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The Landlord Law Blog from Tessa Shepperson
Tessa is an English solicitor who specialises in residential landlord and tenant law.
Tessa's legal services are provided via her online service Landlord Law. This service is provided as part of Tessa's legal practice TJ Shepperson, which is regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority No 78852.
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The new tenancy deposit rules that will put you at risk
This is fortunate because come April when the new regulations come into force, they are going to get a lot tougher.
Even with the regulations as they are now, many landlords are still making a mistake which could cost them dear.
This is the failure to serve a notice containing the prescribed information upon their tenants. Many landlords have no idea that this needs to be done AS WELL AS protecting the deposit.
What can happen if you protect but don’t serve this notice?
Now (pre April 2012) the penalties are:
When the new regulations come in, the penalties will be:
The requirement to serve the prescribed information is as important as the requirement to protect the deposit. You need to do both.
Where do you get the prescribed information form?
However landlords, particularly amateur landlords, are often still unaware of the need to provide the prescribed information. After April, failure to serve the notice will leave them open to a claim they cannot defend for the next six years.
Another potential problem:
What if one or more of the schemes’ forms was found wanting? For example in a defence to a section 21 repossession claim? This would leave the landlords who had used it open to a claim from their tenants.
Hopefully this will never happen. However, we all thought we knew how the existing regulations worked until the Court of Appeal drove a coach and horses through them, with their decisions in the Tiensia and Gladehurst cases.
I would prefer to see a prescribed form provided by government. Then there can be no argument.
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