Repossession of private rented house

Can anybody give me advice please? I have been renting my house from an estate agents for six and a half years, signing a new tenancy agreement every six months. We have had several letters from Birmingham Midshires recently and although we rent the house from an estate agents, we have the landlanys address and have been forwarding the letters to her. I am not sure if the estate agent knows we have the landladys address as the only reason we have it is because she paid us a visit to look over the house last year and left her address. We have now received a letter addressed to the occupier and found out that there is a repossession hearing in december as she has not been paying the mortgage for the last five months. As Birmingham Midshires are sending the letters here and not to the landlady, I presume they do not know she rents the house to us? I have not contacted the estate agents yet as we would like to try to buy the house if it was repossessed and not just be offered another house by the estate agents. Should I contact Birmingham Midshires and enquire about a mortgage and let them know that we are renting the house and have been for over six years? Would the building society be prepared to look into giving us a mortgage or would they just prefer us out? The estate agent we rent from are not very good anyway, we have not had any safety checks (gas etc) in over a year and I have contacted them on several occasions regarding the poor condition of the windows(most of them not closing properly and with no handles!), plumbing problems etc and they never get back to me. We even had to re-tile the bathroom due to leakage in the kitchen as they never sent anyone round to repair it. We are very worried as we have quite a few pets and would find it hard to rent another property allowing us to have pets (both landlandy and estate agent know we have pets). We have decorated the house throughout since we have been here and would really like to buy it if the oppurtunity arose. Do we stand a chance of that? What (if any) rights do we have? Or would we be better advised to just start looking for another house to buy? Hopefully somebody can advise. Thank-you John

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