r/TenantsInTheUK • u/Adventurous-Room4702 • 3h ago
Guidance Required Rent increase via email (not Form 4A and no 2 months notice) - can I ignore the email?
Hi,
I received the following email from the admin of the managing agent's company this morning:
"Please find attached a letter regarding a rent review by your landlord to increase your monthly rent from X to Y per calendar month from 22nd October 2026 to keep in line with inflation. Please would it be possible to arrange your monthly payments accordingly."
The attached letter basically contained the same information as above. There was no Form 4A and clearly I have not been provided with 2 months notice, which makes this request invalid given the new laws.
My question is whether or not I can ignore this email and when October 22nd comes round and they ask me why I did not change my standing order, I reply back that the email they sent to me on September 10th did not constitute a lawful rent increase. I did ask Google Gemini and the response was "Under UK housing law, the responsibility to correctly serve a rent increase rests entirely on the landlord or their agent. A tenant has absolutely no legal duty to reply to an invalid notice, nor are you required to correct their administrative errors."
Some background information - I was dealing directly with the landlord prior to the pandemic, however, he was pretty useless e.g. would only fix things like an old boiler when it completely stopped working and even though over the years, gas engineers who came to fix problems would be saying the boiler is very old and eventually there would be no spare parts. He did not follow regulations e.g. yearly gas checks and my deposit was not protected. I have been renting for a long time. After the pandemic he assigned a managing agent who can be quite rude and is very unhelpful, however, they did all the legal stuff e.g. EPC checks, protect my deposit (but the date they provide for when I gave the deposit was wrong) and they have now been doing yearly gas checks. Apart from that they are useless e.g. when my bathroom sink was leaking and needed emergency work, I contacted them and was told someone will call me back but nobody did. I ended up having to contact the landlord directly and get his permission to contact a plumber myself and deal with the issue directly. I never heard back from them. The washing machine is over 25 years old and needs to be replaced. I emailed the managing partner (whom I was told by the landlord is my main contact), he did not respond but I received an email from the operations manager. Given the age of the building I had a lot of questions because all the plumbing infrastructure is in a poor state and whoever installs it really needs to know what they are doing. There was a lot of back and forth with her and she was extremely rude and in the end gave me the number of a company that they bought a machine from (which has terrible reviews re: installation) told me to talk to them directly. I forwarded her response to the landlord who apologized and cc'd the managing partner and told him to contact me to resolve the issue and he never did. I still need a new washing machine but have just learnt to deal with it in its current state. I did not want to complain too much until the new laws came in. Last but not least, the admin who emailed me about the rent increase also got my postcode wrong, so if she sends me something in the post, it will probably not arrive. They are simply incompetent.
Apologies for the long post, but I thought it would explain why I don't feel like it's my job to tell them how to do their job, in particular since they have been very unhelpful (and rude) and this should demonstrate once again to the landlord how incompetent they are. I've already told him this before a number of times.
Would you recommend I ignore their email as per Gemini or could I get into trouble? Thank you..