Legal issues and court orders

What is a Notice Seeking Possession?

If you owe us more than four weeks’ rent we’ll serve you with a Notice Seeking Possession.  This Notice is a formal way of telling you that you have arrears on your account and that you haven’t kept to the terms of your tenancy agreement.

The Notice will tell you exactly how much rent is owed and that after four weeks we can apply to a county court for a Possession Hearing.

You must contact us straight away to discuss how to repay the debt.  If your rent arrears continue to increase after the Notice has been served, we’ll apply to a county court for a Possession
Hearing.

What is a Possession Hearing?

A Judge listens to you and us, and decides whether you should be evicted.  When we apply to a county court for a Possession Hearing, we’ll write to you and usually visit you.  We’ll tell you what court action involves and about the outcomes of the hearing.  We strongly recommend that you attend court.

There are a number of different decisions that the court can make:

• They can award an immediate (absolute) Possession Order.  This will mean that you have an agreed number of days, normally 28, to clear your rent account.  If you don’t clear your rent account by then,  we can apply to the court for a warrant to evict you.
• If you’ve made an arrangement with us to reduce your arrears and the court thinks that you’ll keep to these payments, then the Possession Order may be suspended.  This means that you have to pay your rent, plus an agreed amount, to reduce your arrears.  As long as you keep to this agreement, we won’t evict you.   However, if you break the agreement, we’ll apply to the court for a warrant to evict you.

At the hearing the court will normally award costs to us. This is to cover the costs we incur. We’ll normally ask that you pay all of our costs.

Eviction

If you don’t pay the rent arrears, as set out in the Possession Order, then your tenancy will end.   We’ll still accept money from you for living in your home, but we won’t class this as rent.

At this stage, we’ll inform you that we intend to apply to the court for a warrant to evict you.  You’ll be advised of the time and date of the eviction.  You can apply to the court for the eviction to be suspended.  The court will suspend the eviction only if you can show that you have tried to reduce your rent arrears and that you would continue to reduce the arrears if the warrant was suspended.