Managing agent threaten to court

DVardysShadow

And there is no right of offset?

Fire_Fox

I don't think so. I was advised by LEASE that there are only very limited reasons you can legally withhold service charges (Commonhold & Leasehold Reform Act 2002, section 21A). I have found two such 'loopholes' as our service charge demands were not in the prescribed form AND we were never sent the statement of our rights, mandatory since October 2007. I am currently £4K in arrears and this remains my trump card.

Instead of withholding you can challenge charges that you have already paid. If you read the LVT decisions they look for what specific services, what specific invoices and what specific years are disputed. This makes more sense when you consider that long leases normally allow for service charges to be collected in advance. You obviously can't dispute services that have not yet been rendered!

Court argument for the prosecution
The management company have to provide leaseholders with the summary of accounts "within one month or within six months of the end of the 12-month accounting period, whichever is the later". Therefore demands for 2009/2010 will rightly have gone out long before the 2008/2009 deadline for accounting and auditing. The OP can't reasonably expect the 'disputed' £500 to be offset until mid way through the following financial year by which time she was already six months in arrears without any legal foundation.

Having said all that I am not a solicitor and I might be wrong. Because none of us are legal eagles and because leasehold dispute specialists are rare and because proper legal advice is expensive, I would want to avoid the court route by paying up and disputing later. Perhaps Richard Webster will read the thread and confirm or deny my understanding.