 Summary Cause Summons...Please Help!
Let me explain the background to this...
Around 2 years ago my partner and I moved into our first flat together.
We had a tough few months, several things went wrong and at one point we were both out of work, and both claiming job seekers allowance. This was probably for about 2 or 3 months. We were also claiming housing benefit.
After about 3 months I got a job. We ended our claim for job seekers allowance, and sent a letter to the council (who deal with housing benefit) explaining that we were no longer claiming job seekers allowance as I was now in full time employment, but that as only one of us was working full time would like to still continue claiming housing benefit, or at least part of it. We said if there were any problems to contact us.
Nobody contacted us so we assumed everything was OK...things were pretty tight, and my partner wasn't able to work for a while due to health problems, so we survived on my salary as our only income.
Then out of the blue we received a letter from the council saying that they were no longer paying us Housing Benefit, and that they had been overpaying us for a while, and therefore we were due them over £4000!
Anyway, it turns out they never received our letter...or so they say...
We just accepted it and started paying rent ourself, and we assumed that would be the end of it. We thought it had been sorted out with the council.
However, a few days ago out of the blue my partner received a "Summary Cause Summons" saying that we had to go to court regarding the money we owed them.
Now we are confused! Initially when we contacted the council the lady on the phone was quite rude and said that we had committed benefit fraud by not telling the council of our new circumstances. When I said to her we had, we sent them a letter at the same time we informed the job centre of my new job, she totally dismissed it.
But now someone has said to us it isn't really our fault that they never received the letter, we thought we did everything right in informing them of our new circumstances, so if they ended our claim and are claiming the money they paid us is an overpayment, that isn't our fault. They also said that since we have been paying rent ourselves, that we should be able to have some sort of back claim?
I'm all confused! We're slightly worried too, don't know what to do as the council seem to be intent on painting a bad picture of the situation when we try talk to them. What should we do?
Thanks for your help! | 
