Anti-agent campaign group set to almost double in siz...

A campaign group that has held protests outside letting agents’ branches and has been fiercely critical of fees, says it’s seen a glut of new members.

Acorn - a tenants’ union of activists with 11 branches today - says it's poised to open in a further eight areas of the country.

This follows a flurry of new members since the General Election.

Acorn has told The Guardian newspaper that it has issued a post-election clarion call on its website: “Don’t mourn. Organise!”

The organisation’s founder Nick Ballard tells the paper: "We’ve had hundreds of new members join. They started coming in just after the exit poll and haven’t stopped since. Communities are going to have a rough time of it over the next parliament. [They] need to be organised and, we would say, outside of political parties.”

Just last week we reported that Acorn in Manchester staged a protest demanding that lettings agency Mustafa and Co Property Management drop a landlord client which the group felt had behaved unfairly to tenants.

Last August we reported that in Bristol two Acorn supporters campaigning against lettings fees were claiming victory after refusing to pay an agency’s charges for renewing their tenancies.

The agency was one of the largest in Bristol - CJ Hole, part of The Property Franchise Group - and the two tenants argued against the £90 renewal fee by saying that if they were new tenants, they wouldn’t have had to pay anything thanks to the ban contained within the Tenants Fees Act which came into effect in June.