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Behind the scenes of running a Government scheme during the holiday season

Here we are in that strange period between Christmas and New Year where you are hopefully spending time with your family. If you are working it’s probably because you used up all your holiday and are, let’s be honest, going through the motions a bit not really knowing what day of the week it is or if you run your own business, you never really get a break anyway!

Running a Government scheme is like running your own business as there is never any ‘quiet period’ or let up over the Christmas period.

With mydeposits our standard customer service lines are open from 8am to 7pm on all weekdays and we have live chat with real people, not AI chatbots, available on Saturday mornings. Property Redress and Client Money Protect are not quite as long but still open 9am to 5.30pm. This year we made the decision to give our team a bit of a break and run all the lines from 9am to 4pm for the week between Christmas and New Years.

It is not just our 20-person strong customer service team that keeps going. We have Government set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on all aspects of the work we do. This includes call and email answering where we have market leading response times but also with our resolution services for both mydeposits and Property Redress.

A mydeposits resolution case should be completed in three months from date raised to decision. There are also other timescales within the process such as how long tenants and landlords/agents must submit evidence, how quickly an adjudicator uploads their decision after allocation and how quickly we then pay out any deposit money we’re holding to the parties.

I am very proud of our 40-person mydeposits resolution team who deal with approximately 15,000 cases across our schemes in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Jersey. On our England and Wales custodial scheme we now pay the deposit money back to the parties immediately after an agreement is reached or an adjudicator uploads a decision. This will be replicated in our insurance-based scheme from early quarter two 2026 as we are moving that scheme onto our Total Property technology platform that runs our custodial scheme.

With our Property Redress resolution cases we do have a bit more flexibility around the timescales. We take a reasonable approach to obtaining evidence from the parties particularly around holiday times. On every case we can, our resolution team contact both parties by telephone to try to resolve the complaints by what we call ‘early resolution’. This is a very successful approach with around 55% of all cases we accept being resolved this way without the need for a formal written decision. We also pride ourselves on how quickly we turn accepted cases around with the average being 67 days in 2025. Plenty more facts and figures from the service will be available in our 2025 annual report that will be released in March.

Our websites are also open 24/7 for operational membership and protection business. Amazingly, we had four new Property Redress members join on Christmas Day and three on Boxing Day. Our mydeposits custodial system releases deposit money as soon as the parties confirm their positions so on those days our customers would also have got the money into their accounts straight away.

Hopefully this has given a bit of background to the work of the teams running our Government schemes. We are always striving to improve and our roadmap of getting all our schemes onto the Total Property platform continues next year with our England and Wales insurance based mydeposits scheme being migrated over ahead of the implementation of all tenancies going periodic.

I wish everyone a very Happy New Year and see you in 2026.

Tags:

mydeposits
property redress

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