Our Housing Options and Advice service offers free, confidential advice to anyone with a housing-related problem including:
- private sector tenants
- housing association tenants
- council tenants
- owner-occupiers
- landlords
Email the Housing Options and Advice service or telephone 01223 457918. You can also visit the Customer Service Centre.
For more information you can read our service standards.
Looking for accommodation
We can advise you about trying to find a place to live. We cannot provide you with accommodation, but we can give you advice about your options in Cambridge.
Mortgage or rent arrears
We can advise you about financial problems relating to your housing. We can help you with court applications to prevent eviction and claims for benefit to help pay your housing costs.
Tenancy rights
We can advise you about your rights as a tenant and about problems of disrepair.
If your landlord wants you to leave or wants to change your tenancy agreement or increase your rent, you should take advice before you do anything; you may have legal rights that can be protected.
Harassment and illegal eviction are criminal offences for which we can prosecute offenders.
Help for landlords
We can help landlords and potential landlords by suggesting model tenancy agreements and providing other advice.
We can advise landlords on how they can lawfully evict their tenants - or we can suggest other options to try and resolve disputes.
We can also refer you to other relevant council departments as necessary.
Relationship breakdown
We can give advice about the housing rights of partners on the breakdown of a relationship.
We can also offer advice to victims of domestic violence.
Conflict of interest
In some cases we may not be able to advise both parties in a particular dispute, for example both a landlord and a tenant.
There is also a limit to how much help and advice we can give to people who are in dispute with us as a council, so we can be seen to be fair to everybody.
If we cannot offer you full advice and assistance ourselves, we will refer you to someone who can.
Confidentiality
Whatever you say to us will be confidential within our team and will not be disclosed to any third party without your consent.
However, there are some circumstances in which we may have to disclose confidential information.
These would include situations:
- where you were making a fraudulent claim for Housing Benefit or Council Tax Benefit and did not take our advice to disclose all the information to that department
- where you later make an application to the council as a homeless person and do not disclose something you have already told us
- where there was a risk to the safety of a member of the public (including yourself) or to a council employee
