Call for better rights for tenants

FULLY PAID-UP tenants who are sent eviction notices when their landlords’ properties are repossessed should be given better legal protection, housing organisation Threshold has said.

Bob Jordan of Threshold told an Amnesty International conference that it was receiving one call per week from tenants who have been told to leave the property within weeks because of the financial difficulties of their buy-to-let landlords.

“Very often the first the tenants hear about this is when the letter from the sheriff comes through the door,” Mr Jordan said.

Threshold said this was a “new problem” for the organisation and that it had dealt with a total of 50 to 60 cases relating to either the repossession of a buy-to-let investor or cases where a receiver had been appointed to a landlord company. Threshold wants tenants to have the same rights in these cases as they normally do under lease law, which includes a minimum notice range of 28 to 112 days.

“There’s a loophole in the law here,” Mr Jordan said. He contrasted the experience of “model tenants” with that of mortgage customers who can benefit from forbearance policies.

“On the one hand, we have people who are behind on their payments, who have the moratorium, and on the other hand, we have people who are fully paid up, but are being threatened,” he said.

Kevin Baneham, Threshold’s legal adviser, later said tenants also had “no real chance” of getting deposits back in the case of receiverships.

The Amnesty conference was held to highlight a lack of transparency in the allocation of Government budgets. “We do not know whether money allocated in the Irish budget is delivering. We do not know how effective it is, whether it gets to where it is needed, or how its impact is monitored,” said Amnesty International Ireland’s Colm O’Gorman.