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Tonts
Quick update on this.
We took this to the council's environmental health team (via a contact from off here) and raised a formal complaint with the agents, copying in the director of the company with significant control. This escalated it out of the hands of the two useless and dishonest property managers who had been dealing with it and kept contradicting each other, and into the hands of someone more senior in the firm. After a back and forth, they sent the company MD to view the property and draw up a schedule of work to be undertaken, which includes replacing mattresses, which environmental health will follow up. They are still insisting on the tenants moving out for redecoration, but will refund half the rent for that period.
For now, we are going along with it and will accept the money and get the works done, however, we will be going back for:
-A full refund for the period the property was uninhabitable due to a) it not having been deep cleaned in the middle of a pandemic and b) contractors letting themselves in without permission and entering tenants' bedrooms while they slept, making it unsafe.
-The other half of the rent for the period of the decorating, given the agents acknowledge the decorating is required (following a proper inspection) and have insisted that the house needs to be empty.
To this end, we have lawyers working on it pro-bono and expect to get some, if not all, of the additional refund.
My take-aways from this:
-Agents just aren't very bright and are incapable of following an argument
-Escalating it through a formal complaint gets attention of someone who has the authority to take decisions
-The formal complaints process opens up the route to the ombudsman, which we might still pursue
-Get environmental health involved
-Keep a clear and logical list of everything and the chronology, backed up by all correspondence and time-stamped photos - they will make mistakes in their emails, which you can use to your advantage
-Be persistent - they work on the basis that 9 out of 10 tenants won't pursue it, even if they are in the right, so be the 1 in 10 (insert UB40 joke) and don't put up with it just because it is a typical student experience
Thanks for the advice on here and to @furious_tiles