County Court Judge Keen On Unnecessary Home Repossession

 

This is a letter sent to an investigative  journalist who contacted me yesterday about mortgage repossessions.

 

It occurred to me it might be useful to clarify a couple of points after talking to you about repossession issues yesterday.

 

My impression of the County Court repossession hearing where the judge appeared to be a bit outrageous is that it was an extremely powerful example of the extreme difficulties facing people with mortgage difficulties. The court was deliberately unhelpful, or perhaps one might say it acted completely incorrectly and in a biased manner.

 

I would like to let you know that the hearings at the court are taped and the tapes kept for two years. I had always thought I ought to get hold of that tape, but that chore slid into oblivion as I have been busy with more pressing priorities. I might suggest you see a transcript because it might give you a juicy morsel.

 

If my memory serves me correctly ( and I think it does) a transcript of that tape (which I am entitled to acquire) will show the judge being literally ridiculous. 

 

I had already been given a six month stay by the court and this judge terminated this at three months solely  on the grounds I had broken the terms of the previous court order of three months prior by taking more than the (entirely arbitrary 28 days) to make a payment from a pension.

 

I did not technically break the terms actually, simply because I had followed correct legal procedure by going back to the court and asking for more time as it was entirely out of my hands how long the pension company took.

Legal procedure would demand that a hearing of the application for more time take place and whatever the result of that hearing would take the case forward to different terms to the previous order. That is it’s purpose – to vary a previous court order. In this case to request more  time. In legal parlance I think it is called a ‘directions’ hearing. Of course a judge might decide to let the status quo of the original hearing stand.

 

The result of my application was that it was heard by a judge in my absence who instructed that it was unnecessary for me to be heard in person as he decided and directed that as the case was to be heard at a ‘review’ hearing already scheduled for a few weeks hence at the three month mark, that this application of mine for more time be heard at that review hearing.

 

The upshot, therefore, is that the Judge at the review hearing entirely mismanaged the case with a clearly documented and vicious bias against me  and simply steamrollered over me, which deserves exposure. I have heard similar things are experienced in other repossession cases. The courts are not always sympathetic as is commonly thought.

 

After the judge found this technical excuse to terminate my previously ordered  six month stay and (spuriously) order repossession, he then addressed the other issue he was obliged to consider which is that the court can order a stay of the lender’s repossession request if it looks likely the householder might be able to regain sufficient income in the reasonable future (can legally be at any time within the lifetime of the mortgage, therefore potentially a very long time period of grace available) to maintain the mortgage.

 

The judge ignored (completely declined ) my evidence of forthcoming work which I was waving in my hand and he proceeded to make a superciliously dismissive  speech about how he thought it was not feasible or possible for anyone to earn an adequate income from freelance journalism, or freelance public relations consultancy. He would therefore order repossession.

 

The lender’s solicitor was surprised at the behaviour of the judge. We  had a lengthy conversation about it after the case.

 

As it happened I then proceeded to do some freelance writing work for two very large multinational companies.

I would like to let you know, however, that the combined effect of all the circumstances surrounding my failing attempts to fight off repossession now left me with impossible levels of stress, the net result of which was I could barely engage in work at all.

The curious thing, is that doing the bit of work I did was an absolute pleasure involving no stress at all despite it looking as though it ought to.

I was obliged to engage in re-mortgaging at that time to avoid looming eviction as the lender always kept me expecting  to receive an eviction notice at any time. I was always at three weeks notice of eviction for the next several months. I never really knew if I was actually going to be in the house in about three weeks time. It was horrendous.

 

With benefit of hindsight, I can now see that my ability to work has been seriously compromised by extreme stress since these events. My doctor insisted I acknowledge that as I was ignoring it. I am currently fighting a daily battle to get past the constant stress to get things done.

 

The stress has produced physical illness and it looks to be the likely cause of the failure of the abdominal surgery previously mentioned. This seriously compromises me and exposes me to an increased risk of cancer. The whole point of the surgery was to diminish the risk of cancer as a pre-cancerous state already existed. I am now imminently faced with an unnecessary repeat of that abdominal surgery involving five holes stabbed in my abdomen and a subtle re-arranging of stomach, oesophagus and diaphragm in what is called a fundoplication operation. Not fun.

