Wedding hell - HELP!

6722kane

I am getting married in July and put a deposit of £1000 on a venue ages ago. Since then, the manager has been off sick long term and has recently returned, telling us that many of the items that we have requested (chairs, music) are at much higher rates than we expected. The items are silly - for example, she is charging us £150 for the hire of a sound system to plug an ipod into, but will not allow us to use it unless we pay £450 for a sound engineer!! This is just one example of the nightmare that we have been through. We have since cancelled the venue due to the spiralling costs and, true to form, she is refusing to pay the deposit back. Not only that, she is now saying that we owe her a further £175 for VAT on the deposit!

I would have thought that we have a good case for a small claim, as the terms of the agreement (all verbal I am afraid) have fundementally changed since we paid the £1000, but if anybody out there has some useful tips or bits of consumer law that we can throw at her, we would be most grateful. I am very tempted to write her a letter demanding the deposit back, following it up with a "letter before action" and then take action. Is this the right thing to do??
Many thanks!

lister

Unfortunately if the agreement is verbal, you are going to have a hard time getting any recompense from them regardless how much in the right you are and whether contract law is technically on your side.

On the other hand, trying to add VAT to a deposit seems to be an absolute nonsense to me. As far as I am aware, you must bill for VAT at the time of invoicing, so any VAT the venue is liable for on the deposit is assumed to be included in the amount charged. Their problem when the VAT man cometh, not yours as far as I know. Indeed, if you have any kind of invoice for that deposit, it would be interesting to know if there is a VAT reg number on it...