What if I already have the animal?
Answers
This is the ordinary situation. Almost nobody acquires an animal after obtaining documentation.
It is not a problem
The test asks whether this animal alleviates a symptom or effect of your disability. Answering it requires the animal to exist, and usually requires you to have lived with it. A clinician who has never heard of the animal is in a worse position to say it helps, not a better one.
Where it does create difficulty
- The animal is already in a no-pets building without permission. You are in breach, and the accommodation request now has to be untangled from that.
- Complaints have already been made about the animal, so the request arrives in a file that already has a problem in it.
- You are in an eviction process, where a request that arrives after proceedings begin looks reactive even when it is genuine.
If you are already in breach
Make the request anyway, in writing, and do it now rather than after the next letter. A pending accommodation request materially changes a landlord position: proceeding over an unanswered request is a serious problem for them. Acknowledge the breach plainly rather than arguing about it, and keep the two questions separate: whether the accommodation is warranted, and what happens about the period before it was requested.
You can request an accommodation at any point in a tenancy. There is no stage at which the right disappears, including after a notice has been served.
Common questions
- Does it look suspicious to ask after getting a warning?
- It is a common pattern and providers are used to it. Timing may affect how sceptically the request is read; it does not affect whether you are entitled to make it.