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council tenancy transfer whilst in prison
My client has rent arrears from an old council tenancy and as a result will not be offered further council accomodation until she clears these, which she is unlikely to be able to do for the forseeable future. She says that the arrears all accrued from a period when she was in prison for 30 months, sometime during 1997 - 1999. At that time she was under the impression the tenacy was transferred to her then partners name, so that he could stay there and look after her kids. Once she left prison she moved back and they started to clear the arrears until they split up and moved out, but she has now been told there are still some left years later. She thought her ex was still paying them off after they split up, but it seems not.
I am not a housing expert so I wanted to ask- is it likely that the tenancy would have been transferred to his name for the period my client was in prison, and can we argue that he, not my client, is liable for the remaining arrears?
The whole thing is being hampered by lack of readily available records due to it being so long ago so I don’t have any more details at present.