To not pay my rent

[cantsleep]

We have a council house. The rent is £120 a week.

I have always paid by direct debit every month. I used to get hb but when it stopped the council did not readjust my payments so I was paying 422 a month which was too little and I didn't notice as am really busy with dcs and thought I have a dd and didn't worry about it as knew the bills go out.

Before when the council had taken too much I had a ightvto get a refund and they mucked up my c tax as well so are useless.

As I had been unknowingly underpaying I now have arrears and got a letter today saying that they are changing my dd to £658 a month.

We cannot afford this. It was their mistake that I got arrears so I cancelled my dd ad I will phone them tomorrow and set up a standing order for the £130 a week, 120 rent and ten pounds towards arrears.

AIBU?

Thats fair enough must have been how I read it ....i dont see why they shouldnt be open to negotiations if they messed up

I'm not disputing the fact that I should have checked and I will be from now on.

Things just got in the way and I didn't but I was relying on the fact they would be calculating things correctly and they didn't.

Your incomings will dictate how much they will accept you paying each week with arrears.

As a general rule they will not accept anything lower than £4.25 each week but that would be from someone on a very low income.

Normally if you offer slightly more than a court would order you to pay then if they don't accept that and do take you to court and you can prove you offered (and paid the offered amount) they would not be able to recover any costs against you and may end up paying your costs,this also applies if they accept your offer and you pay with no defaults but they still apply for a notice to seek.

Take your monthly income before tax and deduct the following amounts

£244 per child
£315
£159 if you have a partner
Any rent costs
Any maintainance You or your partner pay out
Any court ordered debt repayments
Any child care (registered) costs

What is left will be approximately what a court would order you to pay a month take that figure times it by 12 then devide by 52 and you have your weekly amount. You will also be expected to pay the arrears during your rent free week/s and don't let the council take responsibility for collecting from bank pay it using your card or standing order because if they fuck up that's classed as you defaulting.

Oh make sure you include all income (so child benefit and maintenance) as those are not exempt from means testing for debt repayments

(If you receive disability or carers benefits these are exempt but I guessed if you were a carer or disabled or had a disabled child you would have put that in your op)

If it's a variable DD then it's a good lesson to keep a slightly closer eye on your finances. The advice above seems incredibly useful so follow that . I would disagree with anyone who says its entirely your fault, since its the council who define what you're actually paying.

A bit harsh on OP here. Yes it is always wise to check your payments are correct but the council should take the right amount too.
When your rent rises the council always take the increased amount automatically by variable direct debit.

HB would complicate this but in reality the council doesn't pay itself the HB, it just takes the HB away from rent due and changes the amount they take by direct debit. They always do this when HB goes up or down. They have done it automatically like this with OP in the past.

In this case OP was getting about £22 p/w HB. This stopped. As Council pay HB they knew it had stopped. They should have adjusted payment, they didn't. They made a mistake by undercharging OP and they should have took less than 6 months to realise this mistake, and that they were not recieving correct payment.

Councils always make mistakes though so you should check but lots of people would miss this, especially with so much going on. And the Council were at fault as well.

I agree that people are being a bit harsh,
perhaps its because many don't know that HB is paid out two weeks in arrears, so whilst on HB a claimant is never fully upto date with rent payments, all Councils and HAs accept this for HB claimants.
But for non HB claimants all councils and HAs require rent in advance, so when a claim ends the rent account is only paid up till the day the claim ends and not in advance, this can catapult a tenant straight in to arrears, without them realizing.

There is no point cancelling your direct debit. If you owe them money they can just start it again (unlike standing orders). You need to speak to them and try to get them to reduce the amount they take.

All sorted out, just phoned the council. They said I can set up a standing order instead for just the rent each month and try to pay off the arrears as and when I can. I stil have a rent card so will pay bits on that when I have spare money.

They said they took the wrong amount last month too they'd taken a bit extra but not enough and admitted they hadn't adjusted the amounts. To be fair I know I should have checked as well but dcs have been unwell and I have been preoccupied (didn't mention in my op as thought it wasn't relevant but we do get carers and dla for dcs)

Great. Glad it's all sorted :)

I think they should let you pay back over the lesser of 12 months or the period you underpaid.

So unless you have £2k arrears from 2 years @£85/month, they are overcharging IMO.

But £10/week isn't enough.

There is a world of difference between a direct debit and a standing order.
Firstly on the dd side, if you set it up correctly and it had been working, you need to find out why the payments stopped. If their side, you have better negotiating powers as not your fault. If a standing order, you need to check if you set up a from to order. If this was the case, your to date may have been reached, in which case you should have made another order.
Sorry to say that "life" in general is not an excuse for not meeting financial obligations.