Rent Act under review...: Tenants to pay 1 month advance
The government is pursuing a pragmatic review of the Rent Act 1963, (Act 220) to ensure that landlords charge rent on a monthly basis and address all problems associated with rental housing effectively.
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The draft rent policy, which is intended to review the Rent Act, if approved by Parliament, will see a departure from the six-month maximum rent advance that the current act allows landlords to charge.
To that effect, the Ministry of Water Resources, Works and Housing has begun stakeholder engagements to draft the new rent policy that will lead to the amendment of the Rent Act.
The Deputy Minister in charge of Housing, Mr Sampson Ahi, told the Daily Graphic in Accra on Sunday that the draft of the reviewed policy would be ready by the close of next week for submission to the Cabinet and later to Parliament for approval.
Mr Ahi said some of the stakeholders who reviewed the act had proposed that landlords should be permitted to charge rent only on a monthly basis, while other stakeholders had also proposed that landlords should be made to charge rent on a monthly basis, with a three-month surety paid alongside the first payment.
He said although the act currently allowed landlords to charge rent advance to a maximum of six months, landlords were violating that provision in the Rent Act.
He attributed the violation to the acceptance of prospective tenants to pay what they were charged, against the national requirement, for fear of being ejected at anytime and the scarcity of the accommodation.
Reviewed act to be more pragmatic
Mr Ahi assured members of the public that the reviewed Rent Act, if approved by Parliament, would effectively address, without compromise, the problems that confronted tenants and landlords.
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He said although the current Rent Act allowed landlords to charge rent advance up to a maximum of six months, the Act was being violated because tenants felt more secure when they had paid for more months.
According to him, the current policy seeks to address most of the challenges in the rental housing sector.
In response to a question on the expected impact of the reviewed Rent Act, which is virtually defunct due to poor implementation, Mr Ahi said: “Yes, I agree there has been a hitch in the implementation of the current Rent Act, but this time around the government is more poised to address the issue as part of measures to address the housing deficit estimated at more than 1.7 million housing units.
Stakeholders’ co-operation
He said all stakeholders, particularly the government, would do all it could to implement the reviewed Housing Act, if approved, to ensure that people would get access to rental housing until they were able to get their own houses.
While acknowledging that the reviewed policy would be difficult to implement without the help of tenants, he called on all tenants and prospective tenants to support the implementation of the policy, since it was being reviewed to bring relief to them.
“Tenants should no longer, for the fear of being ejected, condone the payment of unapproved rent for their rented houses. We are here to protect tenants and we will do that without compromise,” he added.
Mr Ahi said the lack of enforcement of the provisions in the Rent Act of 1963, which stipulated that no one should take rent advance of more than six months, was the cause of many frustrations in society, thus leading to the springing up of many slums in the capital cities.