Rented a room in Shadwell, London and after 1 month there the agent evicted the whole house with 7 days notice with the reason that the landlord wanted new tenants paying higher rent. Agent offered me a room in a 2 bed flat council flat in Limehouse which had been freshly painted but the flat was filthy with no fire alarms and shared with 9 people, 2 or 3 per room in total about £4000 a month for the flat. Accepted the room as had no where else to go and paid deposit and full rent. Within a week started getting dozens of bite marks on my body and discovered the flat was infested with bedbugs. Agent came and sprayed room every week for 3 weeks but there were still getting 30 or more bites per day. Made a complaint to the council who came out and said that there were signs of bedbugs across the whole building and it would be extremely difficult to get rid of them. After making complaint to agent, 7 day eviction notice given for making a complaint and I moved out as agent as threatening to change locks. Moved to a new room but had to pay £750 a month for a tiny single room in East London. Decided son afterwards London is a mugs game and moved out the city.

Had no heating for 3 years still not fixed. Rotten back door and unsafe electrics with no end in sight I work full time and can not afford a disposit for mortgage and I don't apparently fit the needs for council housing.

When renting in London I reported a broken window (would by open) to my landlord. Four years later when I moved out it had not been fixed despite repeated reports of the problem. We also had vermin in the attic due to a large hole in the roof that was leaking substantial amounts of water into the property. It took the landlord three months to get a contractor to look at it and a further month to solve the problem. I now live in Bishops Stortford where the rent is equally as high meaning that my partner and I are unable to do anything with our lives except exist, hope my partners depression doesn’t render him bedbound again as we don’t get sick pay (myself because I’m self employed and my partner because his employer doesn’t pay for sick days) and hope the car doesn’t break because the extortionate renting costs mean we have no spare cash after our above average salaries hit our bank account Ts. How is it that we can take home over £30K between us and merely exist. We aren’t entitled to any help from the government yet we struggle. We aren’t entitled to food bank support because of our income yet we struggle. This country is broken and the people who suffer are the middle earners who are taxed more, entitled to less and priced out of buying their own secure properties because of greedy landlords. Someone help us. Because it currently feels like no one in office cares about people like us. We aren’t alone.

Our ex landlord was a nightmare no repairs done-ever he didn't even do a gas safety check a plug socket set alight and he laughed telling me it was still safe to use water would drip through the walls into a light socket-he told me it was cos I'm fat!(I'm not) the list went on he finally got reported to the council who came out checked our home and rang him to tell him what needed doing-and then that was the last we ever heard from them he died not long after and his son took over-we left we couldn't be dealing with him too

I moved into a 4 bedroom house in 2012. The landlord had taken the living room, a room with a single pane glass door leading to the garden and turned it into a bedroom. There was a 2 inch gap below the door, right next to my bed, I would freeze in the winter. He was charging rent of £360 a month for a single room. He said that cleaning would be provided weekly, we never had a cleaner come round once. He kept the boiler under lock and key, refusing to let us have more than 2 hours of heating a day, even in the winter. One hour at 7am one hour at 7pm. I was seriously ill for the majority of the tenancy due to the mould on the walls, the cold from the 2 inch gap and the single pane door. On the day rent was due, he would walk into our rooms in the morning without any notice or warning. Not even a knock, we had no privacy and he seemed to enjoy embarrassing us. Once on a particular cold night, I couldn't bare to stay in my room and had slept on the floor of another tenants room. He came in during the morning and made homophobic jokes and slurs at the fact that I had to stay in another tenants room. We never damaged the property once, but he refused to give us our deposits back once our tenancy period had ended. He also took our personal belongings that he deemed worth money and locked it in one of his other property's when we said we would make an official complaint. I never got to see my guitar, tv and amp ever again. The entire market is rife with this behaviour. Landlords seem to think they are above the law, we need stronger regulation. Personally It's looking like I will never own a house, I am going to have to suffer abuse for the rest of my life at greedy money grubbing Landlords. Take all the property off them and turn them into council houses. You can trust them.

