All of the tenancy deposit schemes are easily outperforming targets for ensuring money is returned to tenants.
The Dispute Service takes a day, as does MyDeposits, while the Deposit Protection Service’s insurance scheme takes two days.
The custodial scheme run by DPS returns all deposits within five days.
The timescales are achieved against official targets of five days where is no dispute.
There is much more variation when it comes to the average time taken to resolve disputes, where the official target is 28 days.
TDS is quickest at ten days, and the DPS insurance schemes the slowest at 29 days. MyDeposits takes 17 days, while the DPS custodial scheme says 96% of disputes are resolved within the 28-day target.
There are also variations in the results of awards following dispute resolution.
Most notably, MyDeposits makes 100% awards to the tenant in 35% of cases and only 9% to the landlord or agent.
This compares with full awards of 27% to the tenant by DPS’s custodial scheme, 26% by its insured scheme, and just over 19% by TDS.
TDS is most likely of the four schemes to make a 100% award to the landlord or tenant (at nearly 20% of cases).
However in all four schemes, adjudication is most likely to split awards between landlord/agent and tenants.
The figures were given in a Parliamentary reply by minister Lord Greaves.
* Separately, it has been confirmed that tenancy deposit schemes must hand over information about landlords to HMRC.
Steve Harriott, of TDS, told EYE: “It is the case that all the tenancy deposit schemes must give information about landlords to HMRC.
“Under tax legislation, HMRC are entitled to get details from the schemes about landlords, and they do periodically ask.”
It just goes to show how our government works introducing schemes like deposit protection and EPC’s to gather taxation information. Always a hidden agenda!
You must be logged in to like or dislike this comments.
Click to login
Don't have an account? Click here to register
I believe that the same obligation to pass on information to HMRC applies to letting agents based on HMRC’s legal power to make such requests.
What clients should insist upon and verify is that information is only shared following a valid legal notice, and not just because HMRC asked for it.
Regarding the statistics on adjudication results, I suspect that the differences are not caused by the schemes but by their customers. Indeed I am not surprised that TDS makes the most awards to landlords because it is the preferred scheme for letting agents, whom I expect to produce better supporting evidence. On the other hand, MyDeposit may be used more by small, self-managing landlords who may not be that thorough and make unrealistic claims.
You must be logged in to like or dislike this comments.
Click to login
Don't have an account? Click here to register