Deposit deduction

Deposit disputes are rarely lost on honesty. They are lost on arithmetic. A landlord replaces a seven-year-old carpet the tenant ruined, claims the £600 the new carpet cost, and the adjudicator awards a fraction of it. The landlord concludes the scheme is biased. In fact the scheme applied a rule that has been settled for years: you cannot end up with a better asset than you started with at the tenant’s expense. That rule is called betterment, and it decides most disputes before the evidence is even weighed.

The working is straightforward once you see it. Take the cost of replacing the item today. Establish its expected total life, using the ranges adjudicators publish: carpets five to ten years, interior paintwork three to five, white goods eight to ten. Work out how much of that life had already been used when the tenant left. Only the remaining share is recoverable, because the rest you were going to have to replace anyway. Then reduce it again by how much of the damage is genuinely the tenant’s responsibility rather than fair wear and tear.

Fair wear and tear is the second thing landlords misjudge. It is the deterioration that happens through ordinary use over the length of the tenancy, and it is never deductible. Carpet flattening in a hallway after three years is wear. A cigarette burn is damage. Scuffed paint behind a sofa is wear. A hole in the plasterboard is damage. The longer the tenancy, and the more people lived there, the more deterioration counts as ordinary. A four-year family tenancy will legitimately leave a property in worse condition than a six-month single-occupant one.

None of this matters without evidence, and this is where most claims actually fail. The adjudicator was not there. They decide on documents. What wins is a dated check-in inventory with photographs, signed by the tenant, a matching check-out in the same format, and a receipt or written quote for the work. Without a signed check-in inventory the scheme usually cannot establish what condition the item was in at the start, so the deduction fails however reasonable the figure is.

Cleaning deserves a separate note because it generates more disputes than anything else. You can charge the cost of returning the property to the standard recorded at check-in. You cannot charge for improving on it, and you cannot apply a blanket professional cleaning fee as a matter of course, because the Tenant Fees Act 2019 removed that. If the check-in inventory records a professionally cleaned property and the check-out shows otherwise, the cost of putting that right is recoverable. If your inventory is silent on cleanliness, you have no baseline to argue from.