A POINT of principle was one key issue in a complicated story we told a couple of weeks ago. You may remember pensioner Paul Winder faced eviction from his flat in Brighton for not paying the full rent.

When Mr Winder, who is 75, moved in, he qualified for a few pounds a week in housing benefit after a rent officer assessed an appropriate rent for his flat at £45 a week. His landlord charged £50 a week, as he was quite entitled to do. The tenant initially refused to pay the extra fiver a week, saying he could not afford it. A building society windfall ended his housing benefit and he became responsible for all the rent.

He still held back £5 because of the rent officer's assessment.

David Lepper, MP for Brighton Pavilion, also reckoned Mr Winder had a good point. The MP agreed the law needed altering and urged ministers to consider making rent assessments binding on landlords.

Predictably, our story provoked a strong reaction from landlords. Barry Cocum, marketing manager for the Southern Private Landlords Association, wrote to me to put their case. After all, says Mr Cocum, the tenant signed to pay the £50 rent and since he refused to pay the £5 difference between the £45 housing benefit he received and the landlord's rent, he was being evicted. Mr Cocum also said a rent officer's "average" rent always excluded a percentage for services that made up the total payable.

"Mr Winder had the choice as to whether he took the tenancy at the rent offered. It is not good enough to think that government will support tenants who, once in a property, think they should pay nothing towards their rent."

Sorry, Mr Cocum, you are not quite right with some facts. Mr Winder always paid the bulk of the rent. His housing benefit, while he got it, was only £2 or £3 a week; he had to find the rest of the rent himself. He also paid extra for services. Admittedly, he found the total hard to afford at first, but later on wanted to pursue what he thought was an important point of principle.

Some of Mr Cocum's ire was reserved for Mr Lepper. It was unfortunate the MP had become involved in the case "for it is quite obvious he does not understand the regulations".

It appeared Mr Lepper was advocating rent control after it had taken 50 years to get it abandoned. Accommodation was in short supply in Brighton and Hove and, if rents were limited, the situation would become impossible for tenants on housing benefit. Landlords would sell their properties if rent control returned.

Mr Lepper "should be taking action to stop unreasonable regulations whereby landlords have to continue to allow tenants to occupy their properties when those tenants no longer pay the rent".

I'm sure Mr Lepper will have a strong response to that so over to you, David, and watch this space.

We got in a tangle with tourist figures for Worthing in a piece the other day so I am obliged to Eileen Suchodolski, the town's tourist information centres manager, for putting us right. A total of 13,255 inquiries were handled at the Chapel Road office and 22,060 at the seafront office from July 1 to the end of September. Taking the year as a whole, the total number of people through the doors was more than 65,000.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.