Thursday 8 May 2014

Rent Controls abroad (well if everyone else is throwing their hats into the ring)

The Swiss have a civil code legal system rather than a common law legal system (unsurprisingly). Broadly what this means is they look up their gigantic book of obligations or other area of law and apply what that says. In England and Wales you look up what Judges have said about the vague witterings of parliament and in Scotland you look up what Judges decided to do on that particular day and try to figure out if your judge will be subject to the same whim. 

As regards unfair Rents, Switzerland tacks this onto the end of the general obligations in relation to leases. I am not sure why just transplanting something like this to the UK would not work. 


9 comments:

Lola said...

That looks like a bit of 'why the bloody Hell bother writing that down', except. to give more functionaries more excuses to interfere. And who decides what's 'fair'?

DBC Reed said...

The Swiss landlord appears to be able to whack up the rent to balance the inflation rate.Can't see the Brit landlord abusing that (not)!

Kj said...

Agree with Lola, what´s fair?

SumoKing said...

I would guess that not falling under one of the exemptions would generally be "unfair" and proving that would be a matter of evidence.

It is not the functionary that would interfere it would be the tenant pointing to the law to hold the landlord to account if appropriate as decided by an impartial tribunal

Lola said...

Sumo:

"It is not the functionary that would interfere it would be the tenant pointing to the law to hold the landlord to account if appropriate as decided by an impartial tribunal" Yeeaah. riiiight.

SumoKing said...

we, granted maybe/probably/almost inevitably in the UK it would be, in Switz they don't actually have enough government to manage that

Mark Wadsworth said...

Top people, the Swiss. We could do a lot worse than just copying them (apart from the mass gun ownership and lack of humour).

SumoKing said...

the mass gun owning is weird and seeing the 18 year old conscripts all piling onto the monday commuter train to go back to barracks, using their machine guns as walking sticks and head rests is very odd indeed

Mark Wadsworth said...

SK, I don't mind the gun ownership itself, it's the fact they actually use them. Switz has a surprisingly high murder rate.