A no fault eviction, is there any advice?

[Sally1984]

Hi everyone.

I am being served with a section 21.

It is a no fault eviction (It turns out my landlord has not been paying the mortgage). I have lived here for almost 5 years and have never missed a single payment (and never even been a day late in fact)

I do however, have a bad credit rating, which is going to make it almost impossible for me to go through an agency.

I have been in contact with Shelter........My local Council do rent properties to people in my situation however (private properties, as there are no Council houses available)

My worries are that I do need the house to be quite local to my family, I live with my disabled 10 year old son, and do rely on family and friend support for respite. Shelter have told me that the Council could house me and my child in temporary accommodation until they find a suitable property. I am very worried about this, my son would find that extremely difficult to cope with, and ideally it would be much easier for us just to move once from here, to a new place.

Can anyone give me any advice on this? Are there any charities perhaps that I can get in contact with that could help me with the Council, so that hopefully we can just be housed without having to go into temporary accommodation?

Any advice whatsoever would be very much appreciated, this is such a stressful situation.

[dslippy]

A sad situation.
Your LA has a duty to finf you housing appropriate to your needs, but they do not have a magic wand to make housing less rare.
They will likely tell to await the possession order.

It does not sound as if you will hasve any useful defence to the possession claim.

[islandgirl]

There is no defence to a properly served S21 (although many LLs get it wrong. If you head over to a specialist site called Landlordzone there is a s21 checklist. If it is incorrectly served it will not succeed and you do not need to tell your LL it is incorrect). Correct or incorrect, the LL will remove you eventually. Councils usually tell you to wait until the possession order (but the costs of the court action to remove you will be yours). I feel so sorry for you as you have been perfect tenants but the LL can ask for the property back at any time for any reason. As has been said above, councils simply do not have enough property to let. I am sure you will be higher up on the list than some due to your circumstances but avoiding temporary accommodation will be very difficult.

[Wylderose]

Contact your local council's housing department. Because of your circumstances they council would have a duty of care to do a homeless prevention assessment and register you as potentially homeless under the homeless prevention act. They would also be able to assist you to find alternate accommodation, whether this is through their housing register (possibly housing association property) or as a last resort, temporary accommodation.

Once you go onto the homeless register, you should be able to access the local housing register and actively bid on properties. Depending on where you live, you could be rehoused without the need to go into temporary accommodation long before an eviction takes place. In general, councils don't like to place people into temporary accommodation because the cost to the council is really expensive.

The housing department at the council will always advise you not to just move out when the S21 is up because if you do, then you can be deemed as having made yourself "Intentionally homeless" and they can then end their responsibility to help you. On the other hand it is not nice waiting to be evicted either.

An option that is open to you is to find a privately rented property. Unfortunately they are not cheap to rent and if you have a bad credit history, you could struggle to find someone to rent to you. There are websites such as OpenRent where landlords will rent to people without going through rental agencies. If you do find someone who will rent to you, you may be able to apply for a Discretionary housing payment to help cover the costs of moving to another private tenancy.

To be eligible for a Discretionary Housing payment, you must be claiming either housing benefit or universal credit with housing costs included and be able to prove that you can afford the ongoing rental costs. The kind of costs that can be covered using a DHP are Deposit on a property and First month in advance, removal costs and possibly dual liability overlap for rent at the old property when you do move.

To secure the tenancy for you, most councils will give an assurance to the landlord that they will make the payment and that the payment will be paid direct to the landlord. Landlords don't generally refuse when they get an offer like this.

I hope this helps you