A Burial City Punks

I mentioned having trouble moving flat. The situation is this. I've been given notice to leave my current flat, and so looked around for somewhere else. In my haste, I paid the holding fee for another flat only to realise I could not move in as soon as the landlord required, because of my contractual obligations for my current flat. The holding fee is supposed to cover costs should the prospective tenant change his or her mind. I hadn't changed my mind, and said I was still interested in the flat, but they still wanted someone who could move in sooner. So, in this case, what is the status of my holding fee? From what I can gather from those I've consulted, it should be there simply to cover expenses incurred. Over a week has passed now and I have not been able to obtain from the letting agents any information regarding what will happen with my holding fee. You'd think, if they had a legitimate claim to it, they could tell me easily enough how much they would want from it, and for what, but no, I have had evasion and silence.

I don't know what the outcome of this will be yet. If things go bad, I may well write more here, giving details of the letting agent in question and so on. Two things I want to note for now. Last week I noticed this on the 'receipt for administration charges' that I had signed:

In the event that the landlord refuses your application on the grounds of unsuitable references, the above sum will not be refunded you.

Right, so, they could refuse my application and take my money? Imagine if that happened with job interviews – "Sorry, you haven't got the job. That'll be £275, please."

In this case, references have not been an issue, as the issue has emerged before the references stage, but I didn't like the look of that clause.

The other day, I visited the Citizen's Advice Bureau to ask some questions about my situation. The lady I spoke to was helpful and also said, "I must make a note of this. For some reason there's been a rise in this kind of thing recently. You're the third person I've had in today with the same complaint."

And today, I happened to be passing an advice centre. I wasn't sure what kind of advice, but I thought I'd pop in and see what I could ascertain. I looked at their pamplets, and one about scams caught my eye. The man behind the desk came over and asked if I was disabled. I said I wasn't, and he said that all the pamphlets were for disabled people and he was sorry if they couldn't help. Anyway, I took the scam leaflet, as I've found there to be a lot of scams about since I've moved to London this time. At the bus-stop, I read through the leaflet. Most of it seemed really obvious and simple. "Oh well," I thought, "I could put it on my coffee table in my new flat, whenever I get it, for visitors to look through when they're bored." But then the heading "Property rentals" caught my eye. I read on:

You want to rent a property. Before checking your references, the landlord asks for a deposit – usually a month's rent – and gets you to sign a contract. The contract states that, if the references are unsatisfactory, your deposit will be paid back, minus a fee for checking the references.

The landlord contacts you to say your references are unsatisfactory, no matter how good they really are. You're told you can only have a small portion of your desposit back because of the expense incurred checking references. You may end up losing hundreds of pounds.

I hardly need to point out, I think, why I find this striking. I may write more on this subject here, depending on what happens.