New Court Form

Just to give all members the heads up, HMCTS have released a new N5B accelerated court application form. The new form can be found here. 

This version of the form takes account of the changes required by the Deregulation Act 2015 which came into force in October 2015 and introduced requirements around the How to Rent Guide and the EPC and Gas Safety Record being “prescribed legal requirements”. For all of these it asks how and when the requirement was complied with. It is recommended the new form is used with immediate effect.

I also asks if any HHSRS improvement of emergency remedial notices have been served (considering retaliatory eviction rules).

The new forms are not without concerns as, for example, it now asks in question 7 (f) for a copy of the TDS certificate. TDS is not referring to the TDS deposit scheme but the more general comment in section 213(5) for a landlord/agent to provide such information relating to “compliance by the landlord with the initial requirements of the scheme in relation to the deposit.” It is worth noting that although this is in a list of things that CAN be prescribed, the prescribed information regulation have never prescribed this as a requirement. They also ask a lot more details about when the deposit was received and when it was “lodged” (presuming them mean you complied with the initial requirements of a scheme).

The old 4 page form has become a 7 page form with a lot more details to fill out and a list of documents attached on page 7.

The new form asks questions about, for example, the How to Rent guide, and appears to assume this had to be given to all tenants (there is no box to say “not relevant” for a tenancy that commenced before the provisions of the Deregulation Act came into force). The paperwork does include the date the latest tenancy was granted so in most cases the information can be “calculated”, i.e. if the tenancy was granted in 2013 the How to Rent guide is not currently needed. However, the form is still limited in its assumptions as, for example, there is no obvious was of explaining the TFP hybrid agreement starting with a fixed element and then running periodic.