Landlord refusing to pay deposit, advice needed.

LostRiot

Hi,

I rented a house in london for a year with 3 friends, we moved out on the 4th of September,

Our landlord claims he has a bill from EDF for £2800 which in incurred from someone in our new build development not paying their electricity bills (i.e. they did not call up when they moved in and register their meter so it was still going through the joint meter for the whole development).

He asked for proof we had been paying our bills and we emailed him (via his agency who are managing his rents since september 2009 (i.e. they were not managing our property)) all of our electricity bills for the the year.

Today I received a call from him saying he wants us to send him all of our bank statements too, claiming we could have outstanding money owed and that he wants to make sure that the money we paid accounts for the electricity which came off our meter, i.e. he will use the price per kwh and the number of kwh's we used (taken from meter readings he made) to make sure we paid the whole amount.

This seems completely excessive to me, we provided him with our final bills showing no outstanding payments and I believe that once the meter was registered in our name we could not have avoided paying for any of our electricity without the energy companies being aware.

We do no know where to go now, it will take us a long time to find all the statements and it could be that this would not solve the problem anyway. The agency who are managing his new properties are not being much help as at the end of the day they really have nothing to do with us.

Do we threaten legal action? do we do what he says and hope he pays up? Is this even a reason to withhold our rent? Who can we get advice from?

The total amount is about £3600 so we're not talking about peanuts, to add to this we did not receive the details of the deposit scheme our deposit is in, so we are not even sure it is in a government scheme.

I know this is not directly related to this board but I thought someone might have some advice they can give us.

tek-monkey

Tell him to **** off! He has no right to see your bank statements, tell him you will be asking the deposit scheme for all your money back immediately. Then ask him for the deposit scheme details, and remind him that you can screw him over if it wasn't protected.

LostRiot

Our rent was over £25k a year, I gather his may mean we have no protection.

This sounds a bit crap. Surely this cannot be the case?

tek-monkey

I didn't realise there was an upper limit, where did you hear this? I'd pursue it through the tenancy deposit scheme regardless, you apparently have nothing to lose by doing so. Make sure the landlord realises this.

£25k a year is a LOt of rent, I pay about 6.5k for a 3 double bed semi!

LostRiot

Well it was a 4 bed house in Islington, £150 a week each, that's not overly excessive for the area (housing benefit will go to £130), it was a nice house.
Details are here
lawpack.co.uk/Knowledge/Property/LandlordAndTenancy/article873.asp

tek-monkey

Bloody hell, never knew about that! I presume it was one rental agreement for all, rather than a seperate one each? Even so, I pay less per month for a full 3 bed house than you pay for a bedroom. SO glad I never moved to the smoke....

LostRiot

Oddly enough, when I go to mydeposits.co.uk it appears that our deposit is protected, but only our street name comes up when it asks you to confirm if it is your address, so I'm a bit confused. I'm going to give them a call in the morning.

tek-monkey

Yeah, best bet mate. I'm not even a home owner (yet!), so can't offer any better advice than your average bloke in the pub. Have rented a LOT of places, but always seem to go smoothly luckily.

N79

tek-monkey wrote: »

I didn't realise there was an upper limit, where did you hear this? I'd pursue it through the tenancy deposit scheme regardless, you apparently have nothing to lose by doing so. Make sure the landlord realises this.

£25k a year is a LOt of rent, I pay about 6.5k for a 3 double bed semi!

By way of an explaination of why this deposit did not need to be protected tek-monkey.

There is no upper limit for deposit protection but there is for ASTs. The maximum rent permissable (at the moment) under an AST is GBP25000. (See schedule 1 of the 1988 housing act. This amount has not been raised since 1990 (see S.I. 1990/434, reg. 2, Sch. para. 29) hence why more residential tenancies in London will start to fall outside the housing acts.) Only deposits paid under ASTs have to be protected.

This means that for non AST rentals such as this (it would have been a common law tenancy) the deposit protection scheme does not apply. For your information there is also a minimum rental limit for ASTs. GBP1000 / year in London and GBP250/year everywhere else (Schedule 1 of the 1988 housing act).

Of course, if the LL has protected the deposit in error then it may be possible to use the scheme dispute service.