Rent Express scheme

[Chestnut]

Can someone with experience of this explain the difference, if any, between a local authority "Rent Express" schemes and other homeless schemes with 'bonds' as in recent topic "Jail birds"?

Under the R E scheme the council pays prospective tenant 1 month deposit and 1st month's rent in cash to be passed on to landlord with follow up by Housing Benefit whilst the tenant remains qualified for this. The tenant is vetted for ability to pay prior to recommendation by council to landlord.

Beyond this normal landlord tenant system then applies - AST, references, Deposit protection, notice, etc.etc. This scheme looks good to help tenants around redundancy situations, for example.

On the other hand the scheme from J4L's example looks horrendous.

[trustee]

Hi One of our tenents payed by the rent express scheme and its worked out fine his council benefit comes in regular every month but we also set up a credit union account with them, where they open a credit union account for 2 pound take the reference number on it down to council and the council pay his rent every month into the credit union account and then credit union pay it into our bank account its just more security for the landlord so the tenent is never tempted not to pay.

hope this helps