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Housing Rights Service and Law Centre (NI) have recently responded to the Home Office consultation ‘Tackling illegal immigration in privately rented accommodation’. Under the proposals all private landlords will have to carry out checks on the immigration status of every tenant before renting out a room or house.
Our housing advice line gets stacks of queries about renting privately. A lot of the PRS cases that come through to me and my colleagues could have been prevented at the start of the tenancy if the tenant or the landlord was better prepared.
We get a lot of calls in September and October each year from people who've signed up to a tenancy that hasn't worked out. The reasons that people have for wanting to get out of agreements are understandable, some common issues are:
We invite experts in the housing field to give us their opinion on a hot topic of their choice, they also have the opportunity to make three housing themed wishes.
Our first contributor is Professor Paddy Gray who gives us his opinion on the recovery in Northern Ireland's housing market.
The latest Northern Ireland Housing Bulletin shows that there has been a significant increase of 15% in the number of households experiencing homelessness.
One of the headline statistics of the Bulletin, which covers the period of 1 January 2013 to 31 March 2013, is the 15% (652) increase in the number of households presenting as homeless to the Housing Executive, compared to the previous quarter.
Cat Song is a second-year law student from Fordham University School of Law in New York, NY. She is currently working at Housing Rights Service as a legal research intern studying comparative housing law in the different UK jurisdictions.
In her final article for Housing Rights Service, Cat explains how social housing works in the US.