A County Court Judgment (CCJ) is a court order registered against a borrower if they fail to make debt repayments. Issued in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, CCJs enable creditors to recover owed funds. Scotland, however, uses a different process called “enforcing a debt by diligence”, where a decree or order may be issued by a sheriff court if a debtor fails to repay a debt and the pursuer seeks court intervention.
These secure data include record-level County Court Judgements for England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands. Two secure products are available, CCJs at the Lower Layer Super Output Area (LSOA), and individual level records. These data are supplied by the Registry Trust and are available from 2016 onwards with complete coverage for England and Wales.

Data included for each type of debtor (England and Wales complete coverage - other jurisdictions may have less data):
• Consumer/ Commercial
• Corporate/ Non-Corporate
• Value of judgement
• Debtor and creditor details
• Location details
Record level data are only available through our 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 data aggregated at different Census geographies and rounded to the closest five observations is available as a Safeguarded product.

Content

The aggregate level LSOA data for Consumer and Commercial debtor types is avaialable from 2016 onwards and includes:
• 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
For detailed description of the columns contained within the data, see the Variable Dictionary; and for an overview of the characteristics of the data, see the Data Summary. These files can be downloaded from the bottom of this page.

Quality, Representation and Bias

Quarterly data have been aggregated to create an annual dataset. The data covers England and Wales only, with a total of 9 years of data. The individual level records contain each CCJ recorded, whilst the LSOA level dataset may suffer from some missing observations in some years, though with overall very good coverage. Please note: after the release of the 2021 Census, the 2023 dataset has been aggregated to 2021 LSOA geography, whilst the prior years are at 2011 LSOA geography.