Social housing law firms forced to hire extra staff to cope with spike in disrepair claims

Trowers & Hamlins, which represents social landlords, has increased the size of its housing team by 175% since January 2021 to deal with the number of cases coming in. 

Managing associate Dorota Pawlowski said that prior to disrepair claims surging, the firm’s caseload was about 20% disrepair, but this has now grown to 80% of all work. 

“The vast majority of my and my colleagues’ caseload is taken up with disrepair claims… to the extent that we have taken on more staff to deal with it – that’s how much we’ve got,” she explained. 

Clarke Willmott has increased its housing litigation team by 20% in response to increased demand. 

Lindsay Felstead, partner and head of housing management at the firm, said: “There’s an increase in litigation generally, but noticeably an increase in disrepair. 

“And in order to ensure that we’re able to deal with it, we’ve certainly grown the team.”

Ms Felstead, who also jointly leads Clarke Willmott’s social housing sector team, said that a lot of clients are “getting hammered on claims”. 

“Quite a lot of organisations try to deal with them in-house because that keeps costs down, but they just can’t cope with the volume that is coming in, hence needing to send them out externally to firms like ourselves,” she said. 

She added: “It’s a really difficult area – for those claims that are genuine, then obviously that’s very difficult for those tenants.

“But for the ones that are not, it is really difficult because landlords only have finite resources.”

Baljit Basra, partner and lead on disrepair claims at Anthony Collins Solicitors, said the firm gets about 10 to 15 disrepair claims a day. 

“We’ve got quite a large team and I would say at least half, if not more, are just dealing with disrepair claims because they are so prevalent,” she said. 

The housing team is also expanding. “We’re expanding because of the increase in work full stop, which also includes the disrepair,” Ms Basra explained. 

It emerged in December that Anexo Group, a firm that specialises in credit hire and legal services for motorists, had formed a new team to deal with tenant disrepair claims. 

At the time it said the housing disrepair team was engaged in almost 1,600 cases and that it expected the figure to rise “substantially” during 2022.  

Alan Sellers, executive chair of Anexo, said that he believed the firm’s housing disrepair casebook will “become a significant contributor to group revenues”.