Late Penalty charges due to overpayment of Child benefit

I think I have read one or two other posts on here regarding late penalty charges for self assessment on tax returns. My husband earned over the £50,000 threshold in years 2014/2015, 2015/2016 and 2016/2017. I was claiming child benefit during these years and had not realised that as he went over the earning that he was meant to complete a self assessment tax return. Although we are not disputing that we should pay back the child benefit, we did not receive any notifications of any need to complete a tax return at all until around May of this year so how can they say it was late if we did not realise it was something that needed to be done. We have already set up a direct debit to pay back the debt from the first year, this is £257 a month, we are finding this quite difficult to pay back but after phoning HMRC they said as we agreed to this amount we can't change it. Also one this amount is paid back we will still owe over £3000 which will be due in full. They don't really seem very willing to help us. All we wanted to do was bring the payments slightly lower to make it more manageable and not keep getting late penalties when like I said before we were never notified of any of this before May of this year.


Just in case people think we are well off this is not the case. We used all of my husbands earnings on an extension we built and at the moment our daughter, son in law and 2 nearly 3 children are all living with us while they save for a mortgage. We are not in financial difficulty but had paid off our overdraft quite recently and now this is putting us back into it again.


So would we be able to appeal the late penalties at all? Why are the people that you ring in HMRC just so harsh? Nobody seems willing to help or accept we know we should pay the money owed back. Also it is so frustrating that 2 people earning £49,000 in a household can still claim Child Benefit, who the hell came up with that rule???? How is that fair? Anyway I have since cancelled the child benefit of course.
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