Earlier on in his tenancy Gerald had threatened to report us to the council. The electricity had got cut off when the only female tenant at the time, a pleasant South African woman, had moved out (she had always sorted out their contributions to the electric bill). From then on none of them had paid a penny, even though all their names were on the contract and they were legally bound to pay it, according to their tenancy agreements. This then became our fault.
Gerald said to Adrian, ‘I’ve got a right to heating and hot water.’
Adrian answered: ‘Yes, and you’ve got a legal responsibility to pay the bills. In fact, have you ever paid anything towards the electricity since Joy left?’
‘What’s the point’, Gerald answered, ‘when the others won’t?’
Adrian repeated, ‘So, have you ever paid?’
And he said: ‘No. Joy left, not having paid hers, so there was no point.’
In fact, they believed Joy owed £30 when she vacated, so allegedly decided never to pay again. They’d treated the only woman tenant like she was their mother.
A whole saga ensued, during which a bill of £1,400 was run up, they were given and ignored countless warnings by the electricity company and finally a meter was installed. This meant that every time the money ran out on the meter and the electricity went off, apart from being plunged into darkness and the heaters not working (which frankly was their own bloody fault for not paying the bills), the fire alarm wouldn’t work, which meant we were contravening the law.
It was all well and good to think, ‘I’m not paying, because they should have paid the bill’, but we had to operate in the real world. But we just didn’t know how to sort it out; it was one of those problems you had to sleep on and hope that a solution would float to the surface of your mind. We didn’t want to sacrifice £1,400 of our money because of them. In the end, we had no choice and we settled the bill in full with the electricity company. We then tried to claw back what we could, by using deposits if we could when people left (most left with arrears, though, making this impossible) and recouped about £500.
This was complicated by the fact that around the time the meter was fitted, two tenants had been evicted and we had two empty rooms to fill. We couldn’t let out two rooms in a house where there was an electric meter with a massive debt attached (meaning that each time £30 was put in, £20 was swallowed up by the company towards the debt), as this would have meant that people who had not accrued the debt would be forced to pay towards it and no new tenants would agree to that. So, if we had not paid it off, we would have had two empty rooms forever more, and lost about £5,000 in rental income each year.
We had also learnt from our first experience of paying the bills for tenants at another house that it was necessary to put a clause in tenancy agreements which included bills, stating we would pay a maximum of £100 in any given month, and that they must pay anything above that. We had another house where we were also paying the bills and since we took over the responsibility it was also a constantly boiling and brightly-lit house, at all times of the day and night.
It was galling when we were so careful with gas and electricity in our own house, keeping the bills down and not wasting the earth’s resources, only for others to completely abuse the fact that we were paying the bills. In one of the houses with an inclusive rent, we would find the heating on constantly, and they would even then open the windows because it was too hot. And lights on in the daytime – why did people do that? Was it mood lighting? Well, it didn’t improve my mood.
TIP:
If you let rooms to different tenants who don’t have a shared tenancy, it is advisable to charge a rent inclusive of bills (with a ceiling of how much gas, electricity and water the landlord will pay for). Tenants otherwise don’t seem able to arrange the payment between themselves, especially if they move in at different times and if they use or abuse the utilities in different ways.