It can be a lose-lose scenario for some tenants who ask the council to push their landlords to fix up substandard apartments

When Ciara Hill was struggling to get her landlord to fix up her flat last year, she asked Dublin City Council to inspect her home to check it against the legal minimum standards.

Environmental health officers did, and Hill later filed a dispute with the Residential Tenancies Board, too.

But while Hill has seen some small victories – official notices to her landlord telling him to fix things, and some work done on the property – she has also suffered one significant loss.

Last summer, Dublin City Council stopped her housing assistance payment, the subsidy for low-income renters. With that cut off, it put Hill in rent arrears and has left her at risk of eviction.

Council staff say they won’t resume the payment until her landlord fixes all the issues with the property, says Hill.

“They told me it’s because he hasn’t done the standard work that they cannot reinstate it until he fixes all that’s wrong,” says Hill, “as it’s the second improvement notice they have served.”

The home is back on the prohibition notice list for the second time.

Cutting off HAP payments because of poor standards isn’t something that councils do lightly.

They rarely do it because of the kind of knock-on effect Hill has experienced – that can worsen a tenant’s already bad situation, says Gavin Elliott, a solicitor with Community Law & Mediation.

“The inspection process is supposed to take out rogue landlords,” says Elliott, “but then there is the balancing act because rogue landlords also house people.”

Sinn Féin TD and housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin says that HAP inspections, which are currently done within the first eight months of a tenancy, should be done at the start. A standards certification system should also be introduced for all rental properties, he said.

Social Democrats TD and housing spokesperson Cian O’Callaghan says that local authorities should be given powers to compulsorily purchase substandard properties, so they can repair them and keep tenants in their homes.

How bad is too bad?

In June 2022, Dublin City Council issued Hill’s landlord, Mel Kilraine, with a prohibition notice for the flat, one of a bunch of apartments in an old Georgian terrace in the heart of Rathmines village.

Issuing a prohibition notice comes at the end of a long process during which environmental health officers alert a landlord to ways in which an apartment isn’t up to code, and first give them chances to fix it.

Sitting tenants don’t have to move, but landlords can’t re-let until they make it decent.

The council later lifted that prohibition notice, a letter shows. Hill says this was after the landlord did some minor work on the property.

Then in August 2023, the council issued another improvement notice flagging 24 items to sort. Among them were fire-safety issues, mould, a broken sink, uneven flooring, issues with the heating, the lack of a shower head, and a leaking toilet wastewater pipe.

Last summer, Hill discovered her HAP payment had been stopped when her council rent was returned at the post office. When she phoned the council to ask why the payment was stopped, she didn’t get a clear explanation, she says.

After months of looking for answers, council staff recently told Hill that her HAP was cut off because the council had issued a second prohibition notice.

Elliott, the solicitor at Community Law & Mediation, says that the council can continue to pay HAP after issuing an improvement notice, but by law they have to stop the payment after they issue a prohibition notice.

The council should write to the tenant and give them notice that they are stopping the payment, he says.

The tenant can lodge a dispute with the RTB over standards and the RTB can award compensation, says Elliot.

But a tenant will quickly run into rent arrears once HAP is stopped, and then the landlord can issue a notice of termination for rent arrears, he says.

How many times?

Curiously, in most cases where the HAP payments were stopped because of a failure to meet standards, a council hadn’t issued landlords with any prohibition notice, show figures.

In 2022, councils stopped HAP payments for 111 properties nationwide because they didn’t meet minimum standards, according to data released under the Freedom of Information Act.

In 41 of those cases a prohibition notice had been issued, said a Department of Housing spokesperson.

In 2021, councils stopped 159 HAP payments and 20 of those closures followed prohibition notices, the data also shows.

A department spokesperson said that when a prohibition notice has been issued, a council may keep paying HAP for up to 13 weeks so the household can find somewhere else to live.

Some councils are reluctant to stop the HAP payment, even when the property significantly fails to meet the minimum standards, says Elliott, because the household may well become homeless.

“The ones that are going to fail substantially are at the bottom of the market,” he says. “They have to make very tough decisions.”

Some solutions

“I think there has to be a level of protection for people who make complaints,” says O’Callaghan, the Social Democrats TD and housing spokesperson.

If tenants can ultimately lose their homes due to complaining about standards, it could put people off reporting conditions that might be dangerous, he says.

In Paris, authorities can compulsorily purchase private rental housing that is in very poor condition, he says, repair it and keep the tenants in their homes.

“There is a strong case, in the case of very bad conditions, for those properties to be taken off the landlord and brought up to standard,” he says. “You also don’t want to be losing rental accommodation.”

Here in Dublin, “it’s questionable as to whether or not the inspections system is effective at improving the quality of the housing stock”, says Elliott.

The housing advice charity Threshold has been calling for an NCT-style system for rental properties.

That would be “a licensing scheme”, says Elliott. “You would have to arrange – if you are a landlord – for a qualified individual to come in and certify that your building meets the standards.”

That certification would be submitted and the licence renewed every five years, he said.

Ó Broin, the Sinn Féin housing spokesperson, says that that certification system, together with inspections of 25 percent of all rental stock each year, could be used to bring most rental homes into compliance in four years.

HAP inspections should be done at the start of the tenancy too, he says. Under a previous rent subsidy scheme, the Rental Accommodation Scheme, the inspection was done at the beginning of the tenancy.

“You can’t have the state paying for properties with severe mould and dampness that could pose a risk to the health of the tenant,” he says.

In the medium term, the state needs to provide more public housing directly and wean itself off its reliance on private rentals for social housing, says Ó Broin. _

[CORRECTION: This article was updated at 2.30pm on 11 April to delete a reference to council powers to repair properties and bill landlords, as this provision is no longer in the law. Sincere apologies for the error.]