The Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities says a new How To Rent guide will be issued today, October 2.
Letting agents acting for landlord clients MUST serve the latest version of the guide at the start of any new tenancy and on renewal if there has been an update to the contents of the guide. It forms part of the prescribed information landlords must issue, and if they do not, they lose the right to repossess using Section 21.
The latest update will be the second in 2023 and today’s revision will include reference to the controversial Housing Loss Prevention Advice Service, which replaces the Housing Possession Court Duty Schemes and allows tenants to access legal advice if they are at risk of losing their home.
The HLPAS offers early legal advice, free of charge, to anyone at risk of possession proceedings and loss of their home. Advice can be provided in relation to Housing, Debt and Welfare Benefits issues, and this assistance includes so-called ’In Court Duty’ on-the-day emergency advice and advocacy to anyone facing possession proceedings.
Under the new scheme, the Legal Aid Agency is extending court duty scheme work to include early legal advice on housing, welfare benefits and debt from the moment a landlord or lender issues a notice to repossess. This is non-means and non-merits tested.
A government statement says: “The service enables anyone at risk of losing their home or facing possession proceedings to get free legal advice, and representation in court, regardless of their financial circumstances.”
Remember to check and download the new How To Rent guide which will appear on the Gov.UK website during today.
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Forgive me for reposting verbatim a post I made on 15th Sept about this, but as today is apparently the exciting Big Day when we landlords all get another gift from the government that just keeps giving to us I thought it might hit the spot.....
....so here goes.....
Does anyone remember the "Easy Read" version they used to offer as an alternative but seem to have given up on for now?
It was even longer and of course full of large, simplistic cartoon-style pictures supposed to illustrate the simplified snippets of text that accompanied them...
...apparently it was aimed at all of our many tenants with "learning difficulties" who, unaccountably, were all represented by the same person sitting (and of course smiling slightly stupidly, but greatfully) for no obvious reason in a wheelchair.
I hope they bring that back next month [that is to now say this month] but perhaps with a more "diverse" cast of miscellaneous tenants to give us a better idea of who they'd like us to be offering our future sitting tenancies to.... AAHHHH!!! I've suddenly got it.... maybe that's the "levelling up" people's covert metaphore for a sitting tenancy?!?! 😁
...oh,and if we don't oblige by serving the most up to date version of this all important, critical guide we'll lose the right to use the s.21 they are anyhow halfway though abolishing.... gosh, and blimey.
For a Green government, the NINETEEN page document seems a tad counterproductive.
"green" in politics - and generally these days - has nothing to do with saving trees, or any type of greenery, or even protecting any part of our natural environment.... Its all to do with adhering blindly to, and/or exploiting, a bizarre quasi-scientific religion that was once a fringe thing but now dominates every aspect of modern life all over the world, or at least the "liberated" and "westernised" parts of it, and is used by government's and organisations large and small to make money while keeping the masses under control and unquestioning about the real environmental issues such as over population, habitat destruction, widespread pollution, increasing toxicity, over fishing etc. etc.
Nobody in the public domain would dare be a heretic and risk being "cancelled" by the ecco-inquisition... far better to virtue signal and milk "climate change" for all its worth, which is currently countless billions incidentally....
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