Private tenant in London – months of unresolved repairs, council contacted, still paying full rent – what are our options?

Hi all, would really appreciate some advice on our situation as we’re not sure what our next step should be.

We’re renting a flat in London from a private landlord(premium area and rent, east London) and have been experiencing ongoing maintenance issues for several months now with little to no resolution. We live in leasehold building but building management have said it has to go through landlord.

The main issue is we had major Leak damage from a neighbouring flat, first reported in October 2025. We moved in in the August and got unlucky as the leak was entirely the neighbours fault and its damaged our flat. The leak was stopped but our flat looks awful, and obviously has done almost our whole tenancy.

We’ve reported it multiple times, and mostly receive holding responses or no reply from our landlord. We’ve continued paying full rent throughout.

We’ve also

* Sent 2 formal written emails (outside of WhatsApp and openrent) setting out all issues and asking for timelines and asking to discuss loss of amenity

* Contacted the council (Environmental Health/Private Housing) - who have visited and recommended a survey and cosmetic repairs but it’s not a health issue so they can’t push it further

We’re starting to feel quite stuck and frustrated given how long this has gone on, and our landlord is completely not present. We want to receive compensation as we are paying a premium to live here which is ridiculous given the state it is in.

A few questions:

1. Do we have a strong legal case here for compensation, and if so what steps follow?

2. At what point can we realistically push for a rent reduction or compensation, and how is this usually handled?

3. Does the length of time (since October) strengthen our position legally?

4. Anything we should be careful about?

We’d ideally like to resolve things without things getting overly confrontational, but also feel the situation isn’t acceptable anymore.

Thanks in advance for any help. We are in England.