A Record Quarter at the County Court, and Nine in Ten Judgments Were Defaults. What a Hire Desk Should Diarise on Issue.

The Ministry of Justice has published its busiest quarter since the county court series began. Most of it is parking. The part that matters to a hire desk is what happened after issue: 368,000 judgments, and 94% of them entered because the defendant said nothing.

The county court received 571,000 new claims between April and June 2026, up 11% on the same quarter last year and the highest figure since the MoJ’s quarterly series began. Judgments rose 26% to 368,000. Of those, 94% were default judgments.

Two points of housekeeping. The figures are the MoJ’s Civil Justice Statistics Quarterly for April to June 2026, published on 3 September, and the latest quarter is provisional. And the record is not a motor story. The MoJ says the rise is likely driven by claims to recover private parking charges. Claims under £500 rose 21% to 245,000, and personal injury claims fell 4% to 11,000.

What do the county court figures say about hire claims?

Directly, very little. The useful material is in the sections on defences, judgments and waiting times, which apply to any money or damages claim whatever it is for.

Claims defended were 14% of claims issued, stable at 82,000. On hire claims against insurers the proportion will be far higher. The point is that most of the system runs on defendants not responding.

94% of judgments were default judgments, up from 91% in early 2023. The MoJ’s own comment is that the jump in judgments is the knock-on effect of the jump in claims.

Median issue to trial was 55.9 weeks on the fast, intermediate and multi-track, 6.1 weeks faster than a year ago. Small claims took 41.0 weeks, 0.7 weeks slower.

What is a default judgment on a hire claim?

A default judgment is judgment without trial, entered because the defendant failed to file an acknowledgment of service or a defence (CPR 12.1). In plain terms, it is money the defendant conceded by silence.

Two things follow. The court does not enter it for you. The claimant obtains it by filing a request once the deadline has passed and the conditions in CPR 12.3 are met, and if nobody files the request the concession sits there uncollected. And silence has a date attached. Judgment requested too early must be set aside, so its value depends on somebody knowing the exact day it becomes available and acting on it.

Which form you use depends on how the claim was pleaded. A claim for a specified sum goes on Form N225 and judgment is for that sum plus costs (CPR 12.4 and 12.5). A claim for damages to be assessed goes on Form N227 and judgment is for an amount to be decided by the court, which means a further hearing to fix the figure (CPR 12.5(3) and 12.8). Most hire claims pleaded in tort are in the second category, so the diary does not stop at the judgment date.

None of this is legal advice. It is the process as the rules set it out.

What should a hire desk diarise on the day of issue?

Six dates and one name, entered on the day of issue.

1. The date of service. Under CPR 6.14 a claim form served within the UK is deemed served on the second business day after the step required by CPR 7.5 is completed, for example posting it. Write down the deemed date, not the date it went in the envelope.

2. The acknowledgment deadline. Fourteen days after service of the particulars of claim (CPR 10.3).

3. The first default judgment date. The day after the acknowledgment deadline expires, if no acknowledgment, defence or admission has arrived (CPR 12.3(1)). This is the date most desks think of as the default judgment date. It is the first of two.

4. The defence deadline, if an acknowledgment is filed. Twenty eight days after service of the particulars (CPR 15.4(1)(b)). Acknowledging buys the defendant a further 14 days and nothing more.

5. The second default judgment date. The day after the defence deadline expires with no defence filed (CPR 12.3(2)). If the parties agreed an extension under CPR 15.5, which can be up to a further 28 days and which the defendant must notify to the court in writing, move this date and record who agreed it.

6. The backstop. Six months after the end of the defence period, if there is still no defence, no admission and no request for judgment, the claim is stayed automatically (CPR 15.11). Lifting it needs a Part 23 application and an explanation for the delay. A file that hits this date is a file where the diary failed.

The name. Who files the request. Not a team, a person. Default judgments go unrequested because everybody assumed someone else was watching the date.

Three checks before the request goes in, because a judgment wrongly entered must be set aside (CPR 13.2).

