Asked by: Lord Bishop of Chelmsford (Bishops - Bishops)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many county court judgements there have been for private renters for non-payment of arrears, each year for the past five years, across England and Wales.
Answered by Lord Bellamy - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
A landlord of a privately rented property may apply to the court either as part of an application seeking repossession of the property, or separately to eviction action, for a county court judgement seeking repayment of rent arrears from their tenant.
Our case management systems do not record what a judgement debt relates to, this information is only recorded in the particulars of claim which would require manual reviewing of court files to extract and as such could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.
Published quarterly statistics on volumes of county court judgements can be found here – https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/civil-justice-statistics-quarterly#2022
Published quarterly statistics on possession volumes can be found here - https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/mortgage-and-landlord-possession-statistics
At the onset of the COVID-19 public health emergency, the Government took unprecedented action to protect tenants from eviction resulting in the majority of possession claims being stayed until 20 September 2020. This meant that possession claims could not progress through the court process including hearings and enforcement action by way of evictions. Since the lifting of the stay, private rented possession claims have largely returned to pre-covid volumes, but social landlord possession claims remain supressed and are currently sitting at around 60% of their pre-covid volumes.