A few matters on the subject of tenancy deposit protection which I have been meaning to comment on for a while.
The August issue of Legal Action Magazine has two cases on tenancy deposit claims, which go to support tenants claiming against landlords who breach the tenancy deposit regulations. If you want to read the full stories, this is set out in Nearly Legal. However just to summarise:
Woods v.Harrington
This case involved a landlord who protected the deposit so late it was after the tenancy agreement had ended. The Judge held that was ‘not only contrary to the letter of the law but is contrary to the spirit of the law and the public policy considerations that Parliament was seeking’. The landlord lost and was ordered to pay the penalty fine of three times the deposit sum for being in breach of the tenancy deposit regulations.
Delicate v. Sandberg
Here the landlord served the s21 notice before the deposit was protected. However notwithstanding this, in the absence of the tenant in prison, they obtained an order for possession and possession of the property via the bailiffs. On being released from prison, the tenant re-entered. The Landlords applied for an order for restitution, but the Court held that the section 21 notice had been invalid, the possession order should be set aside.
The swarb forum
My client Alan (you know who you are) has also drawn my attention to two interesting posts on the www.swarb.co.uk forum:
1. This one says that a tenancy deposit case it to be taken to the Court of Appeal, funded by one of the landlords associations. If anyone has any more information about this, please leave a comment.
2. This one is an interesting post looking at the complexities of the TDPS legislation, pointing out that the wording appears to provide for the landlord to escape the penalty by paying the deposit at any time before the court hearing, and also discussing whether the legislation can apply to former tenants as well as current ones.
I will be doing a presentation on tenancy deposits for my talk for Professional Conferences in December, so would welcome any information readers may have about new cases and developments.
(Note – you can read all my other posts on tenancy deposits here)
Hi, I was wondering what counts as a new AST for the purposes of TDP. I have read Saad v Hogan and it would appear that only a new fixed term AST is recognised. I signed an ammendment agreeing to a new rent amount after April 07 (the original agreement was signed in March). Could it be argued that this constitutes a new AST, or will it just be viewed as an ammendment?
Many Thanks,
Ed
This is looked at in my post New tenancy deposit case – deposit paid before 7 April 07. Although with all these cases it is a County Court decision and therefore not necessarily binding on another court.