Falling behind with your rent

If you are having problems paying your rent, please let us know. Contact your Housing champion as soon as you have any problems paying the rent. We will do our best to help you to sort the problem out.

We want to keep rents as low as possible and we want to provide high quality services, so we must do everything we can to collect your rent. This includes taking action in the Courts if we cannot reach an agreement with you to repay any money you owe us.

In very serious cases this can mean you face being evicted. Please don't ignore the problem as you risk losing your home.

Arrears process

If we haven't received a rent payment from you we will contact you by letter in your third week of arrears. Our letter will ask you to get in touch. Please do not ignore us as we will do all we can to help you.

If we don't get a response from you we will try to phone or visit.

If we still can't get in touch with you, we will write you another warning letter.

After this point, we will serve a legal notice of court proceedings.

This procedure is an outline of basic steps, where each case and step is dependent on individual circumstances. It is rare that we will get to the last stage of legal notice.

This procedure takes around two months, so you will have plenty of opportunity to contact us to arrange payment, and we will try our very best to help with the situation.

Independent advice and debt counselling is available from:

Telephone 01709 822329.

Specialist Housing Advice is also available from:

Telephone 01709 336565

Last update: 08/06/2011