Clean up your act

Heather Fitch was careful where she placed her feet as she stepped gingerly through the front door of the empty house. There was rubbish everywhere, graffiti on the walls and the windows were damaged. The property had been gutted.

“There wasn’t anything left inside,” says Fitch, Brighton and Hove council’s rechargeable repairs officer, of the house that had been vacated by council tenants. “There was no kitchen and a lot of the bathroom units had been removed, ripped off the walls. Tiling, plastering and radiators had also been torn from the walls. There was also a lot of rubbish in the garden.”

The council spends £345,000 a year cleaning and repairing council properties after tenants move out. The clear-up bill for this house alone was £6800. Brighton won’t get that money back, but since August it has taken a stand, chasing tenants to make them pay – “recharging them” as the council calls it – and discouraging them from leaving a mess when they move out.

Clear-up teams frequently face houses left full of old furniture, kitchens full of rotting food, rooms strewn with rubbish and DIY misadventures involving missing walls. Deliberate damage is common too, such as graffiti and excrement smeared on walls.

Some tenants will install a new kitchen, then take it with them when they move, leaving a gaping hole, says Brighton council’s debt recovery manager, Lyn Yule.

It’s not a problem restricted to Brighton – other councils agree that clean-up costs can be a big problem. They will be watching to see if Brighton’s scheme succeeds, and if it is taken up by other councils it could save hundreds of thousands of pounds every year.

Councillor Kevin Allen, chair of housing management, explains that the call for action came first from tenants. “Tenant activists regularly brought it up as a scandal that too many people were getting away with murder and trashing places,” he says. It wasn’t until one day last year when the repairs manager brought photos of empty properties to a council meeting that they realised how bad the problem was, though. “It was a real eye opener,” he says.

Zero tolerance

Brighton’s new zero-tolerance approach starts before a new tenant moves in. A letting officer agrees the condition of the property with the tenant and emphasizes that the tenancy agreement states that anything changed must be returned to its original condition, even if the tenant has permission. This applies even to minor things such as dimmer switches and spotlights.

Staff now keep an eye on tenants during their tenancy. “If a housing officer or other council officer visits the property and notices something like an internal door with a hole in it, they will make it clear that they have to replace it or we’ll charge them,” says Yule.

This is followed up with a letter and a copy is kept for evidence. When the housing officer visits a property as a tenant is about to leave, they ask them to sign a form agreeing to leave the property clean and in good condition or else be charged for any repair work.

At this stage, the officer points out obvious problems to be put right and explains what action will be taken if they don’t. The visit is followed by a letter reiterating the message and listing identified repairs.

After the tenant has left, a surveyor inspects the property, and if they judge that the necessary clean-up represents more than just normal wear and tear, they will take photographs. They can then cost the required jobs and identify which are rechargeable. Next, the tenant’s housing officer decides if there are any mitigating circumstances that mean the tenant shouldn’t be charged, such as mental health problems or if they are fleeing domestic violence and didn’t cause the damage. If there aren’t, it passes to the recharge officer as who decides if there’s enough evidence to chase the money.

Yule insists that in most cases, they plan to pursue tenants that owe them. Even smaller clean-up jobs are not cheap, she points out, because everything left behind, including kitchen white goods, must be removed, and a lorry hired to take it all away.

Clear-up teams face rubbish, rotting food, graffiti – even excrement

If the tenant has moved to another council property, recharging is simple and payments can be made in instalments. But if they refuse to pay, the council applies to the county court for a judgment for the amount owed.

This doesn’t require a solicitor but the council must pay the court a portion of the amount sought – £30 for a debt of up to £300 for example, or £250 for £5000 to £15,000.

Yule hopes the threat of such a judgment will frighten most tenants into paying. “Most people don’t want a money judgment because it affects your credit rating and ability to apply for loans and hire rental.”

Enforcement is harder. The court service offers a number of orders that can be applied for to retrieve money, such as a warrant of execution or charging order. Although the cost of doing this is charged to the tenant, the court service advises people to consider how likely they are to get the money back, taking into account things like the defendant’s possessions, whether they’re working and whether they have other debts.

Yule admits they might postpone chasing someone if they were known to have no money or are in arrears. “We’re not likely to go to the expense of enforcing minor judgment for person that’s not working,” she says but Fitch adds they could come back to the case later. “Somebody’s circumstances might change in the future. If we decide not to enforce a money judgment because the tenant is not working, we would review that if they start,” says Fitch.

Private detectives

If the tenant has disappeared, Brighton can call in the private detectives. The council already uses tracing agencies for former tenants in arrears, and the average cost of finding most people is only about £25. Criminal damage claims can also be pursued if the damage is deliberate.

Brighton is still breaking in its new scheme and Fitch is in the process of contacting 25 tenants about repairs they need to do.

Yule says she knows they won’t be able to recover money in every case, but in view of the amount spent on cleaning some properties, and the amount of time they can stand empty, she believes it’s worth it. “I’m not saying we expect to get £345,000 but if we can halve that, it would be great.”

However, the new scheme’s role as a deterrent is as important as the financial benefits. Hoping to build on word-of-mouth publicity, the council has sent posters and leaflets declaring, ‘It’s Payback Time!’, to tenants’ associations, neighbourhood offices and sheltered schemes.

With the continuing popularity of home improvements, Yule thinks part of the problem is some tenants simply don’t realise they’ve done anything wrong.

“A lot of people don’t think to ask their housing officer first. They think, ‘I’ll take that wall out and put an archway through to the kitchen.’ That’s why we need to make the rules clear when they move in. You can’t assume people are going to know.”