Court delays "costing agents and landlords thousands"

The tenant eviction service Landlord Action says under-resourced county courts have backlogs which are costing landlords dear as they await consent to evict.

The firm says the problem is now so acute it occupies the complete working hours of one of its staff, chasing up courts.

The vast majority of residential possession claims are dealt with in the county courts and enforced by county court bailiffs. However, Landlord Action claims that government spending cuts, a surge in possession cases some 15 per cent above the 2013 level, and the insistence by some courts that bailiffs must no longer act alone, have combined to create serious delays in the eviction process.

We are forever chasing courts for updates on possession orders, Notice of Issues or bailiff appointments. By the courts' own admission, cases are getting overlooked, administrative errors are being made and there are simply not enough bailiffs to support the number of cases, leading to long delays claims Julie Herbert, head of legal at Landlord Action.

The firm says some landlords are losing thousands of pounds in unpaid rent and racking up additional legal costs as cases get longer. It insists that some landlords, who are unable to meet mortgage payments as a result, even face possible repossession, in addition to the added risk of their property being left uninhabitable by current tenants, where communication has broken down.

Herbert says another common frustration is when a possession order has been granted and a bailiff appointment confirmed, but the tenant makes a last minute application because they have nowhere else to go.

The standard procedure is that a hearing has to be considered by a judge. We recently learnt that many of these applications don't even reach a judge, who would have the authority to strike out an application based on the information already provided. Instead, the knee jerk reaction of court staff is to set down a hearing date, in which everyone is dragged to court, only for a judge to pass that the application has no merit she says.