CEL CCJ Set Aside - Support Please!

Coupon-mad

Yes you should respond and tell them you do not agree to any costs being reserved because they have incurred no costs, only you have (£255) and you fully intend to seek an Order that the Claimant shall pay that sum back to you when the set aside application is granted.

henrik777

Probably not but to be honest it'd be a bit rude not to. I'd reply whether in agreement or not.

redredelise

Thanks. 

I feel it's a bit rude to not respond at all, so I'll send something to them.

redredelise

Hi there.
Just to give you an update - telephone hearing for set aside scheduled for 10th August.
Wondering if there is anything in particular I should note for this?
I'll also have a route through the forum to look for anyone's recent experience of a similar situation.

Many thanks 👍🏽

Le_Kirk

redredelise said:

Hi there.
Just to give you an update - telephone hearing for set aside scheduled for 10th August.
Wondering if there is anything in particular I should note for this?
I'll also have a route root through the forum to look for anyone's recent experience of a similar situation.

Make sure you comply (or have complied) with any instructions to submit documents and your telephone/e-mail contact details.

redredelise

Hi all,

I received this from the court that has been sent to them from CEL - 



Any comments on the above would be appreciated - it is certainly good (I assume) that they won't be present at the hearing.

It is basically the same as what CEL sent to me - and I have to admit that I did not respond to them (as they rightly state in the above letter).

Many thanks for the ongoing support 👍🏽

Coupon-mad

I'd be saying as a preliminary matter that CEL (a company with its own in house legal team led by Scott Wilson, a barrister) have compounded their initial unreasonable conduct in not bothering to trace you before issuing a claim, by emailing the court and trying to make submissions in the body of an email without a statement of truth, and in doing so they have also repeated what was a 'without prejudice' offer.  This can have no bearing on the hearing except when it comes to the matter of costs.

Then move on to your evidence that you moved, and that parking firms have been told by the BPA (it's in the CoP) and the DVLA that they must make efforts to trace Defendants before commencing court action.  Relying upon old and known to be unreliable DVLA data is never enough and this abuse by parking firms is so widespread that parking companies were singled out by the MoJ in their consultation about the 85% of small claims that go to default judgments, often due to PPCs using old addresses:

https://consult.justice.gov.uk/digital-communications/default-county-court-judgments-2/supporting_documents/defaultcountycourtjudgmentsconsultation.pdf

Search it for the word 'parking' and you can see that the MoJ know a main cause of this, as they also stated in their press release at the time:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-measures-to-protect-consumers-from-debt-claims

Whilst no action has yet been taken, it is believed this must be because of the impending new framework and Code of Practice coming in Spring 2022, courtesy of the MHCLG who (one hopes) must be liaising with the MoJ to put right the scandal of default CCJs.

henrik777

1 is typical of the PPC industry. DVLA blah blah blah.

Court rules trump the rules for updating a V5.

redredelise

Great. Thank you.

Very handy links.
I will keep you posted on any news.

👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽

redredelise

Hi All.

I had the telephone hearing for the set aside.

It was given under 13.3. and not 13.2.

The judge felt that CEL had a valid judgment and that they are not legally obligated to track people down (the judge didn't say this but it's what he was referring to - and I didn't want to push the issue as I hadn't updated my V5 which I felt the judge would not look favourably on).
So costs were reserved.

The judge did feel that there was enough in the draft defence (he spoke a bit about the lack of any evidence from CEL as they had not sent anything to the court nor were they present) to give the set aside (along with prompt action), which was great.

The next step is to put the defence together for the date the judge set for the defence hearing.

The issue here is that I have done a draft defence which is from the template from @Coupon-mad (the judge said this needs sending to CEL which is fine), but not being legally-minded, a lot of it I don't really understand - particularly if questioned on it at a hearing. So I'm really quite anxious about this next step.

Other points - 

• do I need to tweak the draft defence at all?
• is it better to send the defence to CEL earlier or last minute?
• how do I ensure the CCJ is removed from my credit file - is there anything I need to/can do to speed this up?

Any thoughts always greatly received!