Tenants by Vicky Spratt

Author:Vicky Spratt [Spratt, Vicky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782839996
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fine Until It’s Not

Back on the doorstep of the Bradford HMOs, George told Helen and me that one of the things keeping him and his cousins in England was the ‘very bad political situation’ in Hungary. He said that life under the country’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, was difficult. Orbán is known for having introduced a public workfare system which aimed to get unemployed people back into the labour market in response to the 2008 economic crash. However, George says that, while it might have reduced unemployment on paper, what you can earn in Hungary often isn’t enough to live on, let alone save – which he is able to do while working and living in the UK.

As morning turned into early afternoon, another resident joined us to sit out in the spring sun. Twenty-year-old Dominik* was originally from the Czech Republic. He moved to Britain in his early teens and did his GCSEs here. Until he was seventeen, he told me, he lived with his uncle and his cousins in their family home but, once he had completed those studies, he was asked to move out, get a job and find somewhere else to live because there wasn’t enough space for him. He now shared a room with his girlfriend; he worked night shifts at a nearby factory where shampoo is bottled, she worked mornings. ‘It’s better here than in my country. Everything is so expensive at home. You cannot live a good, clean life there.’ He meant make an honest living. George passed Dominik some Haribos. I asked Dominik what he thought of his landlord. Did he also think he was ‘a good guy’? ‘He’s a good lad, yeah,’ Dominik replied, nodding. ‘I didn’t have much money when I first moved in so I couldn’t afford the deposit he wanted for the room, and he let me pay him slowly for that over time. I was proper struggling then, you know. He looks after me.’ Stockholm syndrome, perhaps, because his landlord was charging through the nose and engaged in illegally renting out overfull rooms, but Dominik felt that his landlord was justified in his cut-throat outlook. If you can’t pay, why should you be allowed to stay?

Before Helen and I left, I asked all of the young men – who were by this point crowded around George’s phone watching something on YouTube and giggling – whether people often got evicted from this place. ‘Oh yeah,’ one of the cousins said, ‘people come and go.’ George looked up from his phone and added, ‘Our landlord is all right as long as you’re paying the rent, you know. That changes if you can’t pay. It’s fair enough, though, isn’t it?’ He looked intense for a moment. ‘You’ve got to pay.’ It dawned on me that, in some ways, this is fairer than Section 21, which means a landlord can evict you even if you do pay – and is testament to how low the bar is set in the private rented sector.

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