What does an adjudicator see when a landlord claims for the oven?
Nothing. That’s the answer, and it’s the single thing most tenants and a fair number of letting agents fail to grasp.
An adjudicator at the TDS, the DPS or mydeposits does not come to your flat. They do not smell the kitchen. They sit at a desk with a bundle of documents – a check-in report, a check-out report, some photographs of varying quality, an invoice, and two statements that contradict each other – and they decide on the balance of probabilities which version of a kitchen in Leytonstone is more likely to be true. The oven itself is irrelevant by the time anyone is arguing about it. The paperwork about the oven is the whole case.
For my money, that single fact should reorganise how you think about the entire tenancy. Everything else follows from it.
The burden sits with the landlord. They are the ones proposing a deduction from money that belongs to the tenant and is held by a third party, so they have to show two things: that the oven was in a materially better condition when the tenant moved in, and that the sum claimed is proportionate to putting it back. Fail either and the claim collapses, whatever the state of the oven.
Why nobody visits the flat
Deposit adjudication was designed to be cheap and fast, which means documentary only. There’s no site inspection, no expert appointed, no cross-examination. I’ve been asked twice in eleven years to supply a written statement about a clean I’d carried out, and both times the request came from the tenant rather than the landlord, and both times it was three sentences on a job sheet that carried more weight than the agent’s four-paragraph complaint. Not because I’m authoritative. Because I was dated, specific and boring, and the agent’s letter was adjectives.
Does the check-in inventory settle the argument before you’ve cooked anything?
Almost always, yes.
A check-in report that says “Oven: clean” with no photograph of the interior is close to worthless as evidence, and the better adjudicators treat it that way. Ovens are the most photographed appliance in the inventory trade and the least photographed inside. I’ve opened plenty of ovens on move-in cleans in Ealing where a clerk had ticked the box that morning with the door shut.
Here is the position I’ll defend to anybody: an inventory clerk who logs an oven as clean without opening the door and photographing the base, the door glass and at least one shelf has produced a document that should carry no weight at all in a cleaning claim. Not reduced weight. None. The industry treats these reports as neutral professional evidence when a good proportion of them are a tick sheet completed at speed for £90 a property, and adjudicators who discount them heavily are doing the job properly.
Photographs, timestamps and the shelf nobody logged
What wins arguments is dull and takes eleven minutes. On the day you get the keys, open the oven, pull the shelves out, and photograph: the cavity base, the inside of the door glass at an angle that shows any brown film, the top element and liner, each shelf laid on the worktop, the runners, and the grill pan. Phone photos carry EXIF data with a date on them. Email the lot to yourself so there’s a second timestamp on a server you don’t control.
Then do the same thing on the day you leave.
A tenant in a flat off Rye Lane sent me her before-and-after set last year after her agent tried for £180. The check-in photographs showed a door glass already hazed brown between the panes – years of it, not months. She got the full amount back and the adjudicator’s reasoning ran to about six lines: the landlord had not established the condition at the start of the tenancy, so the claim could not be quantified. The agent had no interior photograph from check-in at all.
Can a landlord still require a professional oven clean?
No, and this catches people out both ways.
The Tenant Fees Act 2019 made it a prohibited payment to require a tenant to pay for professional cleaning as a condition of the tenancy. A clause saying “the property must be professionally cleaned by a contractor approved by the landlord and receipts provided” has been unenforceable for years now. What survives is the ordinary obligation to return the property in the condition it was received, fair wear and tear excepted.
Which means: the standard is the standard, and how you reach it is your business. Clean it yourself at two in the morning with a caustic gel and a bin bag if you like. If the oven comes back to the state shown in the check-in photographs, there is no claim.
