacts:
housingaction@haringey.org.uk
www.haringeyhousingaction.org.uk

October 1, 2012  Tags: ,   Posted in: HHAG ACTIONS