The Missing Deposit Payment

I have been meaning to write this post for a while and remembered after another case hit my desk with the same issue came about.

I know we have killed deposits to death on this blog but because it is one of those annoyingly nitty picky topic it is needed. While there are now more calls and action to try and stop payment of deposit and replace it with insurance schemes, which will be arguably inclusive in the rent. That is topic for another day.

Recently we have been successful in getting permission to appeal a warrant of eviction and stop a possession order where the landlord had “protected” the deposit in the time frame but hadn’t….let me explain.

In both cases the landlords had set-up for their deposit to be protected by their chosen Deposit Service and received confirmation from them that it was protected. However while doing due diligence before advising on what was then a homelessness case, and as there was a date gap between the deposit protection confirmation submitted to the court and the client informing she had not received the prescribed information, we made a few phone calls. It was revealed that the landlord had in fact while signed up to get the deposit protected they had not in fact paid the deposit money into the service. This resulted in the deposit actually not being protected at all. After requesting and receiving the transaction log from the service it was revealed that the deposit was not paid in on time and therefore not protected in time.

In the latter case we used this show the s21 notice was invalid and for the prior the eviction is currently pending while we wait for an London CC appeal date (ie a long wait).

Since this time I have tried to contact the deposit services around for how they deal with such situations but have not got a full response yet. I will ofc update this site upon a reply.

Take away from this

Check Transaction Logs to see WHEN the deposit was actually paid into the service.

As always comments and shares welcome.