A tenant rang me from a flat off Hoe Street in Walthamstow with a check-out letter in her hand. The letter named a firm. It gave that firm’s phone number, said the carpets were to be cleaned by them and nobody else, and asked for the invoice to be emailed to the branch within five working days of the tenancy ending.
She wanted to know whether she had to. She did not.
I get this call four or five times a year, more in August, and the answer has been the same in England since June 2019. A landlord or agent cannot require a tenant to pay a third party for cleaning at all – never mind a named third party. That’s the size of it. Everything else in this piece is the detail around that one sentence, and the detail is where people lose their deposits.
Can a landlord tell you which carpet cleaner to use?
No. Not the company, not the method, not the price bracket.
The Tenant Fees Act 2019 works by listing the payments a landlord or letting agent in England is permitted to require from a tenant. Rent, the deposit, utilities where the agreement says so, a capped fee for changing the tenancy, a default fee for a lost key. Cleaning is absent from that list, which makes any requirement to pay for it a prohibited payment. A blanket clause obliging the tenant to arrange or pay for a professional clean is unenforceable, and a landlord who presses it can face a penalty of up to £5,000.
A clause naming a supplier is the same prohibited payment with a company logo attached. It does not become permitted because it is printed in the agreement you signed. Contract terms that contradict statute are decoration.
What the Act stops, and what it leaves alone
What the Act does not do is release you from the condition of the property. You are still responsible for returning the place in the state it was handed to you, allowing for fair wear and tear, and that obligation can be enforced through the deposit. So the landlord loses the power to send you an invoice and keeps the power to make a deduction if the carpets come back filthy.
Two different questions, then. Who chooses the cleaner is settled law. Whether the carpet is clean enough is a matter of evidence, and that is the fight worth preparing for.
Why is the clause still sitting in half the agreements I read?
Inertia, mostly. Template agreements get copied between branches for years and nobody strips the dead wood out. I saw one this spring in a Bermondsey letting that still referenced a check-out fee, banned in the same Act, alongside the carpet clause. Whoever built that template last touched it before the pandemic.
The less charitable reason is that it works. Most tenants read the clause, believe it, and pay. An agent who writes it into two hundred agreements and gets compliance from a hundred and eighty of them has a system that pays for itself, and the twenty who push back cost nothing to fold on. There is no downside to trying it until somebody complains to trading standards, and almost nobody does.
Who the preferred-supplier list is for
Here is the part my own trade will not enjoy. Preferred-supplier lists in London lettings are, in the main, commission arrangements wearing a quality-control costume. The going arrangement is a referral cut, or a discounted rate on the agent’s own managed properties subsidised by the price charged to tenants, and the supplier’s position on the list has more to do with how quickly they invoice than how well they clean.
I have been asked to join four of them. Two wanted twenty per cent. One wanted a fixed monthly fee for the privilege of appearing on a check-out letter. I said no to all four, which is easy to do when you have enough work and harder when you do not – I am not claiming sainthood, only arithmetic.
If your agent names a firm, that naming is information about the agent’s accounting, not about the firm’s machine.
What can a landlord legitimately ask for?
A standard. That’s the size of it, and it is all they have.
An agreement can say the property must be returned cleaned to a professional standard. That wording survives the Act because it describes an outcome rather than a purchase. The tenant can meet it with a hired machine, a friend who does this for a living, three days of their own labour, or a contractor – the route is theirs to pick.
The phrase “professional standard” and why it settles nothing
Ask three adjudicators what a professional standard of carpet cleaning looks like and you will get three answers, none of them numerical. There is no British Standard for a clean carpet. There is no residual-soil measurement anybody applies in a deposit dispute. In practice the phrase collapses back into the only comparison available, which is the check-in inventory: does the carpet look as it did on the day you moved in, minus reasonable wear?
Which means the clause the agents fought to keep is a clause that adds nothing. Fine by me. I would rather be hired by someone who wants the work done than by someone discharging a paragraph.
What happens when it goes to adjudication?
This is the section that matters, so I will be slow about it.
Deposits in England sit with one of three schemes – TDS, DPS or mydeposits – and if you dispute a deduction, an adjudicator reads the paperwork and decides. They do not visit. They do not smell the carpet. They see what both sides send, and the landlord carries the burden of proving the deduction is justified.
What sinks landlord claims, in the cases I have been asked to write reports for, is the check-in evidence. A carpet described in the inventory as “carpet – good” is worth nothing at check-out. A carpet with six dated photographs, a note on the pile condition in each room, and a check-in report the tenant signed is worth the whole claim. Where the check-in is thin, the adjudicator has no baseline, and no baseline means no deduction. I have watched a landlord in Acton lose a £340 claim over a Churchfield Road maisonette because the inventory clerk had written one word per room.
The second thing that sinks claims is betterment. A landlord cannot use the deposit to end up with something better than they started with. Adjudicators apportion against the age of the carpet, working from a notional useful life – a mid-range domestic carpet is often treated as having something in the region of eight to ten years in it. A carpet that was seven years old when you moved in has very little value left to damage. If the landlord claims for a full replacement of a carpet laid in 2016, they will get a fraction of it, and sometimes they get nothing because the schedule shows the thing was past its life anyway.
Third: fair wear and tear is not a deduction. Traffic lanes down a hallway after two years of use are the carpet doing its job. Flattened pile under a sofa is not damage. A grey path from the front door of a Peckham conversion to the kitchen, on a beige twist, after a three-year tenancy – that is not a cleaning failure and no adjudicator I have dealt with has ever treated it as one.
What the adjudicator asks for
Dated photographs from both ends of the tenancy, in daylight, showing the whole room and then the detail. A check-in inventory with real descriptions. An invoice that says what was done rather than “carpets – £180”. If you have had a clean carried out, the invoice should name the rooms, the method, and the fibre. Mine do, because half the value of the document is its use six months later in a dispute nobody has had yet.
Is it worth paying for a clean anyway?
Sometimes. Not always, and this is where I argue against my own invoice.
If the carpets are synthetic, the tenancy was short, and you have been careful, a hired machine from the shop on Bellenden Road and a Saturday afternoon will produce a result that no adjudicator will pick apart, because the comparison is the check-in photo and not a laboratory. Spend the £45 and keep the rest.
If the tenancy ran four years, or there are pets, or the carpet is wool, or there is a mark you have already tried to shift and made worse – that is when the cost of a contractor is smaller than the deduction you are arguing about. Same for anything where you need a document more than you need a clean.
What to do if the agent digs in
Write once, in email, and keep it short. Say the clause requires a payment to a third party for cleaning, that this is a prohibited payment under the Tenant Fees Act 2019, and that you will return the property in the condition recorded at check-in. Do not argue about the named firm, which is a side issue and invites a conversation about their pricing. Then photograph everything on the day you hand the keys back, timestamped, whole room first.
If the deduction still appears, raise it with the deposit scheme rather than with the branch. Agents settle a surprising number of these the week before the adjudicator sees the file. That’s the size of it – the paperwork wins, and the argument on the doorstep never does.
One practical wrinkle since 1 May this year: tenancies in England are now periodic, and a tenant gives two months’ notice. Check-out dates float in a way they did not under fixed terms, and every cleaner in London is being asked to hold slots that then move by a fortnight. Book late rather than early, and give your cleaner the real date, not the hopeful one.
The tenant in Walthamstow sent the agent one line quoting the Act. They dropped it, and she cleaned the flat herself over two evenings. The carpets were four years old and beige, and they came back looking four years old and beige.