Our landlord kept refusing to fix the damp or do repairs. So we sued him

theguardian.com:

Like lots of tenants, my housemates and I had a bad experience with our landlord. We lived for months with damp and mould, endured his reluctance to carry out basic repairs, and were messed around when it was time for him to return our deposit. Unlike most tenants, we took our landlord to court – and won £15,000.

In November 2020, as we settled into a winter lockdown, our landlord told my housemates and I that we would have to leave as he was looking to sell the property. The next thing we knew, we were spending hours in the garden in our coats and hats, watching people view our home through the living-room windows like sad animals in a depressing renters’ zoo. “These are the current tenants,” the estate agent would say as we bared our teeth at a succession of clean-faced young professional couples.

Our landlord had seemed convinced that my housemates and I were engaged in a mutually beneficial relationship with him; even after selling the house we had been inconveniently living in, he continued to consider ours a partnership based on trust. So firmly based on trust, in fact, that when we asked him where he had protected our deposit, he was downright aggrieved. Friends don’t ask each other questions like that, seemed to be his attitude. We only asked about this because he had taken about £700 off our deposit on spurious grounds.

Unsurprisingly, he had not protected the deposit, which is a legal obligation for landlords. Nor had he licensed our home as an HMO (house in multiple occupation). As a result, with the help of the tenants’ rights charity Justice for Tenants, we had a case against him.

There are three recognised deposit protection schemes in England, which you can contact to check whether your deposit has been