LANDLORDS, RENTS AND TENANTS [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR]
SIR,—The article in your issue of June 17th entitled " Land- lords, Rents and Tenants " serves to remind us of the apathy of- the public when the recent Rent Restriction Bill was before Parliament. Nobody seems to have perceived the uselessness of perpetuating one of the most fatuous pieces of legislature on the Statute book. It has been the despair of the judges of the County Courts and of the High Court. As the writer of the article points out, it is even administered by- the lay magistrates, who know less than nothing about it.
The principal evils of the Rent Restriction legislation are these. The whole code is so complicated that no tenant feels sure of his rights without consulting a solicitor, who in turn is generally in a quandary till the case has been taken up to the House of Lords.
The protection given to the tenant is twofold, first as to the amount of the rent he has to pay and secondly as to his security from eviction, but it is or was upon the tenant to prove that the Acts apply to his house at all. Few people are aware that the Acts only apply to dwellings erected before 192o. Where is the logic in this ? Then, thousands of houses erected before then became decontrolled between 1923 and 1933. Decontrol was obtained by the landlord getting pos- session of the house during any of those ten years. PossessiOn means obtaining possession Of the key and entering the house between tenancies for less than five minutes. When many changes have occurred, it is well ,nigh impossible for a tenant to prove that the landlord did not decontrol the dwelling, without calling as witnesses all the ex-tenants—many of them perhaps scattered all over; the country. " Further, the landlord could, without any kind of proof, register his alleged decontrol under the Act of 1933, and to remove such registration from the books of the Local Authority is a difficult and expensive task.
Even when the unfortunate tenant is able to establish control, the full absurdity of the Acts appears when he tries to prove the " standard " or permitted rent. This is based on the rent on August 3rd, 1914. The then tenant is often, dead or impossible to trace and the rent most difficult to prove. Moreover, in a row of ten houses, there may have been ten different rents owing to different landlords or some of the tenants having been his own relatives.
These are only a few of the drawbacks from the tenants'
point of view. The landlord is in almost a worse case. To start with he is confronted with the same doubts as to whether his houses are or are not controlled. To prove it he must go to Court.
Once it is established that a dwelling comes within the Acts, he has the same difficulty in deciding what rent he can charge. He, too, must travel back to August 3rd, 1914. His real trouble, however, will be that, whereas the original Act of 1915 was intended to protect the family of a soldier at the front, he has to deal with a new and improvident class of tenant, who has reverted to a controlled house because the rents are lower than all others. He is frequently a bad tenant who can do practically what he likes with the house, and can defy his landlord almost to the extent of withholding his rent. That rent too is so uneconomic that no landlord can keep the house (of necessity an old one) in decent repair and yet derive a profit from his investment.
In short, the Rent Restriction Acts produce bad landlords, bad tenants and bad housing. The benefit goes into the pockets of the lawyer. If the money spent on legal advice and litigation had been applied to new houses and repairs, who knows but that the whole problem would not have been
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