John was renting a room in this property for many months along with others without a formal agreement. When I came, I spoke to her and arranged a rent as we did when the third guy arrived. According to our understanding, we would be paying her a fixed sum every two weeks and top up electricity and gas. She was responsible for the rest of the expenses. We used the address for our correspondence (banks, state' etc) normally but we forwarded to her all the correspondence addressed to her husband. When I say 'the agency' I do not mean a letting agency but a repse the fact tbat ossession agency commissioned by the lending bank, Barkleys (as we found some days after, as they initially would,t give us the name,). There was no notice addressed to the tenants for at least 2 months before the repossession, nor was anyone sent to warn us. We have no slips since the landlady was coming personally to receive the rent but we can prove we were there for months through our correspondence, our presence witnessed by many, our possession of keys to the property and of course the fact that she was seen with us and that she never made any complaint that we were tresspassing or something.

Our main problem is now with the bank, as they supposedly, according to the agency, do not allow them to let us remove our personal belongings. As for a written tenancy agreement, there is none, although all the neighbors can testify that the 'landlady' was regularly in the premises and of course a number of calls to her were made before the repossession. There are also tenants who resided there before us also on verbal agreemients, and of course anyone with an ounce of common sense and willingness to understand, and here I mean the bank, would also easily see what stuff is ours, but they do not seem to care. I guess our problem is twofold so I trust your opinion on where I might get better advice. BTW, we went to the police to ask them to help us, but they said they could not do anything because it was not a criminal case. Then I asked them to be present when the agency would give us our ids to be witnesses that they would not allow us to take therestof our stuff, which they also declined, saying that they could not be used as witnesses in civil cases. In the end, I had a neighbor come to serve as witness, which made the agent much more polite than in the beginning, before the witness arrived...

Hi all! I have been looking for help with little success for a week and then I found this wonderful active forum and I got my hopes up. Our story goes like this... My friend John was doing his masters in London and lived in the property of a certain woman,along with other roommates. In June, he was alone in this house in Bexley and I came from Greece to work in the UK. We gave the landlady a higher rent and told her that a third friend would also arrive in July. All was well, we paid our agreed rent in full,although there were no papers signed, what was described to me as commonplace in UK. Our third friend came, we all found jobs in the City and just like that.... with no warning whatsoever, we one evening returned from work to find the locks changed, our stuff inside. We called the landlady, who admitted that the house had been repossessed and that she had known all about this but she said she hadn't known that they would take the house that particular night (sic). The 'agency' only allowed us to take our ids and passports the next day but they said that the 'client',the bank, would not allow us to take the rest of our stuff... Our clothes, underware, shoes, computers, cameras, bags... everything they kept. We had to sleep in buses, the next day, we had to skip our jobs, we found expensive accommodation and had to buy some new clothes to wear. John was depressed, he has to extend his studies as his books, his research, his paper are all inside and he was on a tight deadline, we had to skip multiple days of work to find new rooms and so on. What can we do?? How can we get our stuff back?? Who should we move legally against for this ordeal? Shouldn't the bank have warned the tenants before repossessing the house, give us a few days to evacuate? Can it be that the landlady did not have to warn us? Plus,we later found out, our landlady was not the owner of the house but the wife of the owner, who.... is in jail. When we told her to tell her husband to tell the bank to let us in, she mumbled something about them not getting on well, which may mean she rented the house out without his consent. A labyrinth of inconsideration and outright shameful conduct that cost us dearly, both financially and psychologically. Thanks in advance for your answers. GK