Brent Council
- A landlord in London was found to be renting out a four-bed house to 40 tenants.
- Jaydipkumar Rameshchandra Valand has been banned from letting houses for five years.
- He made around £360,000 with the scheme, according to the local council.
A London council banned a local landlord from renting out properties for five years after he was found guilty of multiple housing offenses, including stuffing up to 40 people into a four-bedroom property.
Brent Council released a statement saying that "slum" landlord Jaydipkumar Rameshchandra Valand made £360,000, approximately $457,000, from the tenants at the property in Wembley, northwest London.
It says that enforcement officers found one of the tenants "living in a lean-to shack made out of pallets and tarpaulin with no lighting or heating."
Valand was previously found guilty of housing offenses at another property in January 2022, when officers discovered he made £1,400 a month from uncontracted tenants. The property had numerous issues, including fire safety violations, waste buildups, unhygienic conditions, and "disrepairs," per the council.
On that occasion, Valand was fined £30,000, approximately $38,000.
The Leader of Brent Council, Muhammed Butt, said: "This is the first ban we have issued since Brent was given the powers in April 2018 to ban serial rogue landlords under the Housing and Planning Act 2016. If Jaydipkumar Valand breaches his five-year ban, he will face a prison sentence.
"Brent Council takes a zero-tolerance policy against rogue landlords such as this, and we will use everything in our powers to hold them to account to safeguard our vulnerable residents," he added.
Rogue London landlords were fined £8.6 million, or nearly $11 million, in the first three months of 2023, the Evening Standard reported.
One landlord in the London Borough of Hounslow was fined £115,000, or $146,000, after he illegally converted an extension on a property into another unit, where he then put tenants in "squalid and dirty conditions with a toilet located less than 1m from the kitchen."