BLEEDING and naked, Daud Hussein wept as he struggled out into the road after knocking himself unconscious in a pitch black shower.

His landlord was desperate to drive him out, and had switched off all the electricity to his Kensal Rise flat in north-west London, meaning he'd been forced to live in the dark, causing the atrocious accident.

Daud - who is blind in one eye and originally from Somalia -managed to crawl naked and bleeding onto the street, where a neighbour discovered him and called an ambulance.

The 46-year-old spent 10 days in a West London hospital - four in the major trauma ward – with swelling to his spinal cord that caused numbness.

The rogue landlord is just one of many operating in Britain today, but Daud's case highlights just how low some landlords will stoop to make their tenants' lives hell.

Things got even worse when Daud was discharged and found he had no home to go back to.

His landlord sent him a brutal a message via family members, which said: “Tell that black bastard that I have evicted him and his s**t is outside.”

When Daud returned to the dismal property he called home, the locks had been changed and his belongings removed from the flat where his unscrupulous landlord had been trying to force him out by disconnecting the electricity and removing the meter.

"I called my landlord, Bernard McGowan, to say I was outside my property and homeless. He laughed at me," Daud tells Sun Online.

He later took McGowan to court and won damages, but his local council didn’t prosecute.

“I will never forget that night as long as I live,” Daud says.

“I went home at 8pm in a neck brace to find all my worldly possessions, including a ripped photo of my mum on her wedding day in Somalia, thrown into the street.

“I had nowhere to go, and that night I felt suicidal. I saw no point in living."

A friend offered him a temporary place to stay.

Three years on, Daud, now 49, is proudly running his own community centre in Brent - All Nations - helping people from all ethnic backgrounds with problems such as the one he experienced. He also has a council property to call home.

“That night changed my life and made me realise that I was going to have to start my life all over again. I love helping people and I am proud of the work I do.”

Property owner Bernard McGowan boasts of having a £30m portfolio but has been convicted six times since 2014, and was fined more than £100,000 for property offences last year.

His tenants have complained of intimidation, electricity being disconnected, locks being changed and deposits never being returned - and of forced evictions from homes riddled with cold, damp and vermin, sometimes with beds and personal possessions strewn outside the front doors.

Many of McGowan’s tenants are vulnerable. Erskine Clarke was sleeping rough before the council housed him in a West London property costing almost £200 a week for a 12ft x 8ft room in a shared house with mould, a faulty boiler and a leaking toilet.

Erskine says requests for repairs to McGowan were ignored, and the boiler problem went on for two years, resulting in no heating or hot water.

He still lives at the property but now has a new landlord who is renovating it.

The scarred tenant adds: “Nobody should be living in the state it was in. It made me depressed. I lost a lot of weight and got very sick. Why does the government let people do this?"

But sadly, Doud and Erskine aren't the only tenants suffering.

Between 2016 and 2018, landlord Gary Fixter, 36, failed to act on repeated warnings to improve the standard of his properties, despite collecting £100,000 a year in rent and earning a salary of £94,000 a year as an IT consultant.

He pleaded guilty to 45 offences between 2016 and 2018, with eight convictions for renting out substandard shared houses, often without heating, water supplies or fire alarms.

He rented out a shed for £350 a month, a property with live wires spilling out from the mains electrical unit, and another infested with rats.

One of those hoping for justice for private rental tenants is 53-year-old Askel Douglas, who last year was spending every penny of his £260 a week universal credit on a Neasden flat above a supermarket in London which flooded three times.

“I was totally ripped off by my private landlord," Askel, who has now moved, told The Sun Online.

"There was water coming out of the walls and ceilings so it was knee-deep and a total mess, and stinking, dirty water was coming up through the plug so I couldn’t even have a bath."

Jacky Peacock OBE, is director of London charity Advice4Renters, which is campaigning for reform of the private renting sector.

She and her colleagues regularly witness the appalling standards in domestic renting which can be so bad they make tenants ill.

“The things I see are atrocious. Filthy flats in a state of complete disrepair, but also we see many problems with overcrowding,” Jacky told The Sun Online.

“People are exploited by employers as well as landlords, often migrant workers who are hardly paid anything, and they end up in these dreadful places, trying to raise their children.

“We recently saw a Hungarian couple who lived with their six-year-old child in one small room. The husband was a mini cab driver who worked all hours to earn money for them, and he came back to the property one day to find the landlord had let himself into the room and was molesting his wife.

“The landlord brandished a kitchen knife and tried to stab the tenant – this is the kind of atrocious thing we’re seeing day after day. It makes me so angry that vulnerable people are exploited like this.”

Access to a functioning, clean kitchen can be difficult when people are crowded into one property.

“We were in a flat last week where the sink leaked, so every time the tap went on, the downstairs flat was flooded. The landlord had been to "fix" it but basically he’d just propped it up,” says Jacky.

She believes a flood of "amateur" landlords – buy-to-let owners investing in property with no knowledge of their legal responsibilities – are making the problem worse.

Advice4Renters is urging the government to introduce and enforce a national regulatory scheme for the private rental sector.

The charity shared a series of recent photographs with The Sun Online, all of them taken in London properties in shocking states of disrepair.

They show damp, rotten fire escapes, leaking toilets, sinks and showers and boarded-up windows.

Tenants suffering at the hands of unscrupulous landlords are often on low incomes or benefits - people with no bargaining power and little choice as to where they live. They’re crammed into houses in large and dangerous numbers and if they complain, they’re evicted.

A grim roster of greedy individuals taking cruel advantage of society’s most vulnerable has been revealed in an investigation by ITV News.

Rogue landlords are collecting rents – often funded by taxpayers via housing benefit – despite being convicted of housing offences and failing to pass the “fit and proper” person tests required by housing legislation in England and Wales.

Because of the way the law is written, this is usually perfectly legal.

The government’s efforts to police rogue landlords have been branded “weak” and “pathetic” after the investigation found convicted landlords continuing to operate through loopholes in the law.

In response, Heather Wheeler MP, the minister for housing and homelessness, has said: “Everyone deserves a decent and safe place to live, and we are reforming the private rented sector to make it fairer for all.”

Angry tenant Askel blasts: “I can’t understand why the government lets people like me get ripped off for every penny we have.”