 

You might understand it if I say that I would wish to sit down and spend at least eight hours a day trying to bring in an do the freelance work, but that I am surrounded by a sea of chaos, led principally by the artificial pressures brought about by the lender.

 

This demands that I give priority to the lenders aggravations instead of getting on  with the business of actually earning a living – which I am eminently qualified to do.

 

The other issue about repossession which it might be helpful to highlight is this.

 

Whenever a householder becomes involved in arrears, the only people he can ever have access to to discuss his mortgage and try and ‘negotiate’ with are very junior ‘call centre’ employees, often with very limited education and mental abilities, no ability or authority to ‘negotiate’ anything at all, and almost always with no communications skills at all.

 

Because these people simply  follow a specific ‘script’ and  standard list of questions, there is no meaningful negotiation possible. All they want is your answers to their standard list of questions. The minute you deviate from that and try and tell them what you need to tell or ask them they tend to interrupt and talk over you, rapidly reducing any conversation to a load of nonsense; the only upshot of which is reducing you to a harassed, threatened mess. 

You always feel threatened. They nearly always speak in a hectoring manner which tends to leave you a juddering heap in the best of circumstances. The displays of ignorance can be breathtaking.

 

When I asked one of these people if I could have a moratorium on my mortgage she sort of screeched ‘wotsat then’. I was speaking to a financial institution which didn’t even understand the language of banking. How can you sensibly negotiate anything with people like that ?

 

As all the lending institutions appear to have identical systems, quite indistinquishable from each other, the Council of Mortgage Lenders claim that lenders do everything possible to be helpful and avoid repossessions is utter rubbish. It seems, rather, to be quite the reverse, a blind steamroller of systemised encouragement of repossessions where many of them could easily be avoided.

 

strugglingsingledad 

 

 

MORTGAGE LENDERS DESTROYING OUR LIVES

My nine year old son and I are currently going through the repossession process yet again. We will shortly be homeless this time.

 

My son’s Mother became ill when he was a baby and was unable to look after him or even be with us. The building society were about as obstructively unhelpful as you could imagine and insisted on re-possession even though I had another mortgage already arranged to repay them with. Their legal executive was actually abusive just prior to the court hearing, spitting venomously ‘ We will get you thrown out of your house at this hearing regardless of what you say’.

 

In fact the court stayed repossession as the new mortgage was going to be in place within a day or two. But nothwithstanding that, the building society had completely ignored that and were obviously expecting the court to do so as well. They were simply intent on maximising aggression. It was appalling !

 

That was my first repossession experience in about 1999.

 

The second was last year. It is a long story, but the essence of it was I was completely misled by the building society when I had told them I was trying to struggle back into work as a single parent and somehow manage to look after my son as well.

 

The building society told me not to worry about paying the mortgage for the time being (half was being paid by the state anyway as I was an unemployed single parent) and then they immediately sent penalty charge notices and began the re-possession process, ignoring the fact they had said I did not have to worry about the mortgage for the time being.

 

Again, their behaviour was outstandingly aggressive and obstructive and there was absolutely no consideration of my  (extreme) circumstances whatsoever. They forced me to cancel vital, life saving surgery I was scheduled for and then, later, when recovering from surgery, they forced me to physically appear in court in a state of virtual collapse from what had been very recent (still in recovery period ) major surgery.

 

I was precisely seven minutes late for the hearing (the recent major abdominal surgery had made it almost impossible to walk)  and it (along with several other cases) had already been dealt with, repossession being granted by the court for several other people’s properties in separate cases, all within that seven minutes.

 

I managed to reverse that weeks later and was subsequently given a six month stay by the court, provided I cashed in a pension to extract cash to pay off the arrears  of only about £3000 to date.

 

When the pension company took  a long time to process their documentation, I asked the court for an extension of the 28 days they had given me to come up with the money. The court said, not to worry, no need to make that application as we will be seeing you at the end of the first three months anyway for a ‘review’.

