Background

Brent has arguably the largest private rented sector in the country, after excluding the luxury end of the market in Central London. The sector is characterised by poor physical conditions (over 50% falls below the Decent Homes standard); and non-professional management. Typically, landlords own between 1 – 3 properties.

Brent is within the top 10% most deprived areas and our BME communities form 54% or our residents and over 80% of BPTRG’s service users. 130 languages are spoken in our schools.

Our aims and objectives

Our formal aims and objectives are the relief of poverty among tenants in West London, in particular by providing or assisting in the provision of advice information and services.
In practice, these are delivered through

Our Housing Advice Centre which provides legal advice and representation for low-income tenants who are financially eligible for legal aid;

Our Homeplan project which works with families in insecure accommodation, including homeless families, to improve their housing and life chances;

Our tenant engagement activities which bring private tenants of all ages and ethnic groups together to raise awareness of issues which impact on them and to campaign for improved living conditions and better laws to protect them. Our Campaign Group priorities are to improve local enforcement of standards in private tenants' homes and to persuade the Government to introduce better regulation of the private rented sector.

BPTRG was set up in 1986 by private tenants who came together because they wanted to work collectively to bring about improvements to the sector. We remain a membership organisation and tenants are at the heart of everything we do.

The Group was incorporated as a limited company in October 1989 - Company Registration No 2436887

We registered as a Charity in June 1996 – Charity Registration No 1051979.

In 2009/10 our turnover was just under £300,000. During that year we moved to new, fully accessible shop-front premises, and our cash reserves were spent on adaptations, leaving us with a target to re-build our reserves to a figure representing three months operating costs.

Our man sources of income are from our contract with the Legal Services Commission for our Housing Advice Centre; a three year grant from the Tudor Trust which comes to an end in March 2011; and a grant from Brent Council for our tenant engagement activities.

We employ 7 staff (6.1 FTE).