Our member Mark recently won repairs through the union. Here's his story:

In February my oven door shattered, scattering glass all over the floor. I removed the, correctly oriented, tray to inspect the damage and when cooled put the tray back in to take photos of the damage to send to Happy Lets. They sent over a contractor who concluded the door needed replacing, wear and tear, easy to fix and so it all seemed fine. However, after a week I emailed to see how progress was going since the oven was not operational and there were still bits of glass falling out if the door was moved. To which they reply that the photos show the tray is upside down so this damage is user error and we owe £260 for the fix. Obviously, this was horseshit.

I went along to our Member Defence meeting to talk through options and the experience was incredibly relieving. My first instinct was that Happy Lets was taking the piss but as days went on I began to doubt if I’d had the tray in upside down to begin with and if it's fair to assume an oven would shatter from such a slight change. Going to the meeting and hearing the incredulous responses from my fellow members was heartening and relinquished those doubts. We began to form a plan of how to address Happy Lets claims laying out all the contradictions in their argument. Just sitting with other tenants in a room bouncing ideas off of each other uncovered a lot of stupid reasoning by Happy Lets that didn’t even occur to me at first. In summary our argument in the email exchanges were as follows:

• An in person contractor saying its wear and tear is stronger in tribunal than an alleged contractor looking at the photos and saying user error

• The manufacturer when phoned did not agree an upside down tray would cause this

• Measurements of the tray right way up and upside down don’t allow for the opportunity of a smash to occur

• Damage occurred on opening the door not closing

• Under Repairing Standard set out in the Housing (Scotland) Act 2006 wear and tear is the landlords cost

These arguments were strong and came about from just chatting with others and pooling our experience. Our first email was met with stonewalling as I had not mentioned Living Rent and so in our second email I reiterated our arguments above and set out a 48 hour deadline, request for the landlords name and address and then an escalation of claiming backdated rent and the ‘avoidance on my part of including any further parties in this dispute’. Standing our ground and letting our next steps remain ambiguous led Happy Lets to not just replace the door but the full oven at their expense. I cannot stress how lonely and silly I felt disputing this initially before chatting with my fellow tenants and it was only through our union that that was firmly corrected by the solidarity of fellow tenants offering up their time to support each other.