 A group of London renters who were screwed over during the pandemic have just won £19,000 from their billionaire landlord for housemates had organised during the pandemic to receive a 20% rent reduction due to income loss over the lockdown. They started a renters group with their neighbours to lobby their landlord who was George Christodoulou and he is a Monaco-based property magnate and 82nd richest man in Britain. This was a big bad landlord. Now, this billionaire landlord refused, he told them to instead use their unspent lunch money to make up their arrears. But the last laugh was with the tenants. On Wednesday night, a housing tribunal approved Jordan Osserman, Mark Sutton, Foyvis, Dusos and Daniel Mapp's request for a rent repayment order or RRO, a little-known legal mechanism that since 2004 has meant renters can get back up to a year's rent if their landlord has failed to licence a house in multiple occupation or a HMO. Though not unprecedented in itself, Wednesday's judgement is likely to trigger a chain reaction that will benefit not just this household but the whole block. Summerford Grove Renters, an association of tenants living in properties owned by Christodoulou in Stoke Newington, North London, estimates that 50 further SGR households could be eligible for RROs totaling half a million pounds. Osserman says he expects theirs will be the first of many wins to come. In this situation, the landlord was able to say, no, I'm not going to give you any rent rebate over the pandemic. Unfortunately, landlord still have that in their power, but he had not registered the property correctly. He hadn't licenced it as a house of multiple occupancy, and now he could have to pay around half a million pounds to his various tenants, a big win for the renters, one of whom I spoke to earlier today. Jordan Osserman, I asked him about his expectations for this case and whether they were surprised by their victory. At the start of the process, we were just asking directly our landlord for a small reduction in rent to help out neighbours who were struggling with finances during the pandemic, who were losing income. We had no idea that it would go as far as it did. We certainly weren't expecting to go to a tribunal fighting our landlord legally, but we were fairly confident that we had a good shot at this case. We did our research and we worked with a lawyer who was volunteering his time to help us out. We knew we had a shot, but it was a really tough hearing. The judge seemed quite unsympathetic to us, and so I think it's really a testament to the work that we did, the Summerford Grove Renters Campaign as a whole in order to win the case that we did actually win. I would say we had our fingers crossed, but we were pleasantly surprised with the outcome. This case was absolutely part and parcel of the work that Summerford Grove Renters and London Renters Union have been doing. This wouldn't be possible without us having constituted the Summerford Grove Renters. Basically, we started as a bunch of neighbours who were trying to help each other out during the pandemic. We became a formal organisation and then joined the London Renters Union. It was through that process and learning from what the London Renters Union has done, working with them to build skills in terms of how to doorknock, how to work with our neighbours, how to organise collective action. It was all of that that made this case possible. It absolutely wouldn't have happened otherwise. It can be pretty dispiriting being a renter and the government is against you, the laws are against you, landlords are often against you, but there are ways to organise and to fight back. There are organisations doing incredible work across the UK in addition to the London Renters Union groups like Acorn. Also, do your research, because oftentimes, as was the case for us, it required us spending a lot of time learning what rights we did have and pressuring our local council and pressuring other power holders to act that led to this success. I'm hoping that fellow renters will see our case as inspiration for their own struggles. That was Jordan Osserman whose victory in this case is all the more impressive because, as he says, the law really is stacked in favour of landlords and against renters. It was also a particularly unusual situation in this case because there was multiple households with the same landlord. In this country, we have a very distributed system where lots of people just have their one landlord. They don't know who they are, quite difficult to organise against them. In this situation, I think there's about 70 households with the same landlord, which is why this can be used as a precedent to get other people this same compensation. So very, very impressive campaign not to sign that the system isn't broken. As I've already said, the renters weren't able to force the landlord to give them a deduction due to the pandemic. I want to show you another article from Navarra Media this week. This was by Aaron Bustani. It's an article with a great picture of Aaron and his dog, Gino. Aaron wrote about how moving from being a private renter to a homeowner made him realise how much the former was damaging his mental health. Aaron, it is a really great piece. Can you tell us about it? Well, thanks. It's very kind. It's had lots of positive feedback. It's important to say as well, Michael. It's not about if you get on the housing ladder, everything's fine. That's why we have housing security in the title. I lived in London for 15 years. I think about at least 15 properties over 15 years. I never had a home. The watchword of politicians since I've been an adult is community. But our housing model means that it's absolutely impossible for people in my situation, and I'm sure that applies to many of our viewers, to actually be involved in a meaningful community because you know that in a year or two, best case scenario, you'll be priced out and you have to leave. In terms of what it changed for me, I talk about how I had a low point about seven years ago, just a confluence of things, lack of money, PhD. You don't start a doctorate to earn money, but it was tough. It was things were getting really tough. Broken relationship with the next girlfriend, didn't work out, kind of went EastEnders. I ended up with my stuff outside the front door. And