You have emailed six firms about the mould, or the notice, or the deposit. Two never replied. One said they don't do that kind of work. One wanted £250 for a first meeting before they would say anything at all.
It is easy to read that as a verdict on your case. It usually isn't. The solicitors who are good at this are booked solid, and a refusal is more often about their diary, their funding model or their specialism. Here is where to find the right firm, and how to give them enough to say yes.
Where to find a housing solicitor in England and Wales
Three places are worth your time.
Find a legal aid adviser on GOV.UK lists everyone holding a legal aid contract. Filter by Housing and you have the shortlist that matters if money is tight: a firm without that contract cannot take you on legal aid however much it wants to.
Find a Solicitor, run by the Law Society, searches by legal issue and postcode. Every organisation on it is regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
Your council's tenancy relations officer deals with the same landlords every week, and knows which local firms run housing cases.
Check any firm on the SRA register before you send it documents. If they are not on it, they are not a solicitors' firm. A solicitor carries professional indemnity insurance and answers to the Legal Ombudsman.
Can you get legal aid for a housing problem?
Legal aid survives in housing, which is not true of most civil law. It covers homelessness, eviction, losing your home, and serious disrepair, subject to a means test on your income and savings. For housing work in scope you cannot apply yourself. The adviser applies on your behalf.
One route ignores your income entirely. The Housing Loss Prevention Advice Service gives free advice to anyone with written evidence that someone is seeking possession of their home, and free representation from the duty adviser at the hearing. Anything past that hearing goes back onto means-tested legal aid. A letter or email from your landlord is enough, and you tick that box on the same GOV.UK page.
Deposit claims, rent repayment orders and most disrepair claims that ask only for money are outside legal aid scope. Those cases go to the private market, usually on a no win, no fee agreement.
Why do solicitors turn down housing cases they could win?
Four reasons account for nearly all of it, and only one of them is about the strength of your claim.
It isn't their corner of housing. Possession defence, disrepair damages, homelessness reviews, leasehold and tribunal work are different jobs with different rules. A firm that defends evictions every day may never have run a damages claim, and will say no instead of learning on yours.
The caseload is full. Housing work sits with a small number of firms, and a solicitor at capacity does not send a careful rejection. They send nothing. A month later they may have room.
The numbers don't work. This one is arithmetic, and it is written down. A tenant's claim asking the landlord to carry out repairs is allocated to the small claims track if the work is estimated at £1,000 or less and any damages claim is also £1,000 or less (Civil Procedure Rules, rule 26.9). Your solicitor's fees are not recoverable on that track beyond a fixed £260, so almost no firm will run it for you on a no win, no fee basis. Past either threshold it usually goes to the fast track, costs follow the result, and the same firm can take it.
They aren't sure they would get paid. Under a conditional fee agreement, the firm's base costs come out of the costs recovered from your landlord at the end, and its success fee comes out of your compensation. A council or housing association pays. A private individual who has ignored a leak for a year may have no insurer behind them, and turning a costs order into money is a second piece of litigation nobody is paid for.
What should you put in your first email to a housing solicitor?
The firm is spending two minutes deciding whether to spend an hour. Write the page that answers the hour's worth of questions.
- Who your landlord is. Name, and whether they are a council, a housing association, a private individual or a company. Funding decides most refusals.
- What happened, with dates. When you reported it, when they inspected, what they said, what has happened since. A dated sequence beats three paragraphs of prose.
- What you want. Repairs carried out, compensation, a notice withdrawn, a defence to a possession claim. Say which.
- What evidence you already hold. Dated photos, the tenancy agreement, your reporting log, an environmental health notice, an estimate of the works.
- Any deadline. A hearing date, a notice expiry, or a limitation date.
- How you expect to pay. Legal aid, no win no fee, or privately.
On that last one, ongoing disrepair is a continuing breach, so time does not run out while the defect sits unrepaired. The 6 years in section 5 of the Limitation Act 1980 limits how far back your damages reach, counting from the day you start the claim. A personal injury element runs 3 years from the injury or the date you knew about it, under section 11.
Attach nothing else. Say the documents are available on request, send the same page to five firms at once, and chase each of them once.
What to do if a solicitor turns your case down
Ask which part was the problem. A one-line answer tells you whether to try the next firm or fix something first. "Not our area" means keep going. "Too small for a CFA" means the track rule bit, and a written estimate for the works can change that arithmetic. "We're full" means ask again in six weeks.
Some routes need no solicitor at all. If you rent privately, your council's environmental health team can inspect and serve an improvement notice on a landlord who won't repair, which often moves the work faster than a claim does. Council and housing association tenants use the landlord's complaints procedure, then the Housing Ombudsman in England or the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales. Deposit adjudication is free when your landlord agrees to it, and the county court takes it when they don't. In England a rent repayment order is built for tenants to bring themselves, and Wales has a narrower version covering Rent Smart Wales offences.
If you want that one-page summary written for you, Remedy can work out whether you have a claim and what it is likely to be worth, then set out the dates, the evidence and the legal basis in the order a solicitor reads them.
