Cancelling contract after cooling off period

salvie

We placed an order with a company for windows and a conservatory and paid a substantial deposit and are now out of the cooling off period. Due to personal circumstances we are now unable to go ahead with our plans and contacted the salesman to discuss this and he assured us we shouldn't worry and he would look into this for us. We have now received a letter from the owner of the company stating that they want the whole amount for the works that would have been carried out on our house. We gave no dates for the works and nothing has been prepared yet so they are not out of pocket for materials etc. We would of course have accepted that we would be charged some sort of administration fees but can they legally keep our deposit and make us pay the whole amount ???

unholyangel

Read MSE's "is a deposit ever refundable" article.

Long story short.....once a contract is legally binding, you cannot cancel without being responsible for reasonable losses incurred by the other party due to your breach.

However, they have a statutory duty to mitigate their losses and they are not supposed to profit from the breach. They can ask for their costs or loss of profit but not both (as then they would be compensated twice over).

bris

They are entitled to the amount equal to the profit they would have made if the contract was completed (loss of profit).

This however could be a substantial amount depending on costs.

Cost of product £xxx minus cost of materials and any labour, machinery charges he may save, £xxx leaving the profit as the amount you pay.

It is also possible however if he already has materials to complete the job in stock that he asks the court to make you honour the contract, that can be done.

A court would need to look at all the relevant information on the contract and decide how much of the losses the vendor could have mitigated.

The deposit may not cover this so it could get messy and a court would be the place to decide.