Just be aware

A question about : Just be aware

That CAB staff do not always give the correct information to people with regards to lodgers. They misled an ex lodger of mine telling them that they had the rights of tenants.

clearly they, or some of them do not know the difference between tenants and lodgers.

Just so you know.

Best answers:

• Good point. A lodger has no rights really.
• I thought it was very poor that they sent my ex lodger an email which linked to the rules about the deposit protection scheme. this of course applies to tenants only not lodgers.
  It caused unnecessary grief for the lodger and me. If they really don't know the answer to something they should say so rather than give people duff information.
• Do they not have universal training material then?
• They may do. But like anything in life there is always one who may have missunderstood or misdiagnosed the issue.
  CAB work hard to do their best for you. However nobody or no organisation is perfect, ever.
  To aid the local CAB and the person who may have given incorrect advice it is worth comunicating with them so retraining or a review can be undertaken, thus enabling a better response to future issues of this regard.
• It's also worth remembering that they can only really advise on what they are told/given. So if someone tells them that they are a tenant, they'd follow that route. However, yes, one person giving bad advice is not the same as the entire CAB service being wrong. Every single department or organisation that you come across will get things wrong once in a while.
• The CAB advice information, available to each of the independent CAB charities, has very extensive information to enable the adviser to identify the correct type of tenancy, for example whether someone has an assured shorthold tenancy or is an excluded occupier etc.
  First step is for the adviser to use a very detailed flowchart to identify the type of tenancy. Then the adviser will look at the information that relates to that specific type of tenancy to check again the tenancy type has been correctly identified.
  As rights and responsibilities depend on the type of tenancy that is always the first step in the process.
  The volunteer adviser will probably run their research (for example their logic in identifying the type of tenancy) past their supervisor and the case may also be separately case checked (in fact in the bureau where I volunteer all cases are separately checked). Every bureau also gets externally audited for quality of advice.
  Every adviser receives extensive training including a separate pack on housing before being allowed to advise and most have probably been on training courses where identifing the type of tenancy has formed a major part of the course.
  Of course any CAB adviser (including myself) can make mistakes but so can anybody in whatever they do. The important thing is that steps are put in place to minimise mistakes and to stop mistakes re-occurring. If anyone wants to make a complaint about the advice they have been given they should contact the bureau who gave them the advice. That is the obvious and fair thing to do as it gives the bureau a chance to identify what has gone wrong and put in place remedial steps to avoid it reoccurring.
  Of course we don't know what has happened here as Spirit has asserted that CAB give bad advice to lodgers, based on advice it appears to which she wasn't even party.
  I think the CAB board is an interesting experiment and I hope people will give it a chance to see if it works.
• Shock.. Person is human and made a mistake