Court fees

28/07/2009 3:46 pm

Abimbola Badejo Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:48 GMT

"...Clearly if you manage to obtain an order whereby there is a continuing relationship with the tenant, subject to your tenancy agreement, assessed costs could be added to the rent account."

In cases where such costs are debited to the tenant's account, will then automatically become rent arrears? And If they are not considered rent arrears and assuming the tenant has only basic means that he can only pay a weekly sums towards proper arrears, how is the landlord going to get these costs back? Can the landlord refuse repairs to get these costs back?

29/07/2009 2:15 pm

I would echo Chris's comments about the costs going into a sub account, it's very important that these costs in the seperate sub account are cleared though, else the order often lives on, that was certainly the case in rent arrears. On more than one occasion I've known residents to make enough of a payment into their rent account to clear their sub account but for whatever reason (usually clerical error) that didn't happen and that surplus went against the rent, so if people got into further financial difficulty and they thought they'd cleared the last order, in fact the previous court order was stil valid as the costs weren't cleared and potentialy they were liable to be have possession summarily taken in line with the court order.

30/07/2009 8:30 am

To my knowledge Kass, no - the court costs and the money owing on them are a seperate entity from what you pay rent for, however refusal to pay the court costs can place you in breach of that oder so technically you may lose possession on the issue of your court costs, whilst your rent account may be in order. I've never known any scenario where a RSL has been deemed to be justified in withholding it's services whilst in dispute, apart from possibly with leaseholders.

30/07/2009 10:30 am

Just to add to that, since the dissapearance of tolerated trespassers, I think that any refusal to carry out repairs to a property would risk being sued for disrepair.

30/07/2009 2:57 pm

There was talk some time ago about Social Landlords giving priorities of services to tenants not in arrears. i.e. if as a tenant I was in arrears they could say, sorry we can't help you because another tenant, who is not in arrears, has to have the same repair first - and only after that, if there is anything left in the budget, perhaps we'll come round to you, but don't count too much on it, because you are in arrears.
Apparently that was an effective measure to bring down the level of arrears. Is this still going on and is it legal for standard tenancies, please?

30/07/2009 4:26 pm

Kass I think what you're referring to is somethinglike the Irwell Valley Gold Service initiative? http://www.irwellvalleyha.co.uk/livingwithus/content/646/about-gold-service.aspx
They can get away with giving priority to one group vs others as long as they meet legal minimum -28 days for most non urgent repairs less for other repairs.