Dear Advice Team,
First Issue
We have a UC tenant (who is classified as vulnerable by DWP) who commenced her tenancy (NRLA Deposit Guard May 2019 Edition) in May %E2%80%9920.
We received her tenancy deposit via a single BACS transfer for the full amount, from her own bank account.
Our tenant and her partner did NOT notify us, verbally or otherwise, that the deposit was paid by anyone but the tenant herself, (though we accept that that point is potentially two voices against ours) and NO additional contributor to the deposit was listed on the p1 preamble on the tenancy agreement.
Accordingly, our tenant (and she alone) was served the appropriate deposit scheme documents within the prescribed 30 days. We have signed and dated proof of this service.
Our tenant now wishes to leave and to have her deposit repaid on the very day of her departure (ref an earlier posting of ours for advice). We have now firmly rejected this demand, citing the standard Deposit Guard terms which she signed up to.
Our tenant has thereupon belatedly claimed (and with the benefit of hindsight, with some likelihood of truth) that the money for the deposit was contributed in full by her partner, who is in intermittent employment.
Notwithstanding that we have acted in good faith and (we believe) with due diligence throughout, we, as landlords, are concerned that we might be held accountable for failure to serve the prescribed tenancy deposit information to a deposit contributor (the partner), and indeed might potentially face a summary demand to return it and a penalty of up to 3x the deposit sum.
Related Second Issue
We understand that the DWP will issue %E2%80%9Csoft short-term loans%E2%80%9D to claimants if a need arises eg a tenant moving from one property tenancy to another having to pay her new deposit before receiving her old deposit back.
Is this indeed the case? Our tenant denies this is possible.
Related Third Issue
Our tenant's partner (and father of her four children) was NOT added to the tenancy agreement (at their joint request) and he was NOT appointed as a guarantor. Also, he was NOT listed under p2 Clause 4 as having right of residence, though we noticed that he was often at the property during our multiple visits. We attempted to keep tenancy business to the named tenant, despite that the partner sometimes texted us from his own phone or the tenant%E2%80%99s.
We chose to believe his interventions simply represented his ongoing support for the vulnerable mother of his children.
All rent payments were made by the tenant herself, via her own bank account, as we had no opportunity to set up an Alternative Payment Arrangement for receiving DWP rent payments directly.
However, we are now concerned that we might be an unwitting party to a UC fraud insofar as an earning contributor to the household (the claimant%E2%80%99s partner) has been illicitly living in the property and that we might face %E2%80%93 at the very least %E2%80%93 recovery of the rent paid to us.
For background information, the tenant and her partner have attempted to perpetrate at least two frauds on us during the tenancy, one relating to payment for redecoration help and one relating to the procurement of our landlord reference.
Please advise us on the three issues.
Forum comments invited.
