Sister rented a room share 5 years ago, but due to ill health she needed to leave her tenancy mid way through a 12 month AST. The landlord who kindly said that she could leave if she found someone for her room.
Then her housemate approaches her and says as you have the bigger room, I’d like to take over your contract and I’ll find someone for my room. So we thought great problem solved, this girl found someone for the smaller room all was happy. Sister had screenshots of this.
On return of deposit, Landlord completely denies this and says it’s not the case he wants rent arrears and says room was trashed. Sister uploads evidence to deposit scheme to say opposite with photos/texts. Landlord never responds to the DPS despite chasing, never receive anything else and life moves on. Money just sits in the DPS £1000 deposit. Sister was too ill to chase. It stays on “waiting landlord response”
Now it’s 5 years later and today she gets an email from the deposit scheme. They’ve lost the evidence, he’s responded and they want her to resubmit evidence. As it’s been years, all the texts/pictures etc are lost on old phones cannot get back. She called the DPS who said there is no limitations on the landlord response and it can take years
The issue is we are just in the process of helping her buy a house and we are more frightened that the landlord will now take her to court for rent arrears, she won’t have any evidence and we will lose the deposit and have to pay around £5000. If it went to court we would of course pay this to avoid a CCJ being issued but gutted we don’t have the means to defend anything.
We asked the DPS for the landlords details as we don’t have any to contact him and he doesn’t have ours. The DPS cant share for GDPR and we are terrified that a letter will go to an old address for a county court and we will miss it, meaning she will get a CCJ and lose her mortgage. She has a completely clean credit record, we aren’t scumbag people and we do want to sort it just don’t know how.
i appreciate I seem involved but sister is 28 and suffers mental health issues and does need some slight support with things