Housing in the UK is broken. It’s either too expensive to buy, too expensive to privately rent, or, if affordable, in a bad state of disrepair. My flat falls into the latter category. My situation I live in social housing, in a small housing cooperative managed by a large housing cooperative. I have written before about how important and transformational having a home has been for me, but it has not come without struggle. Struggle to obtain it (a different story), and struggle with the landlord over disrepair for the entire time I have lived here. I obtained the keys in February 2021 and immediately reported signs of water ingress in the hallway. I followed this up the next day with photos of how the paint I applied had literally rolled off the walls due to water saturation and damp. The landlord’s managing agent acknowledged the report and said they had
Nowadays I don’t think there are many private landlords dumb enough to not protect their tenant’s deposits since the law has been in place for well over a decade. However, just in case your landlord is as much of a slumlord as my previous one, I thought I would recant my experience of successfully doing a deposit reclaim. Especially because I found London Renters’ Union and Shelter to be utterly useless in terms of help and advice. (Although Shelter’s legal website is very useful and informative.) I discovered my deposit was not protected at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. I was living in a house-share and one of my flatmates was a zero-hours contract, minimum wage retail worker. When lockdown suddenly happened, she had enough money in the bank to pay her rent or to eat, not both. Since we had no way of knowing how long lockdown would last