Possession claims on-line national conference
Thistle Westminster, London
Speech by Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs
Vera Baird QC MP
29 January 2007
The fundamental objective of Lord Chancellor's breakthrough strategy for the civil courts is:
- To deliver a more flexible cost base to support the more targeted delivery of services.
- To remove unnecessary work from frontline offices through the greater use of electronic transactional services e.g. PCOL
- The Lord Chancellor as part of his breakthrough strategy is determined to move the bulk of the HMCS's civil business to electronic channels.
- Why? Because it is cheaper and more efficient for the courts and the customer and will improve the service we deliver.
Benefits include realising savings and improving customer service by:
- Reducing unnecessary administrative burdens on local courts.
- Providing alternatives to the manual submission of claims through promoting electronic claim submission as the preference.
- PCOL delivers both of these.
- PCOL complements HMCS's existing electronic channels - MCOL and the CPC.
- PCOL rolled out nationally on 30 October 06 and is HMCS's newest internet based service.
- PCOL is a simple, convenient and secure way of making or responding to certain types of claim for recovery of property
- It is also a foretaste of where we intend to go with claim issue.
- Most claims will be issued electronically and only where it is absolutely necessary will claims be made over the counter on paper.
The key message is that online will be the norm. Manual processes will be the exception.
- PCOL is suitable for possession claims
- that are for arrears of rent or money due under a mortgage only - including interest and costs.
- where there is an address for service in England or Wales
- where the claimant can provide a postcode for the property to be recovered and has an e-mail address
- For mortgage claims it is important to note that it is currently only available for claims where there is a single account.
- We fully accept therefore that it will not necessarily be available for all of your claims but it will be available for a large majority of them.
- PCOL allows you to access essential court forms online to make and issue a possession claim electronically direct from your desktop.
- Online services with centralised printing and dispatch of claims are cheaper to administer than local courts.
- If a majority of civil business could be issued online the cost of running the courts would fall significantly and so would the costs that you need to pay in the way of court fees.
- But benefits can only be realised if the system is used.
- To encourage use of these systems and to better recognise the savings that are already being delivered by our existing IT systems, HMCS will be issuing a new Court Fees consultation next month that will propose a radical re-organisation of the civil fee structure.
- For the first time we will ensure that the fee charged at a particular point better represents the actual cost of the service applied for. This will include differentiated feed for electronic service.
- In practice this will mean that the cost of a paper claims submitted over the counter at a local court will rise but the fee to issue a claim by PCOL will decrease by up to 25-30%.
- In addition to the proposed fees discounts, users of PCOL will benefit from not having to complete paper application forms and not having to post or take these to their local court.
- With PCOL, there is also less need to contact the court about the progress of a claim. instead, you can view the progress of your claims on line.
- The PCOL website is accessible 24hrs a day, 7days a week enabling users to issue in their own time from the convenience of their home or office.
- As well as claim issue, you can also issue warrants of possession on-line,
- PCOL includes, for the first time for HMCS, a Direct Debit Facility.
- This will enhance the convenience of the site particularly for high volume issuers by significantly reducing internal administrative costs as a result of having to write possibly hundreds of cheques.
- PCOL and its processes are still in their infancy.
- We want to make this work for you and are prepared to listen to what you have to say and where possible make changes to assist you.
- Already we have made necessary changes where possible. For example, we have changed the amount of evidence that you need to supply online. The previous rule required a schedule of payments made in the last two years to be submitted online. Now you only need to provide details of the last three payments.
- Online services are the future and I commend the system to you.
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