She's lived there for 12 years. She was a single mum with two young kids when she moved in and in a position where she had to take whatever she could get. The landlords haven't bothered to maintain or inspect the building, my wife has ended up doing things like servicing the boiler herself. They also didn't bother to meet their legal obligation to put the deposit in a protection scheme. When we asked which one they'd used, they instead gave the name of a firm they own.
Now we're out, they're making up a list of defects to avoid paying back the deposit. A couple are fair, there are a handful of holes in the walls from TV brackets, and a patch up job over a hole in the ceiling of one bedroom. But they're also claiming for missing items that weren't there when she moved in, and a security alarm she fitted, as well as claiming the deposit was £25 less than she paid. Because they haven't used a protection scheme, we can't go through the proper channels to settle the dispute. Which means we should be entitled to compensation, but we'll have to go through a court process to get it. Whilst I'm confident we'd ultimately win, we don't really want to go down that route. But so far the landlords don't seem to want to accept their position.
And the real pisstake is that they're selling the house as it is anyway.
And they're making a thinly veiled threat saying the house was rented to a single mum and that's what they told Housing Benefits - but that was true at the time and we've not claimed anything since I moved in (ten years later).