An early experience with a well-known high street letting agent would have been comical had it not been excruciatingly painful.

Several years ago, needing a home to rent, I approached their city centre shop with a view to renting a modestly small flat with my partner.

I prepared myself for disclosure of “charges” which we as a nation seem to have become depressingly accustomed to. Along with the usual hundreds of pounds in scandalous admin fees and reference checks, there was an additional charge of £50. It was labelled as a “£50 key handover charge.”

“What’s a key handover charge?” I enquired.

“It’s when we hand over the keys,” exclaimed the nonchalant clerk and demonstrated this by miming handing over an imaginary set of keys.

Several years later, the “key handover charge” has thankfully been scrapped but there still remains a plethora of other “cruel and unusual” charges to be wholeheartedly enraged about.

This time around I was asked to pay “tenants’ insurance.”

Believe it or not, tenants’ insurance is entirely different to “contents” or “home insurance.”

Tenants’ insurance is when you are actually required to pay insurance for the landlord’s possessions, fixtures and fittings — on pain of contract. Yes, you did read that correctly.

And here is where it gets a trifle complicated. Increasingly renters across the country will find they need tenants’ insurance in place before they are able to sign a contract and successfully rent a home.

Self-righteous letting agents will often claim you have a freedom of choice — you can shop about on your own if you wish or you can purchase the insurance in store — at an inflated price, they won’t hasten to add.

If you do choose to shop about yourself, you will come up against the predicable fact that it’s almost impossible, by law, to insure other people’s possessions.

This is where the unscrupulous letting agents get you in their unrelenting profit-chasing grasp. They have no shame. The Office of Fair Trading has a point of view on the matter. It states that it’s an “unreasonable” request to ask a tenant to pay, but acknowledges the practice is not actually illegal.

Increasing numbers of people who are low-paid and renting are being unfairly cajoled into insuring their landlord’s possessions.

This is of course morally repugnant but it won’t stop the letting agents continuing to thrive on our acute misery and powerlessness.

In my case we ultimately managed to insure our landlord’s possessions away from the letting agent’s glare — but it took some ingenious wrangling.

Once the contract was signed, we successfully terminated the insurance. But not only would you have to be fortunate not to lose money doing this, why should you have to do it?

Complaining is obviously futile. Time and time again I’ve heard the predictable retort, words to the effect: “You can always go somewhere else.”

Really? Where? Accommodation provision is almost universally saturated by various unscrupulous private agencies, much with the same indecent principles as each other.

Property agencies thrive in grey areas of law and regulation. They roll out the red carpet to landlords yet hold no basic sense of decency for tenants.

Their behaviour continues to prove this to me. We’ve been in our new home now for three months. No matter how many emails I fire off or phone calls I make — our designated “property manager” just doesn’t want to fix leaking taps, damp walls, broken switches etc.

To them, these things equal costs to their profit margins. But my story isn’t unusual. Throughout the country private agencies and landlords are preying on our impotence and misery.

Simply, tenants are treated with disdain, here to line the landlord’s pockets.

We must have a revolution in housing provision, whereby people and housing conditions are put first.

Lazy landlords living blithely off the backs of the working class need a rude awakening.