Experience with Deposit Scheme Adjudicator

RHemmings

Can you give us a summary of what has happened to the flat? What sort of damage is there? 

saajan_12

ShadowMango said:

anselld said:

There has been no suggestion that the deposit is unprotected.  It is not mandatory to use the adjudication scheme and either the Landlord or the Tenant are perfectly entitled to use the Court instead for whatever reason.  The burden of proof is exactly the same and the same rules apply as far as betterment etc is concerned.

  I am not sure how a hypothetical adjudication report will help the OP.  

Thanks for the link to damage reduction; I had already studied those carefully.

I want to argue that going to ADR would have given a neutral expert opinion on the questions of disagreement of who is responsible for the individual items of damage, what a reasonable repair cost is, and how much wear and tear should be deducted. This means that, even if the total is larger than the deposit (which I think is unlikely) I would have paid this without further dispute. Crucially, this would have avoided any legal costs.

As it stands, high legal costs were incurred - following my argument unnecessarily - and the court does not have access to the adjudicator's expert opinion.

I think you're digging into a nuanced argument which doesn't have much legs - the deposit scheme arbiters are supposed to apply the same impartiality and burden of proof. Their expertise wouldn't have definitively reduced your costs in the actual damages (ie they wouldn't have decided more or less in your favour than a judge). 

They are there to provide a decision on the deposit, so the LL would have no reason to believe they would provide a decision on costs exceeding the deposit. Its therefore reasonable for the LL to only go through the process of providing evidence etc once, rather than splitting the portion covered by the deposit with teh ADR and the portion exceeding it with the court. So going directly to court is reasonable if you can't agree beforehand. You also can't now argue what you would have done with just one more bit of indication from an ADR whihc may or may not have been forthcoming anyway. 

I think the better argument is whether the LL made enough of an attempt to settle it outside court eg did they provide a breakdown of costs to you and sufficient evidence directly?