Unfair solicitors charges/repossession threat

[Mark54321]

I have owned a flat for three years and always paid service charges etc on time with no problems. Recently i received a letter stating I was being taken to court for upaid ground rent dating back three years. I had not received any letters about this and had thought ground rent was part of service charges. I was annoyed but decided to pay as it was my mistake and was willing to pay charges (despite not having received a single letter. This was before the solicitors email (complete with scanned letter I didn't receive). My debts are £100. They want £2779.52 in total and are threatening repossession. is there anything I can do?

[honeybee13]

Hello and welcome to CAG.

 

Do you have a detailed breakdown of how they arrived at these charges/costs please?

 

My best, HB

[Lea_HTH]

Pay the actual debt and ask them to quantify their losses. If they refuse, then you'll have to let them take you to court, and they'll be obliged to quantify their losses there. nearly £3k in fees over three years is ridiculous, so I think they'd have a hard time. You also need to check your lease to see if the charges they are levying are allowed for in the lease - if not, they can't charge them. Even if they are listed, they have to be fair and reasonable for the work involved (what they're asking for is not reasonable).

 

In order to forfeit most leases, the debt has to be over £350, so your three years of £100 don't quite reach the requirement, and there are multiple steps they have to go through before they get to that stage.

[Mark54321]

thank you very much, I really appreciate the advice. What makes this worse is that the company have only been involved for a couple of months so the money, except for the £100 is to do with work they have done since instructed.I'll see about doing that.

Edited February 4, 2014 by Mark54321

[Mark54321]

Yes they have sent me a detailed breakdown of everything.About half of it is down to charging £192 an hour for the solicitor, nice work if you can get it. thank you very much I appreciate the help.

[Mark54321]

thank you very much for the adivce. They are charging £192.00 an hour and this comes to £672 for a couple of letters! Then, for some reason the total for works done on schedule jumps to £1017.60