We had a letter from a London county court this
week in response to a routine request.
Anyone who has ever seen a notice of issue within
the accelerated possession procedure knows that if the defendant doesn’t file a
defence then you can make a simple request for the court to make a possession
order.
It’s right to say that the request should then be referred
to a judge to decide whether or not to make an order without a hearing, but the
procedure and entitlement is clear enough.
The main component of the letter we received is as
follows:-
‘I write to advise you that your application
was referred to the district judge on the 10 June 2013. Once the matter has been referred to the judge
there is no target time for the judge to process these matters, the judge will
review these files as soon as they are able, bearing in mind that they must
deal with these matters in addition to their normal court lists. You will be notified of the outcome of this
referral once we have the file back.’
The letter might just as well have read:-
‘Your very
routine request for an order by default has been referred to one of our
judges. They’re all very busy dealing
with cases that have been listed for a hearing so forget all that nonsense in
the Civil Procedure Rules about dealing economically and on paper wherever
possible.
The
judge who will be dealing with this will be doing it in his or her spare time
so it will be done when it gets done and don’t bother to pester us to tell you
when your client can recover possession of his property from the tenant who isn’t
paying him anything. Just be grateful
that anybody is prepared even to think about
spending time to look at this.’
“No target time”?
Why not? Isn’t this an immediate
and obvious invitation to a black hole?
So where does this come from? My bet is that it’s at the instigation of a
judge or judges who are already ridiculously overworked. The cunning observation that there is no
target time is just one giveaway.
I have much sympathy and it’s understandable - but
it’s not good enough. The answer as it
ever is now is to foist the problem back on the court users and tell them to
lump it.
It’s another path to disillusionment with court-based
resolution (unless you’re a wealthy enough litigator to afford entry to the
Rolls (Royce) building.
For all but rich litigation tourists, it’s
the same policy approach. We in
Government don’t yet have time to remove the law that entitles you to pursue
these remedies but we’re going to do it and so in the meantime we’ll just break
every piece of the machinery we can.
