Simon Lambert

You know, the people who work in the media, i.e.

us.

So the people who are writing about this and talking about this and publishing stories about it.

Horror stories and everything and comment pieces and all those kinds of things.

The MPs, the campaign element of this.

It is all very London-centric.

And the London rental market is quite different to the rental market in a lot of other places around the country.

Now, I'm not saying that the rental market in Manchester isn't probably red hot or potentially the one in Bristol and so on.

But if you go to most towns and cities around the UK...

It's a very different scenario and landlords are a lot more concerned about those void periods I was talking about.

So don't try and pull the fast ones that they do.

But to go back to your original point, often it's not the landlord trying to pull a fast one, it's the letting agents.

And the letting agents that are a problem are not the one-man bands like my mum who give both the landlords and the tenants a boot up the backside when they need it and also give them some TLC when they need it.

It's the biggest state agency firms, right?

Either the national firms or the big regional firms who just see it as a way of milking more money out of people.

And we saw this with the fees that ended up getting banned.

You know, a fee here, a fee there, a fee for this, a fee for that.

And essentially, what they're doing...

He's basically just extracting as much money as they can from landlords and tenants and quite often delivering a really crap service because it's the office junior who gets put into that position.

You know, everybody else goes and works on selling houses, like chuck the office junior in there, charge him some fees.