• If you served the claim form yourself, the certificate of service must be on the court file (CPR 6.17).
• No admission with a request for time to pay, and no outstanding defendant application to strike out or for summary judgment (CPR 12.3(3)).
• The deadline has expired on the deemed service date, not the date you think the claim was received.

A default judgment can still be set aside under CPR 13.3 if the defendant shows a real prospect of defending or another good reason, and the court must consider how promptly they applied. So it is not always the end of the claim. It is a position of strength from which any set-aside application has to be argued, with the burden of explaining the silence on the party that was silent.

Which hire invoices should go to issue?

The ones where the evidence is complete and the clock has run. Not the oldest, and not the largest.

The temptation on aged debt is to issue on age. Fewer cases are reaching trial, so more of what you issue will be decided on what is in the file at the moment of issue, whether by default, by settlement in the shadow of the deadlines above, or at a hearing to assess the amount.

A workable filter, applied before the claim form is drafted:

• Liability position recorded, with the date of the other side’s last stated position.
• Hire ended and the period evidenced with dated notes for each stage of the repair or total loss decision. A hearing to assess damages looks at the same material a trial would.
• Rate evidence gathered during the hire, not reconstructed for the claim.
• Impecuniosity documents in, if pleaded. We have written on why so few files prove impecuniosity. The files that lose do so on evidence and timing, not on the law.
• GTA status checked. A GTA invoice under £10,000 unresolved past day 60 may be eligible for the binding ADR route rather than issue. That decision belongs in the filter, not after the claim form has gone.

A file that fails any of those converts silence into a judgment you may then struggle to hold at the assessment stage. Fix the file first.

How do faster trial dates change the settle-versus-issue calculation?

They shrink the discount a claimant accepts for not waiting, but by less than the headline suggests.

For fast, intermediate and multi-track claims the median wait is 55.9 weeks, 6.1 weeks faster than a year ago. It is still more than a year, and every offer made in that year prices the wait in. The Consumer Legal Association’s chair noted after publication that one quarter can fluctuate and it is too early to call the trend reversed. Treat the direction as encouraging rather than banking it.

For small claims the picture went the other way. The median wait rose 0.7 weeks to 41.0 weeks. Most defended hire invoices under £10,000 sit on that track, so for that book the queue got marginally longer.

Two conclusions. On the fast-track book, an offer built on the assumption that you would rather take 70% now than wait rests on a weaker assumption than it did. On the small claims book, 41 weeks to a hearing is the reason the GTA route exists.

Where does the GTA ADR route fit?

For GTA invoices under £10,000, the diary date that matters is day 61, not day 14.

The GTA’s binding ADR route was expected to open in September 2026 for GTA hire invoices under £10,000 still unresolved at day 61. Referral is voluntary case by case, and once a file is in, the decision binds. We covered what the binding route changes at day 61 in detail. As at the date of this piece we have not seen confirmation from the GTA that the route is live, so confirm before building it into a diary.

The county court figures give the route its context. A GTA-eligible file that goes to court sits in a small claims queue that is 41 weeks long and getting longer. A binding specialist decision within weeks of day 61 is a different proposition in both directions: faster to a good outcome on a well-evidenced file, faster to a bad one on a thin file. So two diaries run in parallel: day 61 on the GTA book, the six dates above on everything else.

What we would do this month

Pull every claim issued in the last six months with no defence filed and no judgment requested, and check each against its CPR 15.11 date. Anything within eight weeks of an automatic stay goes to the top of the list.

Then pull the diary template used on issue. If it does not carry the deemed service date, both default judgment dates and a named owner, change the template. Then run the filter above on whatever is queued for issue.

CreditHire Assist sits on the correspondence side of this. When the defendant does respond, and on a hire claim they usually will, the tool analyses what the insurer is arguing and builds a case-law-backed reply in minutes rather than the hour or more that manual TPI responses tend to cost. It does not run your court diary. It makes sure that when the silence ends, the reply is ready. See how that works, or get in touch to try it on one of your own files.

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