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I'd have thought that, unless you have agreed in advance to pay collection costs, they can sing for them. Your lease may have more information.
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If you've been been doing the same thing for the past ten years and they haven't corrected you then they're going to have a pretty tough time enforcing a change out of the blue. IANAL but I think the principle you want to be looking at is estoppel.
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For some reason I’m thinking it’s not enforceable. The only way for them to recover is via small claims/court judgement.
So you could argue that £265 is an abuse of process in the matter
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There should always be a letter before action.
Do you have a copy of the service charge demand? If it doesn't include a list of your rights and their obligations under CALRA it's not valid, and you can effectively consider yourself not to have been served correctly - ie you don't have to pay until they send it properly.
CAB suck at this stuff but https://www.lease-advice.org/ will analyse your lease and tell you what is and isn't payable by it. Usually admin / legal charges like this aren't payable without an explicit clause - and there usually isn't one. Book a telephone appointment if you can
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NotThamesWater
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@Dammit
Our service charge is invoiced twice per year, for e.g. in December 2019 for the first half of 2020, and then in July 2020 for the second half of 2020.
We've paid, since 2010, on what are known as the English quarter days, once per quarter.
So, this year we were issued the service charge in December 2019, and the first half was due to be paid at the end of this month, the second half at the end of June.
I'd actually paid the first half in February this year when I paid the section 20, so we had £711 outstanding, which would have been cleared by standing order at the end of this month, and actually putting us a quarter ahead of the schedule that we'd paid by for the past ten years.
Why am I writing this? Because they have sent our arrears to a firm of solicitors for collection, adding ~£265 to the costs for legal fees.
I don't have anything in writing covering the arrangement to pay quarterly against a six month charge, but we'd done it for ten years - does having done that for so long give me anything I can rely on when speaking with the solicitors?
Should there have been a letter before action? They have gone straight to a demand for payment with the legal fees on top.