stuffed by the council

mad_as_a_box_of_frogs

Any help from any leagle beagles would be much appreciated..... 4 years ago my buissness went belly up causing massive debts and me ending up loosing my house, Myself, pregnant wife and two young children ended up in a homeless hostle awaiting council accomadation. At the time i was out of work as i had a knee operation and the wife was also not working due to the pregnancy, we moved in to the hostle where we were told the rent was capped at £67.00 a week which we paid every week and have proof of this, we were then moved to a temp house and were told again the rent would remain the same (the house had no heating, a wasp nest outside the door, no heating and poo smeared on the walls NICE!!!). we again paid the rent every week until we finally moved into our permanent home. A few months after we recived a letter saying we were in over £4000 of rent arrears, when we enquired into this we were told that allthough the rent was capped we should have claimed the rest from housing benefit which we never kner or were never told about, we contacted housing benefit only to be told that the application was too late and we would have to pay it ourselves. we were also told that our new house cannot become ours because we our listed as arrears and will stay on trial period until its cleared. How do i get out of paying for this unreasonable amount of money, can i take them to court

oscardog

Look up "Estoppel" on Wikipedia.

Good luck

Tixy

Do the arrears relate to the time in the hostel? or just the time in the temporary house?

When they informed you that the rent was 'capped at £67' how did they tell you this? was it in writing? do you still have the letter that states this?

mad_as_a_box_of_frogs

Tixy wrote: »

Do the arrears relate to the time in the hostel? or just the time in the temporary house?

When they informed you that the rent was 'capped at £67' how did they tell you this? was it in writing? do you still have the letter that states this?

arrears are for both hostel and temp house, we were told verbaly and probably did sign something but were never given a copy also the guy who was dealing with it was new to this position i think we were one of his first if not the first client,