I am a 27 year old woman with moderate CP and dyspraxia. I work full time, I study part time. Due to living the student life, I have lived in 5 different tenancies, under 4 different landlords. The first 4 really couldn’t help more if they tried, however, my final landlord’s actions and utter negligence nearly killed me. My previous landlord, on every account, was the very definition of a four landlord. He simply didn’t care. The fire alarms were faulty, the electrical system was dangerous and all of a sudden, I constantly had migraines and the flu - something that rarely happened with me. I told him to get the property checked for carbon monoxide and he repeatedly refused. I paid for the check myself, discovering that there was indeed a leak. This left me without money to feed myself for a week. For 4 years, he repeatedly promised that he would make adjustments to the entrance for me after the patio steps deteriorated, becoming a regular hazard for me. A neighbour found me unconscious on the floor after I had lost my balance an hour previous, returning from work. Three winters in a row I was left without heating because the boiler would repeatedly break down. This, combined with the extent of damp in the building overall led me to develop pneumonia twice. While I was in hospital, he abused me over the phone, telling me he was going to sue me for the damages I had incurred by ‘causing the damp’. By that point, I had already developed depression and PTSD. I didn’t have the gal to point out his stupidity. The final straw was, 6 months prior to leaving, there was a heaving stench of sewage. I had been reporting the wooden panels in the bathroom for nearly a year, One day, whilst cleaning the bathroom, the entire floor collapsed. I fell with most of the bathroom down into the basement, breaking my ankle and my collar bone. Turns out the smell was a leaked deposit of faeces. I was a good tenant. I never broke rules. What I broke, I fixed immediately. Even though I was a DSS tenant for years, I always made sure that rent came in on time. I didn’t deserve this.

My rent was increased by 8% every year for the 3 years I lived in my last home. I moved in in a desperate situation when I was 6 months pregnant and recently evicted through no fault of my own (owner's circumstances changed and had to suddenly sell up).. The flooring in the kitchen and bathroom was heavily stained and the carpet in the living room should have been thrown long before I took the place. I was promised it would be updated as the tenancy went on. The kitchen and bathroom flooring were replaced 2 years and 8 months after I had moved in. I reminded them of each of these issues at every 6 month check the estate agent did. He agreed with me. I was living in squalor at the hands of pure greed. There was an extension lead running the length of the kitchen providing electricity for the fridge. I suggested putting a socket behind the fridge and was told it was not illegal for the extension lead to be used in this way so it wouldn't be changed. It was run behind the kitchen taps and where there was mould from sitting water in a badly put together, very old kitchen. The place was running alive with mice. I did everything I could. I was a cleaning, storage maniac. They called pest control after I'd lived like that for one year. Within 4 weeks, they were gone. I had horrid neighbours downstairs that would drug binge from Friday night to Sunday morning and spend the rest of Sunday fighting. All whilst my child could hear everything in such a cruddy built block of council flats. The landlords had bought the place many years before for peanuts from the council. My neighbours all got new fitted kitchens and bathrooms and paid half of the rent I paid because they were council tenants. I was not in a situation better than them. I just happened to work when I was left desperate and the council would have charged me the same every month to live amongst chaos in a homeless shelter with a brand new baby as I paid to rent such a dive. It was the best of a bad situation. All of this is normal for private tenants. If you want to sort out the housing crisis, look at sorting private renting first. Somebodies shelter should never be another person's wage. That's where it is broken.

We was recently evicted through no fault of our own... Well the landlord claimed to want the house back but this was a scam to get the rent raised. We was paying 750pm the landlord wanted 1000pm and couldn't raise it that much in one hit so evicted us... The local council could not help and only offered us a b&b for 2 weeks if we gave our dogs away... Then they made comment that as my partner is polish I should just get her pregnant.. outrageous!!! If I could change one thing in the private rental sector, that would be to cap rent at 15% above mortgage payments and raise landlord taxs.. this would encourage people to stop buying 15/20 houses just to rent out at a profit which drives the market value up and makes buying a home unaffordable for the masses... It's easy to buy a 300k house when you already have 10 you can use as collateral.. realistically that 300k house is worth 200k but supply and demand kicks in... The housing "crisis" the government claims to have is only partially true if you could free up some of the many rental properties and have them on the market for sale at actually affordable prices less people would depend on rentals and government housing... Also let's take a long hard look at mortgage criteria... We have rented for 5 years.... Shows we can afford to pay over £700 a month... But not according to mortgage lenders.. they seem to think if we bought a house that £700+ we pay in rent every month is not money we would put towards a mortgage payment.. I guess they think im stupid and will buy magic beans... Seriously though if you have a history of paying rent on time for a long period why on earth does that count towards NOTHING in the lenders eyes??

Mice infested with damp all down living room walls that was untreated. Letting agent took no notice of complaints and ignored emails

We still pay extortionate agent fees even though the government said they would outlaw them a year ago. We also have had an experince of having an offer accepted on a house and then coming to sign a contract but having a competing offer accepted by the landlord from a different agent 5 days before our move in date, leaving 5 of us in a very vulnerable position.