While my experience was not quite as bad as Rob's, we had a pretty horrible time while renting through these lowlife scam merchants.
We were without the main bathroom and the balcony and the front door for nearly five months, and would have been more if we had not got Environmental Health involved. I withheld a portion of the rent for this period as I was not going to pay for something I had not received. When the repairs were eventually complete(minus the front door which was NEVER repaired in the entire time of our tenancy - 2.5 yrs) the owner threatened to take me to court for the withheld amount which I refused to pay. This went on month after month - I went through the formal complaint procedure where Atlantis assigned the agent we were complaining about to do the investigation - no prizes for guessing what their findings were!!
We decided not to go to the Ombudsman because we had absolutely no confidence in their impartiality.
Mercifully after a year Atlantis Lettings was sold to Romans(they must have got it on the cheap because there would have been no goodwill to buy).Romans then advised me every month that the landlord had told them about a rent arrears.
To cut a long story short, we eventually had enough money to be able to move out of that cesspit, and knowing that the slumlord would somehow contrive to retain our deposit on the pretext of damage etc, despite the fact the property was left in an immeasurably better condition than when we got it, we stopped paying rent 1.5 months before leaving(the amount of the deposit). I was advised that the landlord could go to the small claims court to get the abated rent and I in turn advised Romans that I would countersue for fraudulent misrepresentation- (we were not told about the bathroom or the broken balcony on viewing) and reckless endangerment due to the undisclosed state of disrepair of the property(backed up by the Environmental Health investigation).
Fortunately for Reading this pathetic excuse for a company is no more, but less fortunately one of the most incompetent and dishonest people I have ever had to deal with(Angela Jennings) is probably employed at some other unsuspecting agency in the area.