Tenants making a claim

Landlord Discussion Legal
1

Hello,

Looking for some advice and any info would be much appreciated.

Tenants who vacated the property over 12 months ago are looking making a claim on basis of no compliance certificates were received before the tenancy start date. Tenants paid 6 months in advance, however their initial pre tenancy rent + deposit was only paid 3 days after the tenancy start date. Does this put them in breech of the tenancy and makes any claims made void ?

2

What compliance certificates are they claiming you have not correctly served? Are they correct? Be specific.

3

EICR, GAS Cert, Prescribed Information. It was posted in hard copy an d later sent via email after the 30 days period.

4

Theres no claim possible against the gas and EICR certs. However, they could claim a penalty if you dont have evidence of service of the deposit PI. They would be very unlikely to get more than 1x the deposit, so if you dont have a certificate of postage, I would offer them 1.5x deposit. Get some legal advice first though as it needs to be handled properly.

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5

@Jean1 others more expert may correct me but just because one party breaches a contract in some way doesn’t make ‘void’ any claims of breaches by another party to the contract- that’s just wishful thinking.

  1. The guidance on electrical safety was updated recently (nov 25) and states LLs must

“Supply a copy of the report to a new tenant before they occupy the premises.”

(Google ‘Electrical safety standards in the private and social rented sectors: guidance’)

but you’ll need to check what was in place at the time - the bit about ‘before’ might be new or it may have been unclear in previous guidance.

  1. Additionally if a s21 was served before tenant had received valid certificates the s21 may have been invalid and then you might have illegally evicted ? You’d need proper legal advice on that too.

Ps whether tenant has a claim themselves they could threaten to report any breaches of gas or electric regs to local authorities/hse who do have powers to impose large fines.. I’d get advice

Good luck

6

Yes, youre spot on that the tenants breaches of contract are minor and make no difference.

I dont think the HSE would be very interested in the lack of evidence of service of eicr and gas cert and the tenants haven’t been unlawfully evicted, so all that should be fine.

1 Like
7

@David122 I agree so long as gas certificates and eicrs were actually done in approximately the right timescales the fact they may not have been served perfectly on time is relatively minor.

Totally agree- what I meant was the gas or electric regs are relevant if the certificates weren’t produced which HSE or LA could be interested in but if these were done the serving of them late (which isn’t a safety issue and is different legislation I think) wouldn’t be of particular interest to them