Page 66 - Solving Housing Disputes

scheme eligibility and instructions for accessing the scheme. Advice would need
to be made accessible through a “doorway” built into the relevant online justice
service, replicating the physical doorway to the duty solicitor desk in a physical
court. Any moves in this direction must be carefully piloted and the results of
the pilots properly evaluated. Many members of the Working Party thought that
possession ought to not be subject to continuous online resolution. We
recommend that if the online possession project features a continuous online
resolution process the user must have access to a virtual housing duty
solicitor.

Court closures

3.21 The last decade has seen the court and tribunal estate of England and Wales
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significantly reduced. Closures were initiated to consolidate the estate and
buildings underused and inappropriate for modern use sold off in favour of sites
in better condition. Proceeds from the sale of court and tribunal buildings were
to part-fund the Reform Programme. However, many argue that the sale of
almost half the estate was initiated without due regard for the access to justice
implications of closures at a time when the Reform Programme was years away
from offering a wide array of fully functioning, end-to-end online justice
processes capable of replacing face-to-face hearings. Ultimately, the closure of
the estate in such a way has had a damaging impact on access to justice and the
day-to-day experience of users of the justice systems.

3.22 The proportion of tenants who attend possession hearings has long been
“depressingly low” 166 and our Working Party is concerned that court closures
have exacerbated this problem, particularly for vulnerable respondents to
possession claims who might struggle to cover travel costs to a court outside
their town. For example, the submission from the Association of District Judges

165 Between 2010 and 2018, 162 of 323 magistrates’ courts closed along with 90 of 240 county courts,
28 of 83 tribunal buildings, 17 of 185 family courts and 8 of 92 Crown Court buildings, House of
Commons Briefing Paper CBP 8372, Court Statistics for England and Wales, 27 November 2018.

166 2014 research by the University of Oxford and the University of Hull identified low attendance rates
at possession hearings as attributable to people burying heads in the sand, seeing little point in attending,
landlords and housing officers telling them there was no need to attend, fear or misunderstanding of the
legal system, general apathy and the cost and difficulty of attending. Bright and Whitehouse,
‘Information, Advice & Representation in Housing Possession Cases’, (April 2014) p. 47 available at h
ttps://www.law.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxlaw/housing_possession_report_april2014.pdf

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