If you’re renting a room in a shared house, or if you’re acting as someone’s guarantor, you’re going to need to know what joint and several liability is.
Students are the main target market for big shared houses, and it’s important to know the responsibility that this legal clause gets tenants and guarantors into.
If you sign the same contract as the other people in your house then your contract comes under joint and several liability. In plain language, this means that you (and your guarantor) are responsible for your own individual rent, but also the collective rent of your whole house. So each tenant is responsible for the entire rent of the whole house as well as their own.
If an individual student is living in a house with six others, for example, paying an average cost of £90 per week and is tied into a 12-month contract, a parent signing a guarantor form could be held liable for £32,760.
See how Only My Share can help you protect yourself.