I was watching Midsomer Murders (S5:E1, “Tainted Fruit”) and did not understand what was happening.
The salient points:
Father passes on estate management to spoiled girl. Villagers in an uproar because she won’t fix the roof of some elderly gentleman’s home. Upon not comprehending this, I looked up an episode guide, which described him as “the poacher.” Okay, it makes sense that his home was part of the estate and her responsibility (noblesse oblige and all). But, would estate owners welcome and provide housing for a poacher?
Said Poacher dies. Spoiled girl makes a flippant remark about, “Now I have vacant possession.” I also looked that up, and kind of grok the underlying concept, but not how it applies in the real world, and why the Manor Girl would care about whether anyone was living in the ramshackle house when she had, y’know, the Manor.
Would anyone care to explain the Upper Crust to the rural hicks? Ta.
I’m not familiar with the story in question, but “sitting tenants” do often have considerable rights. A new landlord cannot simply turf the tenant out, so in this case although the girl who inherited the estate might have wanted to get rid of the poacher (who, presumably was not proven to be a criminal?), she probably would not have been able to do much about it. Some tenancy agreements confer the right of the tenant to occupy the house for life, and often at a fixed rent. I assume that said “poacher” would have signed an agreement with the girl’s father (or even his predecessor), and once he was in he was in.
A property with vacant possession (i.e., you own it and it’s empty) is generally more attractive on the open market than one with a sitting tenant, as the new owner can do what they like with it, including rent it out to someone else at a new, higher rent.
Depends if the properties fall within the protection of the Landlord and Tenant Acts. Maybe she wants to sell or rent out the place, thus providing a steady income stream. While it is possible to sell with a sitting tenant, it usually depresses the price. In the past the tenant could apply to the Rent Tribunal to fix a ‘fair rent’ (which was always less than market rent). It was so difficult to get a sitting tenant out, if they had not actually done something, like trashed the place, that privately rented accommodation pretty much dried up in the 1960s - landlords would rather sell outright. Now things are different and ‘buy to let as an investment for your pension’ has been popular in recent years.
Ahh, it’s becoming clearer, now. I had the impression that the Poacher was part of the estate, as would be the Gardener or the Farm Manager. Could be that he was just some schlump who had a tenancy agreement made with the estate owners sometime in the past, and therefore had a right to live there as long as he chose.
Thanks for pointing out the value of vacant possession, but it brings up more questions. So, if a person bought a house, intending to live in it, and there was a tenant already living there, the new owner couldn’t do anything to get them out? That would be hard to deal with.
Episode summaryBarnaby and Troy go out to the village of Midsomer Malham to investigate death threats against Melissa Townsend, the beautiful daughter of the big house. They find that some Midsomer Malham villagers blame Melissa for causing the death of a local poacher by failing to get the leaking roof of his cottage mended.
It’s difficult to know whether the owner could or could not get them out. This is a complicated area of law. There are assured tenancies, which give a degree of security of tenure, in that the tenant cannot be evicted without ‘good reason’, and assured short-term tenancies, created by the Housing Act 1988, where the landlord may terminate the tenancy on two months notice without reason.
‘Poacher’ is not some sort of office or profession, just someone who violates the (often harsh in the past) laws on the taking of game. Actually such people are pretty much extinct, if indeed they ever existed outside of fiction. Today the killing of game will be done by criminals organised for profit.
If the poacher was poaching from his landlord’s own estate (something that could be quite hard to prove), then that would make it doubly galling if they couldn’t get rid of him legally.
