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Part III deals with ancillary requirements including the provision
of information. It also places certain obligations on occupants
for the purpose of ensuring that the manager can effectively carry
out his duties.
Responsibility for management will rest on an owner or
lessee who receives the rents or other payments from tenants or
lodgers, including any agent or trustee through whom the rents are
received.
The main substance of the code of management is contained
in Part II of the Regulations which deals with the manager's responsibilities
for repair and maintenance. Broadly, these responsibilities
amount to ensuring the repair (including reasonable
decorative repair), cleanliness and good order of the parts of the
house in common use; the proper maintenance throughout the house of
installations for basic services, such as water supply, drainage,
gas and electricity; the repair and good order of all means of
ventilation and means of escape from fire. The manager is also
required to ensure an adequate provision of refuse bins and to take
reasonable precautions to protect tenants from injury as a result
of structural conditions in the house.
Where rooms are let to tenants or lodgers as their living
accommodation, the manager must ensure that the rooms are clean and
in a reasonable state of structural repair at the commencement of the
letting and that defects are remedied in the rooms which are already
let, when the Regulations are applied to a house. There is a
continuing obligation for the repair and proper working order of
installations in the rooms, for the supply of water, gas and electricity
as well as baths, sinks, basins and sanitary conveniences.
In Part III of the Regulations a general obligation is
placed on occupants to take reasonable care not to hinder the
manager in carrying out his duties.
Regulation 14- requires the manager to display in a suitable
position in the house a notice containing his name and address
and that of any other manager with an indication of his interest
(i.e. agent or trustee), a copy of the Management Order, a copy of
the Regulations and, if the local authority require, a notice which
the authority may provide for indicating briefly the main provisions
of the Regulations.
The Regulations do not stand in isolation, and they must
be taken together with existing powers under the Housing Act, 1957,
and the new powers contained in the 1961 Act relating to the provision
of additional services and facilities and the prevention or
reduction of overcrowding. It is likely that there will be houses
where Orders applying a code of management prescribed in the
Regulations will be all that are necessary to bring about an improvement
in conditions. In others, the reason for the unsatisfactory
state of affairs will be not so much bad management as lack of
essential facilities. To put this right, a local authority can
require the necessary work to be done and, where need be, link the
notice of works with a direction limiting the number of occupants
in a house. In the very worst type of houses conditions may be so
bad that, to effect any real improvement, it will be necessary to
take action at one and the same time to secure better management,
additional facilities, and a limitation on the number of
occupants.
The premises affected vary considerably, and render
impracticable the provision of a single rigid code of requirements
applicable to all cases. However, the Council on 29th May