The tenancy agreement & bad people

The recent news story about a tenant rapist who was jailed for imprisoning and raping a teenage girl and then was not unreasonably locked out of their rented property by the landlord who had assumed that the tenant had done a bunk just highlights how strong a tenants rights are. Once granted these rights by a tenancy agreement how ever clearly the tenant may be an evil and undesireable person, this will not overide the rights granted to them by the tenancy agreement.

All of us as landlords from time to time have felt like taking the law into our own hands and using our property rights to dispense what is clearly some form of justice.

This case just highlights how dangerous this can be for the landlord. One of the most common cases where this happens is where a tenant appears to have disappeared or abandoned their tenancy often after a period of non payment of rent. There is unfortunately no such concept of abandonment in law . Therefore a landlord needs to go through the correct legal process to gain possession if they are to avoid the double indignity of being dragged through the courts by a 'scum bag' tenant!