Globe Property are members of the Tenant Deposit Protection Scheme

Prior to April 2007:

Prior to April 2007 landlords and their agents has a choice as whether to take deposits from their tenants and, whilst the vast majority did take some form of deposit, some chose not to. Where an agent was managing a property the deposit was held either as agent for the landlord or as stakeholder between the parties. In addition, there was no legal requirement to hold the monies in a client account or to pay interest and for landlords who hold deposits had no legal requirements as to how monies should be held. However, professional bodies such as the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), National Association of Estate Agents (NAEA) and the Association of Residential Letting |Agents (ARLA) required their members to hold deposits in a separate client account. Any deposit disputes were ultimately resolved in the County Court.

There was a certain amount of criticism of this lack of regulation from organisations such as Shelter and Citizen Advise Bureau; In 1998 Citizens Advice published Unsafe deposit, a report describing how tens of thousands of private tenants were being cheated out of millions of pounds by unscrupulous landlords. The report called then for a statutory Tenancy Deposit scheme to be set up modelled on a successful scheme already running in Australia.

Citizens Advice successfully campaigned with house charity Shelter to get an amendment included in the Housing Bill to introduce such a scheme. A decision was subsequently made to include legislation for the protection of tenancy deposits, and this was duly enacted within the Housing Act 2004.

The Act only covers assured short hold tenancy agreements (section 213) staring on or after 6th April 2007