The recent Benchmarks article by Richard Pates exposes the fact that the Court of Appeal has driven a coach and horses through the tenant deposit scheme inserted into the Housing Act 2004, which protects tenants against the widespread abuse by landlords of the rental deposit system.

The loss of this protection can have a devastating impact on low-income or vulnerable tenants in the current climate.

I was a solicitor for over 30 years and now run a charity which helps those on low incomes negotiate the civil justice system. We have recently had a proliferation of highly vulnerable clients who are either on the brink of homelessness, or forced to remain in sub-standard conditions because of their inability to recover deposits.

One mother, living on benefits, in desperation at the appalling conditions in her flat moved, borrowed the money for a deposit on a new property. Her landlord would not repay the deposit, so we helped her to issue proceedings for recovery. Just before trial, the landlord repaid the deposit and issued a counterclaim for several times the value of the deposit for damages for spurious allegations of disrepair.

Recent cases mean that the landlord will suffer no punishment for having forced this vulnerable tenant into the stress and anxiety of court proceedings. She has also been deprived of the opportunity to have any issue of disrepair dealt with by the alternative dispute resolution procedure set up by the scheme.

This is yet another example of the odds being stacked against the disadvantaged at a time when the devastating cuts to the whole advice sector means that there will be very little support available to help them find redress.

The Court of Appeal will, of course, say that it was only interpreting a poorly worded statute. However, the decisions suggest it was influenced by the punitive effect of the penalties in the scheme on non-compliant landlords, so it chose to let landlords off scot-free whatever the impact on tenants.

The whole saga is yet another example of how our current legal system and its funding favours the more powerful over the less.

Joanna Kennedy, chief executive, Z2K, London SW1