My landlord put my deposit in the wrong scheme, does that matter?

There are only three government-approved tenancy deposit protection schemes in England and Wales: the Deposit Protection Service (DPS), MyDeposits, and the Tenancy Deposit Scheme (TDS). Your landlord must use one of these — no other organisation can validly protect a tenancy deposit.

If your landlord has placed your deposit with a company that is not one of these three, or has purported to hold it themselves outside a scheme, it is legally unprotected. The same applies if the deposit was registered in the correct scheme but the prescribed information was not provided to you within 30 days.

The consequences are the same as for non-protection: you can apply to the county court for a financial penalty of between one and three times the deposit amount; and any Section 21 notice served is invalid until the deposit is properly protected and prescribed information served.

You can check whether your deposit is registered by using the free lookup tools on the websites of all three approved schemes. If it does not appear in any of them, it is unprotected regardless of what your landlord tells you.

Write to your landlord immediately setting out that you cannot locate your deposit in any approved scheme and ask them to confirm where it is held and to provide the prescribed information. Keep records of all correspondence. If they cannot produce evidence of compliant protection, seek advice from Citizens Advice or a housing solicitor about claiming the penalty.