Polly Toynbee’s excellent exposé of county court eviction proceedings implicates larger issues around the role of these courts in assembly-line debt enforcement (I spent a day in a court where ‘no-fault’ evictions reach 10 an hour. Whose fault is this, Rishi Sunak?, 15 December). Historically, this is not a new phenomenon: in 1910, county court debt cases in West Hartlepool were dispensed with at the rate of one every 85 seconds. But debt enforcement in these courts is now part of an international “overindebtedness industry” that includes debt buyers (firms that buy debts at pennies in the pound and claim for the full debt amount), debt technology platforms and specialist law firms.
Data I got from the Ministry of Justice on county court customers making multiple civil money claims indicates that 10 legal firms represent 80% of these claims, the great majority of which are undefended debt claims resulting in default judgments. Moreover, a number of these law firms are integrated with credit management and international debt buyers, often owned by private equity firms.
Toynbee points to the imbalance in representation in eviction cases, and the failure of the government to reform section 21. However, what has hardly been considered are the issues of consumer protection and access to justice, such as the dangers of collection on unsubstantiated or inaccurate debts or firms pursuing claims past the statute of limitations, which have been created by the growth of this industry. While the Financial Conduct Authority has identified some of these issues, it is time for more systematic scrutiny of the debt-buying industry.
Iain Ramsay
Emeritus professor of law, University of Kent
As a long-retired solicitor who specialised in housing law, I was terribly saddened to read Polly Toynbee’s piece on the lack of legal advice and representation in courts where possession claims are heard. The final paragraph was particularly poignant. It described the plight of an older woman who was being evicted under section 21 from premises where she had run a bar and lived above it. Neither Toynbee nor the judge nor the kind-hearted Shelter advocate seemed aware that a tenancy of premises for mixed business and residential use can never normally be subject to a section 21 order, but has solid security of tenure under the 1954 Landlord and Tenant Act.
Such a howler could hardly have been committed in my day – before successive governments worked steadily since the late 1990s to make my kind of legal aid lawyer an all but extinct species.
Christopher Dalton
Peckham, London
As a founder member of the Gingerbread charity for single-parent families in 1970, it feels like nothing has changed over the last 53 years from when I became homeless. I had to take the only accommodation left to us to live in – a dilapidated caravan with no heating or toilet, in a field in Buckinghamshire with my two little children, deserted by their father and my husband, who lost us our home through nonpayment and left the UK for the US simply to avoid paying child maintenance in 1969. We had nothing, and no family to help us.
If I hadn’t pushed so hard for the help of a family friend to take out a flat in his name, I would certainly have had my children removed by the council and we would have had nowhere to go, like these people under section 21 in 2023.
I remember only too well the fear, the depression and the panic of living in that situation, and what it does to children watching their distraught parent. It breaks my heart to see what is happening in 2023, caused by an uncaring, self-serving, out-of-touch government.
Mim Umney-Gray
Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire
