Rent arrears

[unfairandunsympathetic]

Got into arrears as neither could work for a few weeks. We were then told once back that we needed to pay rent plus £15 on top towards clearing the arrears.
This week we were in a position where we unusually had £100 over and decided to just pay an extra payment into rent account.

We’ve now been told we have to pay the same each week £100 more not £15 more?? It was a one off as we had it I thought we were doing the right thing now I wish we hadn’t

Who told you this; council, housing association, letting agent or private landlord?

Sorry I forgot to put - it’s a LA property and it was the housing officer obviously the extra payment had flagged up - I explained it was a one off we just had some money over so thought it best to pay off the arrears it didn’t mean we will have that every week but they now say rent plus £100 per week towards arrears

How did they say it? In a letter? Tbh I’d just ignore and continue to pay as much as you can. A court won’t look kindly on any action they try to take.

How much do you owe? And who to? I'm a private landlord and have: cut one tenants rent by half for April/May/June, and offered another a third off. It hurts as I live off my rents, but there are people worse off than me. I do not expect these two tenants to ever repay it. I would hope other landlords would be as sympathetic.

Ah I just read your second post. Still, you'd think the LA would want to help - that's a lot to come up extra every week!

By phone - I should have just said a relative have it to us to help perhaps but I didn’t think it’d be any sort of issue. Just want it paid off and up to date but it’s not often we have that much ‘spare’ each week till things get back to normal for a bit longer

You need to speak to someone in the rents department. Insist that they keep to the terms of the original payment plan. The key is regular payments and they shouldn't be encouraging the need to accrue more debt in a "robbing Peter to pay Paul" situation.

Good luck.

If that was the case then surely if you were initially meant to pay £100 then one month paid £15 they would immediately say, pay £15 from now on.
I mean it doesn’t even make logical sense.
I would ignore the phone conversation and pay as per the original agreement unless you have something in writing to state otherwise.

Is the original agreement in writing? Stick to that and speak to the rents department explain you don't have that amount as a regular payment

@unfairandunsympathetic, I'm not sure if this is connected but my DM lives in a HA bungalow and, she pays no rent herself as she is on a state pension. Since lock down she has received a phone call every few days from the HA to say she is in arrears and needs to pay extra each week to get in front. This obviously stressed her out so I called them and was told to promptly ignore these calls . My take on it is that the staff are working from home and the systems are not entirely up to date or some inexperienced team members have been tasked to chase arrears with incorrect information.
So I second the pp and ignore.