Wednesday, Aug 20, 2008
But if you are desperate to find decent accommodation this may be your lowest priority.
GAAPweb: Students told to check on deposits
Students have been urged to check that their landlords are correctly protecting their deposits that are charged on their accommodation.
Posted by whostolemyendowment @ 03:04 PM (267 views) Add Comment
3 Comments
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1. paul said...
How about asking the letting agent to do a credit check on the landlord, to make sure they are actually paying their mortgage?
Lawsuit waiting to happen ... the bank could be sued under Housing Act 1988 if they turf the tenant out ...
2. renting2 said...
If the landlord isn't banking the tenant's deposit properly, the tenant cannote ejected by the landlord.
3. paul said...
renting2, that's probably not true.
The landlord is not supposed to bank the tenant's deposit at all. The TDS is meant to. If you're saying that if the landlord does not put the money into a scheme, then the landlord has broken civil law, but it is then up to the tenant to sue the landlord.
Interestingly, arbitrary eviction and forced eviction used to be criminal offences in the Protection from Eviction Act 1977. If your landlord threw you out onto the street, the next night your landlord would spend the night in the cells (and quite a few afterwards).
The Housing Act 1988 made forced eviction a much lesser offence. Why? Because it was envisaged that banks could need to repossess houses, and we couldn't have tenants calling up the police and demanding that the Bank Manager be put in leg irons now could we? That would be far too much like plebian justice.
In addition, MPs were often landlords, living off the taxpayer's fat of the land. So it was an easy decision to change the law to favour themselves.
Which incidentally why buy to let is a remarkable tax wheeze. So much so that it looks quite incongruous next to how much you'd get taxed on any other investment.