Didnt really know where to put this, but I hope this is a really easy question for someone to answer. If you sue someone, and they offer to pay you a small amount per month to settle the debt, am I (as the creditor) under any obligation to accept their offer? Basically we have sued our builder who cocked up a job for us, and I'm worried he's going to plead poverty and offer us £10 a month or something, when he owes us thousands, and we'll have to accept it! We need the money to pay for a competent builder to re-do the job - so a small monthly payment is no real use to us whatsoever! Any help greatly appreciated

So we sent him a final letter saying either give us our money or we'll take you to court, and the deadline for him to reply to that has now passed. So I'm just going through the MCOL procedure at the moment and I'm not sure on one thing - what do I actually have to send at this stage? Do I have to collate every piece of evidence now, and send everything to him? Or do I send nothing but the summary and keep everything for if he defends the claim?

Yeah, I totally realise this now We got him back over to the site and he told us all the cracks were 'normal', and that we should repair them and then paint, which we did. He then subsequently blamed our repair of these cracks for the NHBC not accepting the render, which is insulting as well as untrue! One of the walls was worse than all the others, and that wall I havent touched and he has agreed to re-render. He refuses to accept the fact that cracks in newly rendered walls a few days after he rendered them is a problem, and refuses to accept that any further work is necessary apart from repairing the one wall. There was nothing specified in writing about what mix he would use, timings, thicknesses of coats etc. As far as I'm concerned it would be a standard procedure straight out of the british standard, so we never discussed this. He quoted to render the walls and I let him get on with it. Am I expected to have technical knowledge of what a tradesman is doing?

sorry, double post.

We have paid a builder £4000 to render the outside of our new build house back in August. Shortly after we paid him, all the render cracked. The NHBC have rejected everything he's done - but he insists there isnt a problem, claiming (amongst other things) that I have done a bad job of repairing the cracks and that's why the NHBC rejected it! It's more complicated than that, of course, but that's the jist of it. Basically I can prove he hasnt done his job right. However, the cost of the materials we'd lose and the demolition cost, on top of the money we paid him, comes to over £7000. This takes the claim outside the realm of the small claims court, and I'm not sure this is something I want to go for. All I want is basically the £4000 I paid him back, so I can put that towards the cost of having it all done again. Is there any better way to proceed rather than full on court? I've looked at arbitration, but that seems to be for employment based things, wrongful dismissal etc - is that right? Any help greatfully received

He caved in after our second letter, and we received two cheques for £120 each yesterday Result! Chalk another one up for the good guys 8) Thanks everyone for all your help

As it happens we had a letter back yesterday. He is now claiming it cost £410 to sort it out, plus another £85 that he hasnt done yet! Including a new radiator to replace one that has leaked for several years, that he has known about for a long time, and 6 or 7 new things that werent on his original list, all with ludicrously inflated costs against them, and no receipts. He says 'having taken advice, its unclear whether the TDS applies in this case', and has offered to put the disputed money in an account, and then we use their dispute resolution service to sort the matter out. Which I believe means we cant take him to court.

Ok what about the condition of the place when we left? Who has to prove the condition of the property? Is it up to us to prove it was clean, or is it up to the landlord to prove it was dirty?

As I understand it, the previous tenant's bond was transferred to me when I paid him. This is no different than me paying the landlord myself. We've written him a letter threatening court action in 14 days unless he pays us the rest, along similar lines to the template suggested by Steve_M above

Me and a mate moved out of a tenancy last month, and have received a cheque for just over half of our £500 bond. We signed a new tenancy agreement when I took over one of the rooms from the previous tenant in November last year, and I paid the previous tenant £250 under the understanding that this amount would be transferred to me as part of the bond. We have nothing to say the bond was put into a TDS, and believe it not to have been. We left the property clean, tidy, with nothing broken or stolen, and no rent outstanding. We even left new lampshades, kettle, iron, bedframe at the property as items that were better than what was let to us. Despite this, the landlord's agent has hit us with a load of utterly ridiculous claims, and we believe unlawfully withheld nearly half our money! We have only dealt with the Landlords Agent, the actual landlord lives abroad and we've never met him, and we're no longer the tenants as we've moved out! Can we still sue him/them for our deposit back, and how do we find out the Landlord's address? We dont really want to sue anyone, we just want our money back!!

Neither of those posts actually answer my question though do they. If I'm going to get my money after the test case anyway - why bother applying to get the stay lifted? Why not just wait it out? Surely it makes no difference? Except that I incur more risk by paying more money to apply to get the stay lifted when the chances are it wont be!

If I have the stay lifted, win the case and get the money - and then the OFT loses the test case, won't the Halifax just sue me back for the money I won off them, in light of the test case proving the charges to be lawful? I think I'll just wait

It's been stayed, pending the outcome of the OFT test case. Which I suppose was inevitable

Exactly the same defence as the ones in that thread. So I just wait a bit, ok

My letter from Optima is literally exactly the same - only the amount differs. Point 8 is interesting - saying the charges 'do reflect and are proportionate to the Defendant's administrative expenses', when we all know they clearly dont! Even Halifax have stopped saying that. lol