Q. Years ago, we had a small family business. We got along with our landlord, paid rent on time, and signed up for a further five-year l ease just before Covid hit. Between that and other factors, we had to walk away from the business. We spoke with the landlord, who wasn’t impressed but knew we had no real choice. Recently, we had a document delivered to us saying that we were in arrears of an ‘instalment order’. What is it and what can we do?
Dear Reader,
It is important to note that the terms of your tenancy are contained within the lease agreement you would have signed. It would be most unusual for such a tenancy agreement to allow a tenant/landlord unilaterally break the lease without showing any cause.
While there is often a ‘break’ clause, those can usually only be exercised on giving notice and only at certain times, i.e. it is not sufficient for you to simply hand back the keys and walk away.
In legal terms, you have attempted to surrender the property. Strictly speaking, your obligation to pay the rent continued up to the lease’s end date. If your landlord agreed to let you leave the lease that is one thing, but it difficult to prove in the absence of a formal written surrender.
The landlord is entitled to make efforts to re-let the property, and can seek to recover rent from you up to the date that the property is re-let.
That said, your landlord would have had to have sued you in order to seek to recover the rent. They would have had to serve an initial legal letter, serve a civil summons, a warning letter, and then serve the judgement – a court order confirming that the debt is owed.
The next step would be for the landlord to serve a ‘summons for attendance of a debtor’. This would compel you to attend court. A hearing would have taken place to examine you as to your means to repay the debt, and that resulted in an instalment order – a court order compelling you to repay a certain sum at a certain time.
If the notice that you are in arrears of the order is the first document you have received, clearly something has gone wrong during the process.
You should make contact with your solicitor to resolve this matter. Failure to act on this may result in the court issuing a warrant for your arrest for failure to comply with a court order. The matter should not be ignored, but dealt with as a matter of urgency.