What the Tenant Fees Act changed, and what it left alone
It changed the contract clause. It didn’t change the outcome where the oven is materially worse than it was, and a great many tenants read the ban as a licence to hand back a roasting tin’s worth of carbonised fat. That claim will succeed, because cleaning is not wear and tear. Wear and tear is a hinge that’s loosened, a shelf that’s dulled, an enamel base that’s crazed after six years of thermal cycling. Grease is not a product of time passing. It’s a product of cooking and not cleaning up, and the passage of a tenancy gives you no defence against it.
The Renters’ Rights Act reforms that came into force on 1 May 2026 didn’t alter any of this. Deposits stay capped at five weeks’ rent for most tenancies, protection in a scheme is still mandatory, and the adjudication process is unchanged. Anyone telling you the new Act has made oven claims harder to bring is guessing.
There is one indirect effect worth tracking. With fixed terms gone and tenants able to give two months’ notice at any point, end-of-tenancy dates now fall wherever they fall rather than clustering around the old twelve-month anniversary. Agents who used to book a block of check-outs for the last week of August are dealing with them one at a time, and the check-out reports I’ve seen since May have been thinner for it. Thin reports lose claims.
Which parts of the oven do claims turn on?
Door glass, first and by a distance. It’s the part every adjudicator can assess from a photograph, and it’s the part a hurried clean misses, because grease between the panes needs the door stripping and most people – including some contractors working to a fixed hour – wipe the inner face and call it done.
Then shelves and runners, which are frequently claimed for separately and which tenants frequently forget belong to the oven at all.
Then the grill pan, which lives in a cupboard and never gets cleaned by anybody.
Extractor filters sit in an odd place. They belong to the hood rather than the oven, they’re cheap to replace, and I’d argue a landlord claiming for a degreased filter after a two-year tenancy is claiming for a consumable. Metal mesh filters in the sort of integrated hood you get in a Barratt kitchen cost about twelve pounds a pair. Any adjudicator working from a market-rate test will cap the claim there, whatever the invoice says.
The base of the cavity matters less than people think. A stained enamel base with no loose soiling is arguably wear, particularly in a flat where the appliance predates the tenancy by a decade, and I’ve seen claims for a resurface knocked back on exactly that ground in a Tooting conversion where the oven was a fifteen-year-old Zanussi.
The bits that get claimed twice
Watch for double-counting. An agent’s schedule that lists “oven clean £120” and then “oven shelves and glass £45” is claiming for the same work twice, since any competent end-of-tenancy oven clean includes both as standard. Say so in your response. Adjudicators reduce for it, and the reduction is often the difference between losing the argument and splitting it.
When should you refuse to pay and go to adjudication?
When the check-in report has no interior photograph, when the invoice is round-numbered and undated, or when the sum claimed exceeds what the work costs on the open market in your postcode.
Also when the claim is for a “professional clean” priced at a figure no professional in the borough charges. I quote by the appliance and the state of it; a single built-in oven with the door stripped, shelves and runners dipped and the glass done properly sits in a fairly narrow band across most of Greater London, and a £250 line item for one oven in a one-bedroom flat in Bermondsey is a number somebody invented.
Adjudication is free to the tenant, takes a few weeks, and carries no downside beyond the wait. The disputed sum is held by the scheme regardless. For my money, more tenants should use it – the schemes’ own published figures have long shown a meaningful share of disputes resolved wholly or partly in the tenant’s favour, which tells you how many claims are chanced rather than evidenced.
What a receipt from someone like me is worth
Less than you’d hope, on its own.
An invoice proves money changed hands. It doesn’t prove the oven was dirty, and it certainly doesn’t prove it was dirtier than at check-in – which is the only question in play. What makes an invoice useful is when it carries the date, the address, an itemised description of what was done, and photographs attached. I supply those as standard now, on both sides of the argument, because a job sheet reading “oven clean, £110” helps nobody and I’ve watched it fail.
I’ll finish against myself. If your check-in photographs show a grimy oven, don’t book me at all. Photograph it as it stands on your last day, return the keys, and let them try. They’ll lose, and you’ll have saved a hundred and ten quid on a clean you were never obliged to buy.
