Here is your Friday update, covering:

• Renting out dangerous properties in Cardiff has cost two landlords thousands of pounds
• First Homes Cardiff - Shared equity scheme for first time buyers
• New exhibition by acclaimed Wales-based artists to help re-establish independent gallery

Two landlords hit with combined £23,000 fines for renting dangerous properties in Cardiff

Renting out dangerous properties in Cardiff has cost two landlords thousands of pounds.

Last Friday (February 9), Rowshanara Begum, of Clive Street, Grangetown, was fined £20,000 at Cardiff Magistrates' Court for failing to comply with five Improvement Notices for work to a house she rents out in Blaenclydach Street, Grangetown.

The previous day, on Thursday February 8, Lawford Cunningham, from Edgbaston, Birmingham, was fined £3,000 for failing to comply with legislation relating to the licensing and management of a House of Multiple Occupation (HMO) he owns in Ferry Road, Grangetown.

19 Blaenclydach Street, Grangetown, Cardiff

This case came to light when a tenant living at the two-storey Victorian property, which has been converted into four self-contained flats, complained to the council that the property wasn't to the required standards.

Following an inspection, housing officers were shocked to find significant defects which were deemed to be a danger to tenants living in the property, including:

• No fire alarms and defective fire doors
• No escape route for the inner rooms in the building
• Unsafe kitchens, dirty carpets, and penetrative damp
• Unprotected electricity meters, unsafe electrical installations, and unsafe windows.

43 Ferry Road, Grangetown, Cardiff

This case also came to light when a tenant living in a self-contained flat in the property complained to the council that the accommodation was in breach of the standards as an HMO.

A Housing Inspector visited the four-storey Victorian property, which has been converted into four flats, to assess whether the landlord was renting out the property in breach of the regulations. The inspector once again found a catalogue of failings, including:

• A defective fire alarm, incomplete fire doors and dangerous electrics throughout the flats
• Lack of fire protection for the electrical meters and lack of sufficient heating
• Poorly maintained communal escape route and accumulation of waste in the front and rear yards
• Damaged kitchen worktops and defective and damaged floor coverings.

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First Homes Cardiff

First Homes Cardiff is a Shared Equity Home Ownership Scheme offered by Cardiff Council. If you are looking to buy your first home, we can help make it easier for you.

A Shared Equity scheme is where you buy a percentage share of a property, but you will be the legal property owner on completion of the sale. This percentage is typically 70%. The remaining equity share (30%) is a charge against the property, which you can buy later. You won't pay rent on the 30% and you do not have to repay it back to the council while you own the property.

We have modern properties available across Cardiff, ranging from one-bedroom apartments to three-bedroom houses. Most of the properties are on new build sites with private housebuilders or with the Council itself.

You can also buy previously owned properties. We resell homes that have been bought through our scheme if the owner decides to sell it on.

If you are interested in purchasing a property through this scheme, you will first need to be registered.

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New exhibition by acclaimed Wales-based artists to help re-establish independent gallery

A new exhibition of work by two critically acclaimed Wales-based artists opens this weekend at one of Cardiff's most important independent artist spaces, Bay Art.

Supported by Cardiff Council, Silent Revolution features work by Sue Williams, a leading voice in contemporary British Art whose raw and powerful paintings stretch across vast canvases and reference Renaissance portraiture, 20th century expressionism, art brut, pop art, and the feminist art movement. Through a combination of reappropriated mass media imagery and bold, urgent expressionism Williams offers up a searing social commentary that leaves no option but to reconsider our prejudices and preconceived ideas about the world we live in.

Accompanying Williams paintings is a complex soundscape, developed by the artist in collaboration with Dr David Bird and Dr Marilyn Allen with support from Swansea College of Art UWTSD. Bird's sonic composition merges with Allen's dynamic classical vocals, and dialogue between Williams and Allen as they contemplate experiences of contemporary womanhood, creating a multiplicity of converging voices.

Fellow exhibitor Geraint Ross Evans' work draws on the power of grassroots politics and the grand, all-embracing visions of humanity placed within nature and history, that inspired artists like Diego Rivera and Stanley Spencer, transplanted to everyday 21st century life in South Wales. Through precise charcoal pencil work, Evans' work playfully stacks up ideas around ‘doughnut economics', capitalist excess and ecological collapse and transforms them into fairgrounds of invention, before moving on to create something akin to a  ‘choose-your-own-adventure' novel through a clinical world of care home monitors, drip stands, and sharps bins - an adventure that, despite the sobriety of its setting manages to reacquaint the viewer with its fundamental humanity.

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