Advice for student house.

Hbrown8

Hi,

I moved into my student accommodation September 2018, it is a HMO and I live with my best friend and boyfriend. The property is let through a student lettings agency and so we don’t have direct contact with the landlady. Despite there being many maintenance issues and a huge oversight of the state of the property when working through the inventory, we have been happy in this property.
Our property is “inclusive of all bills (electricity, water, gas, internet, tv licence)” and so we all pay a set rate each semester to cover the next few months of rent and bills, with no additional costs etc. Come February 2019, after the winter period, we received an email to say that we are at risk of exceeding our allowance of utility bills (£12 per week, per tenant). I immediately emailed back, not wanting any additional costs, asking for more details and an overview of the bill so far. I had no reply for months. Then this month, June 2019, we received an email saying that we had gone over our allowance and any additional charges would be discussed/taken out of our deposit at the end of tenancy. Again, I emailed back asking for evidence of this and details of this overuse. The overuse seemed impossible to believe, we had more than halved our usage as we stopped using the heating/dryer etc as the weather picked up. In February they said that if we continued at our current rate (at that time) we would be at risk of going over, however we completely limited our usage to a minimal amount and one of the tenants has been living back at home for a month! When asking for the evidence, the letting agent said they didn’t have access to the bills/couldn’t send them over/or would not send them until the end of tenancy.
There is also a tenant in the flat downstairs (separate to ours but same LL/LA and same conditions within her contract), we spoke and she has had the exact same two emails from the letting agent, despite the fact that she only lives in the flat for half the week. On the original email in February, she went into the LA office and queried the issue, they told her not to worry, that they send it to everyone and that she was nowhere near exceeding her usage.
Sorry for the long question, I just wanted to know what our rights are? Are we within our rights to ask for our utility bills or dispute them mid tenancy? All the points mentioned suggest that the letting agents send these emails to all tenants and may be adding additional charges that should not be there.

Thankyou

lindos90

You might be best to start your own thread about this HBrown8, I think your question might be overlooked here x