Don’t pay this! You just reinforce their predatory practices. How renewals at much higher prices are allowed - no clue!
Something similar happened to a company I know - it expired and was immediately bought by domain squatters, when they found them they were told that it couldn’t be sold back because the squatter had paid $XXXX for and had big plans (I assume it was BS, just a premise to get paid - no site was ever put on the domain)
Solution: they bought the .org version and bought the .com back a year later.
edit:grammar
Thanks for your uninformed opinion/question thing. I’ll assume that you are asking in good faith and simply don’t know… much about the UK.
He isn’t the root cause, but he chose to insert himself by encouraging violence when he hasn’t a fucking clue what he’s talking about either…