If your landlord doesn't follow the proper guidelines for protecting your deposit, you can sue your landlord for it's return plus deposit x3 compensation. However, if you take your landlord to court and he then protects the deposit and gives you the needed information about the deposit the judge may throw out your claim or find against you so its not a sure thing. You should probably find out if the deposit is protected first. I think you can search with both schemes to see if they're holding your details. If it isn't you can always kindly make your landlord aware of his responcibility in that regard and what you can do if he doesn't protect your deposit. Obviously if you sue or threaten to sue your landlord you're likely to be served with notice to find somewhere else to live so you might want to be sure you want to move out at the end of your fixed term as well.

You can't technically use your deposit to pay your rent, you have an agreement to pay the rent each month. But a lot of landlords are aware that tenants will use the deposit to cover the rent in the last month or two, so it's up to you if you want to do that.

Hi. I am renting a flat right now, and the land lord appears to be a bit dodgy. He does not return phone calls, or answer emails, and is overall very difficult to track down. On my contract, it says that my deposit is put away with a government approved scheme, but I have not gotten any confirmation about this. The other places that I have rented from usually sent me a letter from the DPS confirming the amount of money that I put into the deposit, but this time that did not happen. I have talked to many other residents in the building, and it sounds like they are not having a very pleasant experience with him either. They have talked about how things were broken for months, and had not gotten fixed. I sense that this is an irresponsible landlord, and would like to use my deposit as last 2 months rent because I don't trust that this landlord will give me my money back, whether intentionally or not. His actions indicate this property is not a very big priority to him. I have a hard enough time tracking him down for little things, and I don't want to trust him with a big thing. I don't want to spend months chasing him down for my deposit as it is a lot of money to me, and I am not very financially stable.