This is a question to the blog clinic from Joanne who is a landlord.
Our tenants have been given 3 months notice and served a S21. They were supposed to move out today but are refusing, forcing us to start legal proceedings.
It is our only residence (we have been living abroad) and we are now forced to live in a caravan with our 2 children, 2 dogs and 3 cats.
My husband and myself are unable to work as we both work from home and our daughter is unable to attend school. How long would an accelerated eviction take, given our circumstances please?
Answer
It doesn’t work like that. You have to follow the proper procedure which does I am afraid take several months.
Although you are in a difficult situation, the property is your tenants’ home and they have rights – specifically the right to stay in the property until evicted by bailiffs. It would be unfair generally if tenants in rented properties had fewer rights if their landlords needed the property back quickly.
So you won’t be able to get a quicker possession order. See more about this here.
It generally takes about six to eight weeks to get a possession order using the accelerated possession order, depending on how busy the courts are – there is a real live example here.
However where your circumstances will count is if, after the possession order has been made, your tenants apply to the court asking for more time.
You will then be able to oppose their application on the basis that you need the property to live in yourself and explain your circumstances to the Judge.
Joanne,
The fact that you are asking this question makes me think that you have not had any professional help with your possession claim or S21 notice. If this is the case can I suggest you get some asap as many people have claims thrown out by the courts because their S21s are invalid.
As Dave says, I would highly recommend getting professional help with the s.21 claim, especially if your accommodation circumstances make it particularly important that your claim go through first time.
If you can’t afford legal advice it may be worth seeking assistance from the local housing authority. Particularly since if you are homeless with children then it’s highly likely that they would have a duty to assist you with housing under part 7 Housing Act 1996. (This wouldn’t be ideal as in a desperate situation it would almost certainly involve temporary accommodation, but this is all the more reason why it would be in the council’s interest to give you advice to try and head that off.)
I issued a S21 Notice on 24 February.
I have done every step promptly – following the Landlord Law guidance.
I am now waiting for the Bailiffs appointment. So that will be just over 6 months from start to finish.
Fortunately, I’m not waiting to move in to the house because it’s not a quick process. The term ‘accelerated’ is rather misleading!
It certainly is! There are a lot of advantages to using the accelerated procedure but speed is not really one of them.
The accelerated procedure should not take 6 months (not including the S21 notice period) in my experience – but it does depend on any backlog of work that a court has at anyone time. It is important from a landlord’s point of view to ensure that a tenant should not be able to deny that proceedings have been issued, for example. At the end of the given defence response time the landlord should a soon as possible contact the court to ensure that the application moves up the pile, if at all possible.
A tenant may for example seek an oral hearing rather than a paper process. At this stage the landlord needs to ensure that they can counter any argument that may be put forward by the tenant. Even if an oral hearing is given a DJ will still award possession in 14 days. At the expiry of the 14 days don’t delay on the bailiff application unless there is strong evidence by the tenant that they will move out in a given period.
Most of my work involved defending proceedings, many applications either failed or were delayed due to avoidable errors
https://www.landlordzone.co.uk/news/court-bailiffs-taking-months-to-evict
County Court bailiffs, along with the courts themselves, can take up to 45 weeks to evict a tenant, that’s according to Ministry of Justice figures, statistics for possession claims for the first quarter on 2016.
According to The Sheriff’s Office, overall there is a slight decrease in the number of possession claims, but the really shocking fact says David Carter, the CEO, is the news that the average time from issuing a claim to eviction by a county court bailiff is 45 weeks!
The length of time suggested by the survey will of course include all of the claims for possession made and not just those using the accelerated procedure that is the subject in this question. I am in any event quite sceptical that even an average of all possession claims would take up to 45 weeks. That would suggest either some catastrophic collapse of the court system, on average most contested cases not being clear cut in the majority of cases.
Certainly it is not in judges’ interests to have cases dragging on that long given that they are also subject to efficiency and throughput tests. The judges in the 2014 study by University of Oxford indicated that judges were very keen to speed up the process, but the main cause for delay in claims by private landlords – as opposed to social lettings or mortgage companies, was major failings by landlords in preparation and presentation of cases.
As was plaintively stated at page 72 by one judge ” There are some landlord’s who come in, and it is a Ground 8 claim and you say to them “where is the rent statement?”. “Well what were the arrears,.at the date of service of the notice?”. “Oh I don;’t know”
“They have not got a clue”.
Or another comment by a judge. “Shambolic. Don’t know what they are doing. They can’t fill in the forms, they don’t plead the grounds and the notices are all wrong…..It’s all hopeless”
(Housing Advice and Representation in Housing Possession Cases. Bright & Whitehouse 2014).
The study also established that solicitors who do not specialise in landlord and tenant work also got basic procedure wrong. Amongst other things, such issues add to unnecessary delay and frustrate landlords,courts and others
The MoJ quarterly statistics (note, not just a survey) are about as reputable as you can get Colin. It may be difficult to sift the accelerated claims but the average of all possession claims is quite clear.
Anecdotally, all my s21 claims have taken less than 6 months.
There is nearly always a very good reason behind a “no fault” section 21 eviction.
It is the majority of decent, honest tenants who ultimately pay the price for this failed system.
Who is liable for the costs of a accelerated procedure ?the landlord or the tenant?
The landlord has to pay them – but if he wins his case the Judge will order that the defendant pays at least part of the costs.
However if the landlord has acted in person this will probably just be the court fees. If hs has used solicitors, in most cases ‘fixed’ costs will be awarded which will almost certainly be less than the real costs charged by his solicitors.