Recent CCJ - Advice Needed

Coupon-mad

Tell them no, you'll seek your full costs at the hearing, which are the £313 court fee and travel costs to and from Aberdeen which is c£xxx in train fares and a day's loss of salary or leave which is £xxx

Total £xxx

Tell them they had their chance when you first asked them to consent to the set aside application and they unreasonably refused. This will be pointed out to the judge as a course of conduct that has been wholly unreasonable from start to finish. As such you'll seek the above costs.

If they want to minimise their losses they can pay back £313 by the end of next week and agree to drop the claim because it has no merit. They should also note that the Defendant permanently stays in Aberdeen as their domicile since 2024 (after living in France, not England). Aberdeen is outside of E&W court jurisdiction and DCB Legal had a legal and Code of Practice duty to trace the Aberdeen address at the time, and didn't.

If they fail to agree, pay £313 and provide a suitable consent order to sign, you'll attend the hearing.

cda17

Reply sent:

"Dear ####,

Thank you for your email and for providing your client's revised proposed Consent Order.

I have considered the proposal carefully but am unable to agree to it in its current form.

As you will be aware, shortly after I became aware of the judgment I invited your client to consent to setting it aside. Your client was only prepared to do so on the basis that I first paid the judgment debt together with the consent order fee, amounting to £408.56. I did not consider those terms to be reasonable and, as a result, had no realistic alternative but to make an application to the Court by way of an N244 at my own expense.

As a direct consequence, I incurred the court application fee of £313. It is only now, after my application has been processed and a hearing has been listed, that your client has agreed to consent to the judgment being set aside without requiring payment of the judgment debt and associated costs.

Had your client agreed to a consent order on reasonable terms when I first requested one, the N244 application and associated court fee would have been unnecessary. It is therefore my position that the £313 application fee should be reimbursed.

Accordingly, I am willing to resolve this matter by consent provided that your client agrees to:

1. Reimburse my £313 N244 application fee; and
2. Amend the proposed Consent Order to reflect that agreement.

If those amendments are agreed, I will sign the revised Consent Order immediately so that it can be filed with the Court and the hearing vacated.

If your client is unwilling to agree to those terms, I intend to proceed with the hearing listed for 10 August 2026, where I will invite the Court to determine both my application and the issue of costs.

At the hearing, I will seek recovery of:

• The £313 N244 application fee;
• My reasonable travel costs from Aberdeen; and
• My reasonable loss of earnings or annual leave incurred in attending the hearing.

I will also invite the Court to consider whether your client's conduct, in requiring me to incur the £313 application fee before subsequently agreeing to a consent order on materially different terms, justifies an award of costs in my favour.

In the interests of avoiding further costs and unnecessary use of the Court's time, I remain willing to resolve this matter by consent. If your client wishes to do so, please confirm by 5 August 2026 that it will reimburse my £313 application fee and provide a revised Consent Order reflecting that agreement.

Failing that, I look forward to presenting my application and supporting evidence to the Court at the hearing.

Yours sincerely,

####"

Coupon-mad

Good, but just to make sure you put the case properly to the court, you don't need to justify anything to get a costs award in your favour.

You don't need to show they behaved unreasonably because with default CCJs, the case has never yet been allocated to the small claims track.

Take this crib sheet with you to the hearing:

If the judge or the C's rep wrongly says:

"Pursuant to CPR 27.14, costs are not ordinarily applicable to Small Claims."

That's irrelevant because this isn't a small claims track (costs restricted) hearing.

This is about setting aside a default judgment (exactly like VCS v Carr) and was not allocated to the Small Claims track at the point when the £313 fee was incurred.

As such, the Small Claims track limits simply do not apply.

VCS v Carr (which upheld DJ Iyer's first judgment including costs … at Manchester Court) is the Court of Appeal binding authority here. Mr Carr won and his costs were awarded in full, including the £313 fee.

The cases are on all fours:

A parking firm, VCS had failed to comply with the CPRs and Industry Code of Practice by issuing a claim to an old address without doing the 'soft address trace' check first (which doesn't require a 'reason to believe' that a person has moved).

The clause is mandatory in the industry's Joint Code of Practice in all cases prior to litigation, and it's based on the Government's statutory Code which was 'temporarily' withdrawn in 2022 and is about to be reintroduced this year by the new MHCLG (that clause isn't looking likely to be touched; it wasn't raised in the public consultation). So the failure to do a soft trace - an automated 'sweep' of cases which costs less than 30 pence, in bulk - is:

• a clear breach of the rules in the parking sector,
• is wholly unreasonable,
• does not 'permit of a reasonable explanation' and
• ignoring this clause is plainly likely to cause CCJs, abd
• failure to check an address goes against the Civil Procedure Rules, which is why the Government requires it.

The Court of Appeal Judges in VCS v Carr remarked that a DVLA address "is only a starting point" and they also said that 'not hearing' from the recipient IS in itself likely to be 'reason to believe' that letters may not have been received.

In my case, a Defendant who had moved back from France and was living in Aberdeen was 'there to be found' for the sake of a 29 pence Equifax address trace. I had not lived in Manchester for years and my credit file would have shown that.

In the binding authority. the defendant (Mr Carr) was successful in the Application, making the C liable for costs (r.38.6(1)) which says:

“Unless the court orders otherwise, a claimant who discontinues is liable for the costs which a defendant against whom the claimant discontinues incurred on or before the date on which notice of discontinuance was served on the defendant.”

• This is the "usual rule" and it automatically applies because the claim was not allocated to track, so small claims rules are irrelevant. 
  To depart from that 'usual rule', generally, the claimant must show some form of unreasonable conduct on the part of the defendant, which they have not.
•  In Brookes v HSBC Bank Plc [2011] EWCA Civ 354; [2012], the Court of Appeal provided guidance in the form of key principles which should be considered for the disapplication of CPR 38.6:

• The starting presumption is that the winning party (defendant, here) should recover its costs and the burden is on the claimant to show a good reason for departing from that presumption;

• The fact that the claimant might have succeeded at trial is not itself a sufficient reason for departing from the presumption.

I am the innocent party. I have done nothing wrong and the Claimant has not made a case that I have.

Therefore, the usual rule in CPR 38.6 has not been disapplied so I don't have to prove unreasonable conduct by the Claimants (but I can talk about that too!).

The C is aware of my costs and ten days ago, I gave them a chance to just pay the £313 fee. I also warned them that to attend this hearing, I would have to also incur travel costs from Aberdeen and a full day off work (loss of salary or leave).