Landlords...
A few years back me and my g/f were looking for our first flat together as she was just finishing the last year of her masters degree and I, well, I was doing nothing in particular.
So I go flat hunting and am taken around some right shitholes. Price was very important though as neither of us had much money. Just as I was about to consign ourselves to living in a small, mouldy cupboard the guy showing me around took me to a property that hadn't yet been put on the books.

It was a breath of fresh air. It was very spacious and had just been freshly done up. New kitchen, bathroom, nice neutral colours. In fact the only thing wrong with the place was that the fuseboard hadn't been installed yet. The estate agent assured me it would be installed before the move in date (the date my G/F was moving out of a student house). I asked the price of the place and was elated to discover it was well within our price range so I told him i'd take it. Paid the bond, first months rent and fees the same day. Brilliant.

When it came to moving day, i'd hired a van to move our stuff in and came in through the door to find bare wires hanging down from the ceiling. No biggie I thought, having worked in domestic electrical installation myself I knew that fuseboards didn't take long to install. I offered to install it myself and have my father (a recently retired electrical engineer) certificate it. But they insisted on having 'their' guys do it. Phoned up the agency and they said it would be a week before they could install it. Luckily my parents were able to put us up in the meantime.

So after a week we moved in to our new, electrified flat and got about the business of living and starting life together.

Then winter kicked in...

Now my g/f and I don't like artificial heat. We find it too stifling and dry so we hadn't tried the boiler until the cold really set in. To my dismay I discovered that the damn thing didn't work. There was power to it and it seemed to want to start running. I phoned the agency and they informed me that they hadn't actually connected the boiler to a gas supply and that they'd contact British Gas to get the supply up and running. Great!

3 months later we were STILL without gas, freezing our asses off. Even after reminding them in no uncertain terms that it was their responsibility to supply the domestic services, as stated in the signed tennant's agreement. Eventually it was sorted and we could feel our feet again.

By this time we were half way through our tennancy and had not received a water bill. We reminded them of this too on more than one occasion. It never came.

Anyway, we had a lot of great times in that flat in spite of the crap management and when the time came to renew the tennancy we had decided to move on. So the guy who had showed me the place came around to inspect the place (he never had during the previous 11 months) a few weeks before we were to move out, wherein he informed us that he would be keeping our bond to cover the water bill he'd never given us and we'd have to pay for the decoration to be re done due to the damp and mould that had set in the stairwell in the 3 months we were without heating. I could sense this guy wasn't worth arguing with so I said nothing and let him on his way.

TO THE INTERNET, BATMAN!!! I started reading up on tennant's and landlord's rights and responsibilities and came accross a rather interesting peice of legislation called the 'Bond Protection Scheme'. In it I discovered that if a landlord fails to put your bond in to a third party protection or holding scheme and notify you of its whereabouts, they are liable to pay THREE TIMES the amount of the bond in compensation ON TOP of refunding the bond. In our case this came to the spooge inducing sum of £2000.
They hadn't protected our bond.
I don't think i've laughed so much in a while since that moment. The utter glee and absolute certainty that I could fuck this guy over royally if he didn't do exactly as I wanted.

I informed the agency about their little mishap and that I wanted my bond back in full. Mysteriously, it transpired that the property had never actually been on their books and that the guy who had shown me around was letting other properties out on the side. So he was my next port of call. I wish I could have seen the look on his face over the phone when informed of his mistake. I let him know that I was willing to come to an agreement. After all we're not greedy people. We just wanted to get out and move on and not have to go through courts and all sorts of nonsense.

So we managed to get him to accept responsibility for the ingress of mould and damp, get our bond back in full AND get him to pay the water bill that he'd waved in our faces in such a smug manner. On top of this I asked him to provide us with a sum of money that HE thought was appropriate for our inconvenience at the hands of his piss-poor management. Though I warned him not to insult us or I would take the matter further.

In the end we accepted his offer and probably came out of the ordeal a hell of a lot better than the £2000 we may or may not have got if we'd taken to matter to court, considering the water bill and decoration costs.

A few months later and my parents had bought a bungalow so we went to visit them. Guess who they were living next door to? There's nothing better than walking past someone with a knowing smile and seeing them look intently at the ground as they shuffle by...

Apologies for length.
(Megamoss, Fri 11 Feb 2011, 1:26, 4 replies)

I'd say
that's more than a little victory
(Smale is stuffed, Fri 11 Feb 2011, 9:11, closed)

The small victory....
...was being able to look this guy down, smugly. This was a guy who quite obviously spent most of his time ripping people off and making them miserable. He came across as the croissant eating, orange juice sipping type.
The money thing was quite just in my opinion considering the crap we had to put up with. It was VERY cold that winter.
(Megamoss, Fri 11 Feb 2011, 12:40, closed)

My flatmate has recently just been to court with his old landlord over a similar issue, also had not put the money in a deposit protection scheme.

Cha-Ching.... I hadn't even heard about it before then but I'll be keeping a good eye out when renting in future!
(The_Mighty_Spleen, Sat 12 Feb 2011, 12:05, closed)

In the olden days (2005)
I had to take a landlord to court for non return of deposit (and illegal eviction), which i all got back.

The introduction of the compulsary tennancy deposit protection scheme in 2007 was a massive step in levelling the playing field between landlords and tennants.

Section 21 evictions are also illegal if the deposit has not been protected which is something all tennants should be aware of.
(champagnerocker, Sun 13 Feb 2011, 16:57, closed)