again, that's actually really important to say that was a function of us, neither of us having that much cash and a very stressful situation in London. Little things like having a spare bedroom where somebody can sort of let off steam or something, none of that existed. Brought of support networks, you would normally take for granted often aren't there because people are having to move into zone four, zone five, they're neglecting their friendships, the work can be stressful and so on. So that led to a broken relationship, money problems, and then my mum died, which was just really tough. So I really hit a kind of a rock bottom there. After about another year, I started taking antidepressants, sertraline. It was more for anxiety than depression. It was the smallest dose, 50 milligrams, but it was transformative, it was utterly transformative. And then very quickly after taking that super quickly, I sort of had the clarity about what I needed to change to help myself. One was to leave London. That doesn't mean everybody has to leave London. I think if you're very affluent, if you're rich, you can definitely enjoy London. If you're willing to go through the grind for certain reasons, brilliant. If you've got family and friends there, I get it. But for us, the calculation didn't quite make sense because we wanted to have kids and our families are down here on the South Coast. So we moved. And then not long after, about a year later, we bought somewhere. We bought somewhere because my partner earns a lot more than I do. It's important to say this, in our media, everybody earns the same wage. Everybody earns the same wage. You have a pay ratio of one to one. She had two thirds of the deposit. I had one third from book royalties, not huge money. But it meant we could buy a terrorist house on the South Coast here in South Sea, which we never could have done in London. And the consequences of that were incredible, Michael, absolutely incredible. And I understood all of a sudden why all these quite affluent people really can't understand, can't comprehend, can't get in the shoes of generation rent. Now, it's not to say there are older people out there who still rent, of course, but we know that homeownership is just falling off a cliff now in terms of age for younger people that just far less likely to be getting on the housing ladder than older generations. And of course, there's less social housing too. So the option is to go into the rental market. And it's just such a weight came off my shoulder when I left that, Michael. It took a couple of weeks. And I realized, wow, I can put something on the wall. I can actually change the surroundings I live in. I can actually make meaningful relationships with my neighbors and local businesses, knowing that I won't have to move in a year's time. And those aren't huge things to ask, Michael. Those aren't huge things to ask. And so it might seem that, oh, you're saying, well, you had a home of your own, it's kind of like a Thatcher, I think. Not at all. I think secure tenancy would do exactly the same thing, more social housing, expanding minimum tenancies. I think we need more rent tenancies, five, 10 years in this country, rent caps, getting rid of HMOs. HMOs are effectively turning these buildings, which should be flats and houses and co-ops, turning them into effectively machines that just extort value from their tenants. And I think if you really are serious about addressing the mental health crisis in this country, you have to talk about the housing crisis. You have to. You have to. Because it's the number one need. I got somebody in my reply saying, oh, first world problems. Absolutely not. Shelter is not a first world problem, my friend. A sense of meaningful community and relationships with other people is not a first world problem. It is expensive to be poor. And one example of that is when you have to move every 12 months because you have to pay the removal costs, you have to get time off work, you sometimes need to buy new furniture because something breaks. Again, people watching this know that story, but it's something that's really lost on much of our political media class, Michael, really. Andrew Ma, he lives, I think, 40 minutes from where he has to work, he basically walks there at the BBC. Many of these people have never even rented, or if they did, it was briefly as students, and they really don't get the state of the housing market in this country and how it is destroying people. It is destroying people. And so for me, getting out of that situation, I'm not going to adopt the I'm All Right Jack attitude. It's about, wow, this is so screwed up. And it's actually relatively easy to remediate through a bunch of measures I've already said. And the crying shame is that where are the politicians, where are the leading politicians, other than the previous Labour leadership, saying, this is what we're going to do. I've not had anything positive from the Labour Party or from Conservative politicians about this. It's always build more houses. Well, you can build more houses and that's great. But if the price of housing is going up, and it is going up, I think in the last 12 months, the average housemaps in like 12, 13, 14%, then that doesn't help anybody. So yes, of course, we need more houses being built, but we need a fundamental change in the housing that's already there, like I say, through things like rent caps and minimum tenancies. It's one of the things I find so frustrating about the way we talk about mental health within neoliberal capitalism, because whatever situation we live in, whatever system we live in, I'm sure in communist systems, you also have people who are struggling with mental health. But there is so much, I mean, it should be low hanging fruit. And this is all perfectly manageable. You don't have to have some, or you shouldn't have to have some sort of revolutionary communist system. That's just social democracy. Give people who want affordable rent, affordable rent. And then we can just stop all of these campaigns. We've got Prince William saying, oh, let's talk about mental health. How about we just give people somewhere to live, which has some security where they can build some community and where they're not terrified, they're going to be kicked out all the time. It shouldn't be that complicated.