Festive Recap on Possession Hearings 2021

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Festive Recap on Possession Hearings 2021

As we head towards the end of 2021 it might be useful to give an overview of where we are in respect of residential possession claims in England and Wales.

On 3 November, the Master of the Rolls Sir Geoffrey Vos announced the end of the “Overall Arrangement for Possession Proceedings, for all proceedings issued after 1 November 2021. Oddly, this announcement was after the arrangements had already in fact ended! This has meant the system of Review Dates prior to listing substantive hearings, the procedural requirements for those and the prioritisation of cases based on rent arrears levels have gone. In fact, we noticed that these were disappearing a little bit before that and many proceedings issued in the last week of October generally did not have Review hearings listed. However, the MR made clear that “listing policies… are a matter for Designated Civil Judges to decide in the light of local conditions”. So, there is likely to be regional variation as to how possession claims will be dealt with in the next following months.

For claims issued after 1 December 2021 through to 30 June 2022, PD55C has largely been removed. However, Claimants must still comply with the obligation to file a notice with the court setting out any information the Claimant has about the effect of the pandemic on the Defendant or their dependents. However, just as before it is not clear that this notice has a huge effect on the manner in which judges deal with cases and their ability to take them into account are pretty limited in most cases.

One of the big drives with the Covid changes was to get landlords and tenants to engage with one another to try and resolve disputes informally. How effective this was is yet to be seen but numbers of possession claims still remain far below the levels for this time of year pre-Covid so there may be some degree of alternative resolution occurring. There has been a number of new mediation schemes announced for landlord and tenant disputes and the government appears keen to encourage this on an ongoing basis. In fact, there was a recent call for evidence in which the idea of compulsory mediation was actually put forward by the Ministry of Justice, who have tended to resist such calls in the past.

Following the removal of Review hearings, the early stages of possession claims should move a bit faster. As of August 2021, it was reported that the median time from claim to landlord repossession had increased to 59.7 weeks, up from 19.6 weeks in the same period in 2019. There is a long way to go to see this figure returning to pre-Covid levels and it is unlikely that the removal of Review hearings, while helping with this, will be enough.

The government has also stated that there is to be some sort of Christmas and New Year “truce” during which bailiff’s and High Court Enforcement Officers will be asked not to evict people. There has been some degree of “truce” periods in the past, but it tends to be quite limited and regional and is based more on court officers being on leave over Christmas than on any specific arrangement. It has been suggested that an eviction suspension is even more urgent this year, with the increased level of infections and uncertainties posed by the Omicron variant but the announcement long pre-dated the rise of Omicron in the UK.

Precise dates appear to vary depending on reports but appear to be somewhere around the period from 13 December 2021 to 10 January 2022. However, much will depend on regional Bailiff’s officers’ views and the views of the members of the High Court Enforcement Officers’ Association, who have also been asked to observe this.

Whilst the news of this truce has been welcomed by many charities, such a truce is plainly unlawful and it is not open to the government to tell court officers not to enforce court orders without some form of legislation from Parliament to do so. This is not the first time the government has been down this road and my colleagues write at the time about similar events in 2020. While this will be welcomed in some quarters, however it is done, it is also easy to see how this will add to the frustrations of landlords who are already out of pocket due to rent arrears. It will also inevitably add further delays to the struggling court system.

In Wales the court processes are essentially the same, but importantly the Welsh government has retained the longer notice periods for section 8 and 21 notices that were abandoned in England in the autumn. In Wales, section 8 and 21 notices must give six months’ notice unless the notice is a section 8 notice seeking possession on the basis of anti-social behaviour. This will continue until 24 March 2022 which is the maximum period that the Welsh government is able to extend these powers for under the sunset provisions in the Coronavirus Act 2020.

If you require any assistance with obtaining possession of your property from your tenant(s), please contact us and we would be happy to assist you.

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