Tristan McKenna speaking out after three years of constant issues with his rental home in Armley, including leaking boiler, leaking windows and flaking paint and mould in the bathroom. He now fears he's going to be evicted by landlord after being forced into a new tenancy agreement with a price hike of over 10%.
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00:00So my name is Tristan McKenna, I live in Armley in Leeds. I've been renting this
00:05property for three years through Linley & Simpson but through a private landlord
00:09and for those three years I've reported numerous maintenance problems which
00:15never get resolved. We waited two years for a leaking window to be resolved, we've
00:20been raising issues with the boiler for three years, it constantly needs
00:23repairing. We're currently without a working gas hole because a gas leak that
00:27was reported on the gas safety checks for four years was never looked at and
00:31has now reached a point of failure and on top of that they've increased my rent
00:34by 25% over the last three years. Tristan how are you and your partner, mentally
00:42how are you? Not good, this street and this area in particular is quite
00:46dangerous, we have a lot of serious crime. We had a prostitute set up a caravan on
00:51the street to apply her trade from and literally I think last week we had an
00:56armed robbery at our local convenience store which is less than one minute walk
01:00from this house which made the national news because guns are possibly
01:04imitation firearms were used but it was still an armed robbery on our doorstep.
01:09I've seen baseball bat riots, there was a gentleman stabbed outside the property.
01:13At one point over the summer, just gone over the last summer, we were calling the
01:18police every three days. I've provided Linley & Simpson with evidence, if you get
01:22texts back from the police they don't care. According to them they've got no
01:26control over crime so the house prices, the rent keeps going up in line with
01:30what they feel the house is worth but not the lived experience of being here.
01:33What do you want the landlord to do? I want the landlord to fix the property
01:37properly, I'd like him to totally redo the kitchen because it's completely wrong.
01:40I'd also like him to stop insisting on 12 month fixed contracts. I'm trying to
01:45buy a house and unfortunately every time we try he locks us into another contract.
01:49I'd also like them to bring the rent down. I don't think the rent should have
01:53gone up in this property, I think it should have come down, it's just not worth the money.
01:56Tristan, why have you gone to the Yorkshire Evening Post?
02:00I've reached the end, I've spent three years dealing with Linley & Simpson and
02:04playing as fair as I can. This all exploded the other day when I was
02:09accidentally cc'd into an email I wasn't meant to see, where the person in
02:13question said that I'd never even mentioned problems with the gas etc
02:17before, despite in the email train it only being like three emails above it
02:21where I'd mentioned the problems. So I feel Linley & Simpson just keep
02:25fobbing me off, they're pretending I'm not reporting stuff when I am,
02:29they never want to fix anything. Then they'll sometimes be sympathetic and say
02:33in the case of the bathroom they can see the landlord needs to do something
02:36about it but they won't enforce it. But then they're very happy to enforce the
02:40rent increases. £100, £100 rent increase this year and they've done nothing.