 

At this three month review the judge said I had broken the court order giving me 28 days to pay the arrears and although he acknowledged that  it had not been my fault, it being entirely the fault of the slow processing by the pension company, he was ordering repossession then and there and not giving the remaining three months of the six month period granted me. I had, in fact already paid off the arrears by this point. This was an abuse of process by the court, and quite wrong.

 

So there was a repossession order granted when the arrears had been completely paid off and no arrears were actually outstanding at that point. That judge also sanctimoniously told me that he was of the opinion it was not possible to earn a living as a freelance public relations consultant or journalist (both of which I have spent my entire life doing) and he would therefore be obliged to order repossession as he could see no prospect of the mortgage being paid by virtue of me earning a living. This despite me showing a document offering me work.

 

How wacky is that. The judge had every legal excuse he might need to be lenient and helpful towards me, but instead he acted out the unbelievable aggression of the lender. 

 

I was finally sent an eviction notice giving me two weeks to vacate the property or the bailiffs would attend and throw me out at the end of that two week period.

 

I still had about £100 000 thousand equity in the house and the annual arrears would only be £6000. So the building society could have waited almost indefinitely for me to sort myself out without any risk to them getting all their mortgage repaid.

 

Meanwhile I had found another mortgage. I was a ’sub-prime’ customer, which means that regular building societies can pretend they cannot lend to you as you are deemed ‘high risk’. 

 

But, lo and behold, a lender which just happens to be a subsidiary owned by the same ordinary high street lender is willing to lend you a mortgage  incurring vast expense in the manner of ‘financial churning’ and terms on the new mortgage which almost guarantee you will be repossessed again and lose tens of thousand of pounds in penalty fees and possibly all the remaining equity in the house as it is like to be auctioned off for less than market value.

 

In the process of obtaining these mortgages I have experienced blatant deviousness from brokers. The most obvious being they knew perfectly well I was on state benefits and without a proper income and yet they advised which figure to pretend was my income etc and they knew the contents of the mortgage application were a fiction as I had no choice but to follow their blatantly dishonest instruction in order to obtain a mortgage. 

 

They had frequently made it plain that they arranged many falsified applications from desperate people like myself. They also always made false representation to me  that I was eligible for  a particular mortgage they would ‘definitely’ be able to get me at what was quoted as a reasonable rate of interest and then the interest always, without fail in every case, mysterious went up as they changed all the goal posts once I was completely ensnared in their clutches.

 

Of course, I would not have been desperate if the original mortgage company had been reasonable, and they could easily be so as I had  a couple of hundred thousand pounds in equity at the beginning of this process. 

 

The bottom line is that all this is a process which magicks all that equity away from me and into the hands of the mortgage lenders.

 

They are entirely dishonest.

 

If the original lender in 1999 had shown leniency owing to the extreme circumstances of my being a left a single parent after my partner became massively ill, I might now have increased that original mortgage by about £36 000 up to £136 000 from £100 000. But that house is currently worth about £900 000, which would leave me equity of over three quarters of a million pounds.

 

However, my current equity is actually about £60 000, making my total loss of nearly seven hundred thousand pounds, all of which has passed into the hands of various lenders by means of this process they have all connived at agreeing to organise between themselves.

 

My nine year old son and I now face eviction and homelessness. I will lose all that remaining £60 000 of equity, leaving me penniless after being effectively conned out out of my £900 000 house over a period of time.

 

After thirty five  years of owning my own house I am now unlikely to be able to ever buy another house because of the various strictures lenders impose.

 

I have twice recently seen the Council of Mortgage Lenders tell the media their members bend over backwards to help people in difficulties pay their mortgage and it is rare for people to be evicted if they contact their lender early and enter into negotiations.

 

This is a complete fiction (or more properly a lie), verified by my experience. All the lenders have a standard procedural framework for repossessing after just a few months of arrears and it can only be avoided if you come up with the money within that time frame and no longer.

 

Struggling Single Dad