Court refuses landlords' tenancy deposit appeal
The Court of Session has refused to interfere with a sheriff's exercise of discretion in awarding the maximum payment to tenants whose deposit was wrongly withheld by their landlords.
Three Inner House judges pointed out, in a case where the parties on each side presented their own case, that an appellate court had a limited role in reviewing such a decision, and "will interfere only, for example, where the court below has not exercised its discretion at all, taken into account irrelevant considerations, or failed to take into account relevant ones. It is not sufficient merely that the appellate court might have come to a different decision on the facts".
Sheriff Principal Derek Pyle, who delivered the opinion of the court where he sat along with Lord Drummond Young and Lord Malcolm, said that although the landlords has argued that the retention had only been for 34 days and the regulations were new and complex, the sheriff had set out his reasons in detail and was entitled to regard the defenders' breach as a serious one where, among other things, the landlords had chosen not to register the deposit with one of the approved schemes despite having over four months to do so.
In the case, the landlords had purported to make deductions from the £750 deposit paid and returned only a balance of £327.77. The sheriff awarded three times the original deposit, or £2,250, the maximum permitted under the relevant regulations.