Dispute between landlord an tenant , how much to pay in rent ?

From the messages it looks like the tenant said they would be moving in from early March and then chose to delay that. So I would say the tenant owes £761 for March and April plus £400 for May. As the landlord has said to forget March I’d take that as a win if I were the tenant and pay £800 and keep my head down.

You should always have a Tenancy Agreement, it doesn't matter how well you know their mother.

A signed TA makes everything very clear and can set out the house rules as well so that there is no misunderstanding regarding bills, cleaning, overnight guests etc.

I think you need to cut your losses on this one and find a new tenant. Things have gone wrong mostly due to your disorganisation and there will be bad feeling on both sides. Even if she does move in now, most likely you'll be asking her to leave soon as you had to do with the last tenant. I think you need to rethink your flaky approach as it's leading to problems.

It doesn’t sound like a good idea for either lodger or landlord.

Lodger wants to call the shots and landlord has no balls.

Don't let the tenant move in without a formal contract of agreed terms. If you go onto ARLS website they will probably have a template you could use. Put deposit into a government backed deposit scheme.

The tenant pays from the date they signed the contract and collected keys. A contract has a start date and this is in the contract. When they decide to move in is up to them. Also from the date they signed the contract tenant will be liable for council tax and standing charges for utilities. This is the law. A tenant can ask for a contract to start at a date in the future eg 2 weeks time but that must be agreed before the tenant signs the contract and that date must be the starting date in the contract and the tenant should not have the keys before this date.

I would say unless you have a contract to state otherwise they pay once they move it. There should be a set date communicated though and after this the room would be re advertised.

Neither of you had been particularly smart about this.
Rent should be paid from early March.
Landlord clearly had no recourse to claim this as no contract in place.
Don't start a lodging agreement with bad blood...
Find another lodger.

Unless you were explicitly clear that they needed to pay for the room to keep it available, whether they moved in or not, then there is no recourse to ask for money for the period before they moved in.

As you had no proper contract I would say they should pay rent when they actually move in. You could have easily advertised the room in March/April if you needed the rent money, YOU chose to save it for this new tenant so I don’t see how you could make them pay.

You're not being clear now.

Can you not write in proper paragraphs instead of these strange fractured sentences so people have a better idea of what's actually happened? Is this how you communicated with your potential lodger?

@HowMuchShouldBePaid i think you need to forget about this lodger! they sound like they could be trouble. look for another one and get things firmed up properly before they move in with a contract!

The keeping of the room means nothing, and both sides seem to be flakey as fuck. Lodger pays from when they move on, the fact they have both farted around the issue for months has nothing to do with the lodger. The 'keeping' of the room is on the landlord, they chose to do that, and could have rescinded the offer whenever they wanted. The tenant has cooled their heels for months, clearly didn't really care if they had the room or not. If the landlord reckons they should be paying from the date the room was available, then I would not be moving in, because this does not seem like an arrangement that's going to work

If there’s a dispute now, I just wouldn’t let them move in at all. Rent the room to someone else and for Goodness sake, get a contract! Then you can stipulate how much is due and when. This mess means that no-one really knows where they stand.

In any case, the OP is communicating what's actually happened so poorly that it's impossible to advise, really.

I think what she's saying is she offered someone a room, said it would be available any time from March, expecting the lodger to move in in March.

The lodger has taken that literally to mean "you can move in and start paying rent any time after March", turned up in May, and the OP feels out of pocket for March and April.

If she's communicated it as badly to the lodger as she has to us, it's not surprising there was an issue.

She can't now backdate the rent to March - the error was hers, a) for communicating it poorly and unprofessionally and b) for not having a contract determining the start date.

Tenant pays from either contracted start date or day they moved in. Whichever is first. Until contract signed landlord can rent to someone else and tenant isn't required to move in or pay.

Your tenancy starts from the date of the agreement, not two months later if you didn’t collect keys in a timely manner. They could have rented it out to someone else in that time.

Yes, I know, in this case. But to blanket declare that a tenancy starts from the date a tenant moves in is absolutely incorrect. It doesn't.

You rented a room. It doesn't sound like a very professional arrangement. Did you have people queuing up to take the room? You also stopped replying to the messages. Without a contract I would assume the tenant pays from when they collected the keys.

This.

But no tenancy agreement was signed - hence the issues!

If the tenant had signed a contract, of course they would need to pay rent. But they didn't, not did the pick up keys. So why should they pay rent?

No it doesn't. The tenancy starts from the date the tenancy starts.

If you take a flat on, say, 1st March, and sign a tenancy agreement saying so, but don't move your stuff in until 1st April, you're still liable for March.

OP, if you communicated the situation to your lodger as clearly as you're doing here - ie, not at all clearly - I'm not surprised there's been a mixup.

What has actually happened?

If you wanted them to rent the room from March onwards then you should have had them pay on the 1st March. If they didn't, then the room isn't theirs.