Rundles - Council Tax

esj13

I missed a payment on my council tax in January because it was due at a time when Christmas had just been and gone, a few unexpected bills landed, and I had forgotten it hadn't come out due to the 1st being a bank holiday.

I forgot about it until I got a text message of this firm, Rundles. I just so happened to contact council tax to sort out my payments and they mentioned that the missed payment had been passed to this Rundles. I set up a payment arrangement with council tax for the missed payment and I was led to believe that the payments would be collected by DD along with my ongoing payments. I got a letter from Rundles confirming payment arrangement.

This morning I woke up to a hand written letter being pushed through from Rundles saying they visited to seize goods for non payment and the amount had increased from £352 (this is not the original amount, they added some charges when it was first passed to them, which I did not dispute) to £599. This was alarming and upsetting so I called Rundles who weren’t any help and said “we don’t do direct debits” but refused to listen to my explanation of the misunderstanding and they just transferred me to the enforcement agent and who was also rude, dismissive and threatening and said if I didn’t pay he would keep coming back to the house.

I ended the call and in a panic I paid the amount.

Since then I have been doing some research and I have sent an email to complain. But sent before I found some information that might have been useful.

Do they need to write to me 14 days before any enforcement visit? Because they didn’t.

I have only received two letters from them, one being confirmation of the arrangement and then the handwritten letter posted through this morning when they visited. It says they have a magistrates order to seize goods. Can I request a copy of this? And if it doesn’t exist what can I do because I feel they haven’t followed a proper process and made up legislation and purported themselves to have more powers than they really do to bully payment out of me.

fatbelly

Formal written complaint. See what comes back. Refer it to the enforcement Conduct Board