Many years back I lived in various rented houses and flats before buying my own place. No matter how perfect the condition of the places I moved out of, the scumbag LL would always keep a few hundred pounds of my deposit without any good reason basically saying 'so sue me'. It was never enough money to make it worth the time off work and the grief of going to court, so, same as most people, I just sucked it up. This was in complete contrast to my experience of renting in New York a few years back btw where it's a criminal offense to retain deposits unreasonably and for more than a short period after the tenant has moved out.

Anyway, a young lad that works for me recently moved out of a rented apartment in London and, amazingly, has just got his deposit back in full around 4 weeks after moving out. The agent he was going through (Hurford Salvi Carr if anyone is interested) basically said that now the law has changed with the deposit scheme, many more LLs are returning the full deposit rather than try to stiff people. Maybe, for once, the NuLabour government has actually passed a piece of legislation that helps ordinary people....or is this a one off random event?

Well, judging from the comments over at LandLordZone, many landlords hate it. So, yes, I think they probably got it right :-)

Nice! I remember hearing an interview with the man that runs Al Jazera who said word to the effect of 'we get hate mail from everyone (meaning westerners and arabs) se we think we've got the balance about right'.

Or another analogy is when both the Labour and Conservative party complain of political bias at the BBC. Oh wait, why are Labour complaining again?