Justice Committee – Inquiry into the County Court

Nellymoser

Watched online Sarah Sackman Minister for Courts and Legal Services and 3 colleagues give evidence to Justice Committee on 8th April. 

There's a few online articles that summarise the evidence better than I can
https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/county-courts-not-where-we-want-to-be-minister-admits/5122954.article?

There were two things I found surprising:

1) only 2 Committee members out of 10 actually turned up to question the Minister. 

2) it was said that 65% of County Court judgments are default judgments 

The MoJ ran a consultation on Default County Court Judgments in 2017 looks like whatever measures (if any) were put in place to address this problem have not been very successful.

I've now sent a FOI to MoJ requesting copy of the MoJ summary of responses received to that 2017 consultation and last 5yrs figures for CC claims, default judgments and applications to set aside. (Yearly Statistical Data was shown in consultation for 2005 - 2017).

Car1980

The 2017 thing was a Theresa May initiative that she soon lost interest in once it was out of the news by the sounds of it.

Nellymoser

Maybe she lost interest when she learned what a nice little earner CCJs set aside applications were.

2016/17:
Number of applications 44,326 each costing £255.

Umkomaas

Nellymoser said:

Maybe she lost interest when she learned what a nice little earner CCJs set aside applications were.

2016/17:
Number of applications 44,326 each costing £255.

= £11,303,130!  💷. And now it's £303 a pop!

Coupon-mad

Now £313 a pop... 

ParkingMad

@Nellymoser said:

I've now sent a FOI to MoJ requesting last 5yrs figures for CC claims, default judgments and applications to set aside. 

The MoJ publish quarterly figures here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/civil-justice-statistics-quarterly

Gr1pr

Over one million default judgments must show that the system is flawed,  pity that there is no number for defective service of papers 

Car1980

Absolutely ludicrous.

Such figures are actually going to affect the economy of the country. That's a lot of mortgage and loan profit down the drain.

LDast

This interactive tool is good for filtering and then doing analysis of the data:

Civil Justice Statisics Dashboard

For example, you can extract that in Q4 2024, there were 361,208 money claims. You can even drill down to the number of hearings in each court.

Interestingly, of the 438.9K total number of claims in Q4 2024, the bulk were money claims (361,208) of which 331,803 of those were issued through the CNBC.

pinkelephant12

The Justice Committee has published their very critical report on the work of the County Court:

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmselect/cmjust/677/report.html