What happened during 2.5 days of judicial hearings involving evictions and mortgage repossessions at the Liverpool County Court in 2021?

By John Brace (Editor) and Leonora Brace (Co-Editor)
First publication date: Friday 28th October 2022, 12:00 (BST).

Please note (as the University of Liverpool is mentioned in this piece) the author (John Brace) in the interests of transparency declares that he and his Co-Editor (Leonora Brace) both had University of Liverpool library cards at the time this piece was written and in the case of the author at the time of publication too.

There was a long delay in publishing this piece on this blog as the embargo on publication was put back from that originally notified to us (originally it was September 2021), then it was put back to late October 2021. Unfortunately around then my Co-Editor Leonora (who would normally agree to the published version before publication) fell ill (and sadly died in mid-January 2022). Then, following a period of bereavement in 2022, I broke my arm (twice in 2022 in mid-July and early September 2022) which further reduced available editing capacity, so my apologies for the unusually long delay in this piece being published (which was originally written in Summer 2021)!

Please note that the names of certain individual parties in this piece such as tenants and those subject to mortgage repossession have been deliberately changed to other fictional names in this article. Where the landlord is an individual I have left his or her name in the piece. In relation to one of the hearings I observed (Bank of Scotland PLC T/A Halifax -v- GJ) a published reporting restrictions order of Deputy District Judge Ellis prevents this blog publishing the name of the Defendant, or information that could lead to the Defendant’s identification who is referred to by the initials GJ.

In respect of the other observed judicial hearings (to which no reporting restrictions apply) an editorial balancing test was undertaken regarding the privacy of the individuals anonymised (those being evicted from their home or having their home repossessed) and the public interest in their real names being placed in the public domain. It was (after a lot of discussion) finally agreed between Leonora and myself that anonymising the names and replacing their names with fictional names (as their consent to publication was not sought before publication) was the most appropriate solution. Any similarity between any of the fictional names chosen and the names of real living individuals is purely coincidental and not intended! Fictional names are indicated with an asterisk (*).

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