A Guardian newspaper’s recent article featured a disgruntled tenant who explained how he took a landlord to court and came away with £15,000.

The renter Morgan Jones wrote that besides having a work history around housing legislation for the majority of his business life, decided it best to work alongside the PRS tenant’s union Justice for Tenants to successfully take the case to court.

Justice For Tenants .a non-profit organisation, provides training to local authorities on enforcement powers as well as sitting on steering groups and forums in the PRS sector which include councils teams and at times Trading Standards.

In his ‘piece’ Jones says the central factor of the dispute with his landlord was the failure in returning around £700 of the total deposits paid by tenants living in the HMO property, when selling up in 2020.

However the tenant did some investigation into the landlord and his property and found he had failed to sign up for the council licensing scheme and more damning, had not protected the deposit in one of the three compulsory protection schemes.

Jones wrote: “For the proceedings, we provided various pieces of documentation relating to our tenancy, along with witness statements, and Justice for Tenants did the rest of the legal filings.

Other organisations like Flat Justice, Acorn or your local renters’ union will also be able to help you with representation and advice if you think your landlord has been in breach of their obligations” Jones tells readers.

He continued: “It is helpful in cases like ours to keep records of a landlord’s bad behaviour – failing to fix appliances, damp, mould, not giving notice for inspections and so on – as these things, although not actionable in themselves, will strengthen the case by indicating the landlord was more broadly not fulfilling their responsibilities.”

He openly admits that Justice for Tenants act on behalf of clients on no-win no-fee operation which makes it far more effective and ‘straightforward’ in taking cases to court, and only takes a ‘cut’ from the fines if the landlord loses.