Wirral News Letters: July 27

Jul 27 2011 Birkenhead News

Need for regulation

LABOUR MP Graham Jones has demanded an “urgent statement” from housing minister Grant Shapps “on the crisis of rogue landlords in the private rented sector”.

Speaking in the Commons, Jones referred to Channel 4 recent dispatches programme “Landlords from Hell”, which showed one landlord, who was operating a charity, boasting that he could break the law and would sort out his tenants with a baseball bat.

Jones said: “Tens of thousands of people are trapped with poor or rogue landlords in the private rented sector.”

The MP is opposed to the landlord’s move to have selective licensing regime thrown out. He has gone on record as saying: “Given the chronic state the sector is in – it is more regulation and intervention that is required, and not less.”

Julie Rugg in the “Rugg Report” commissioned by the former Labour government but totally ignored so far by the housing minister, recommended that both residential letting and managing agents and landlords needed to be licensed because of providing a public service. She also strongly recommended that the Residential Letting Industry as a whole was in need of a complete and urgent overhaul.

Because there has been a serious delay in resolving matters, this is why we now have a worrying problem with both rogue landlords and tenants.

As a former professional landlord myself spending 40 years within the lettings industry, I am in favour of mandatory licensing which, if done effectively, will get rid of both the rogue elements once and for all. If other public services are regulated, why should the Residential Letting Industry get away with being regulated itself.

I welcome sensible comments from both agents and landlords.

Richard Globe

Wallasey

Small price to pay

IT’S really hard when food prices are rising and we are being squeezed so hard economically to add farm animal welfare to our list of ‘must haves’ when we shop.

But good farm animal welfare doesn’t have to cost a lot more – indeed new research shows that the cost of a shopping basket of higher welfare food against a basket containing similar standard products, can mean as little as just over five pounds more – that’s less than the price of a box of chocolates and a small price to pay for helping to improve the lives of our farm animals.

This week is Farm Animal Week (July 25 to 31).

The RSPCA’s farm animal welfare charity, Freedom Food is asking us all to Switch one for Welfare when we shop.

Many of you have stopped buying eggs from hens kept in battery cages – but this week why not go one step further and look for labels such as Freedom Food on products like sausages, chicken and salmon too. It will leave a better taste in your mouth. Happy cooking and eating!

Antony Worrall Thompson

Superb concert

YESTERDAY evening Wallasey Town Hall hosted the Wirral Symphony Orchestra’s summer concert of operatic excerpts.

It was an excellent concert, and at the end the capacity audience went wild. No problem of course, but a bit unexpected. Perhaps they had all been watching Popstar to Operastar?

The orchestra was in fine form, and the soloists, who are all local, were superb. The Town Hall could do with a clean up though, and how about reopening the gallery before next year?

S R LANCELYN GREEN

Poulton Hall, Bebington