by Tony Best BARBADIANS WHO RENT HOUSES may soon be given legal protection against rent gouging and unfair tactics by landlords.Attorney General Freundel Stuart disclosed that the administration was putting the finishing touches to a bill designed to “even out the relationship between landlord and tenant”, because the current system was allowing unreasonable landlords to impose hardships on people who were renting either houses, as well as rooms in houses.“We are looking at the relationship between landlords and tenants with a view to making the legislation fair,” Stuart told the SATURDAY SUN in New York.“One of the problems we have been having in the context of an acute low-income housing situation is that tenants have been having to face rental increases, almost whimsically, imposed by landlords, but there is no corresponding observance by landlords to keep their premises in a state of tenantable repair.”The attorney general said: “While we are not minded to introduce rent restriction legislation, we are certainly looking at how best we can ensure that landlords who want to increase rents can show that they are keeping their side of the bargain by keeping the tenanted premises in a state of good repair.”He said that the proposed legislation might soon be taken into the House of Assembly and Senate.Stuart said that the law would seek to strike a balance between the rights of both the landlord and the tenant. It wouldn’t be an anti-landlord measure, but one that protects people against unreasonable actions by property owners.“We are not intending to punish landlords or interfere with the right of landlords to get rid of tenants who are delinquent in the payment of rents,” he said. “That is a right which has to b preserved at all costs. Landlords have rights and tenants don’t have all the rights. But the problem that concerns us is that if you have property which you have rented out and you are constantly increasing the rent, you must show some evidence that you are spending some of this increased rent on keeping the tenanted premises in a good state of repair.“Tenants complain that they can’t get landlords to do much by way of repair of the premises,” he went said. Stuart made it clear that nothing would be done to absolve tenants from paying their rents.“We want to make the relationship between landlords and tenants a just and fairer one and certainly nothing we contemplate is intended to absolve tenants from their obligation where the payment of rent is concerned,” he said.He cited a case in which a landlord sought to raise rent by 600 per cent “and the tenant was an old lady living on a pension”.“That cannot be right,” Stuart insisted. “We have to bring some sanity back to that whole relationship.
