This secured dataset includes record-level County Court Judgements from May 2015 onwards for England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands. The data is currently available up to 2023.

Data included for each type of debtor (England and Wales - other jurisdications may have less data):

• Consumer/ Commercial
• Corporate/ Non-Corporate
• Value of judgement
• Debtor and creditor details
• Location details

Record level data is only available through the CDRC secure facilities - the JDI in UCL. LSOA level aggregate secured data can be made available for use through the UCL Data Safe Haven virtual trusted research environment.

The aggregate level LSOA data from 2015 to 2023 include.

• Total number of judgements
• Total value of judgements
• Average value of judgement
• Number of CCJs with a value less than £250
• Number of CCJs with a value less than £500
• Number of CCJs with a value less than £1,000
• Number of CCJs with a value greater than £1,000

The data aggregated to a MSOA level is available as a Safeguarded product.

Potential topics for study include:

• Work on a way to derive and publish a set or range of economic health indicators
• Predict the future trend of these economic health indices
• Use data to highlight exceptions and process inefficiencies in public sector entities e.g. exception reporting on court timelines, outcomes that are outside expected benchmarks, highlighting court inefficiencies, bottlenecks or process flaws
• Improve existing data accuracy and gaps e.g. impute missing or inaccurate data
• Explore issues around CCJs and fraud – tackle the myth of the ‘unsound’ CCJ
• The effect of politics on indebtedness, what relationships are there between Government, national political representation, local representation and indebtedness?
• Development of the the Financial Stress Tracker produced by Registry Trust, to include the self-employed, those on low income, those who have been impacted by COVID and other factors.
• A closer insight into those taking out a judgment, for example which are the most forthright? Why might this be? Are there spatial or temporal trends?

For more information, please check out our blog post.