The latest government figures for possession claims have been published, which cover January through March 2022.
That's post Covid restrictions and would probably include most of the last of the Covid backlog.
And there's no sign of the massive wave of evictions and resulting mass homelessness that was predicted in a number of places.
Instead, landlord possession claims are still more than 35% down overall on the same period in 2019 (which is the last pre-covid year).
And 40% down on the same quarter in 2018 and 45% down on 2017.
There's no evidence at all of any backlog being cleared, large or otherwise.
Possession claims have fallen every year since 2013 (ignoring the pandemic years) and it looks like they've continued to fall at the same rate.
And, as far as it's possible to tell, the drop is almost entirely due to a decrease in the number of possession claims by social landlords,
as private landlord claims are broadly back to their "normal" levels.
The number of claims that can be identified as social landlord claims is maybe two-thirds of what might be seen as the previously "normal" level.
And timescales are still a bit difficult, the median time from court claim to possession being over 27 weeks (compared to about 21 weeks in 2019),
but it's much better than during the pandemic (the same figure for the first quarter of last year was nearly 58 weeks - although there were fewer than 300 actual possessions in the 2021 period, so it's possibly not that meaningful).
Regional variations are still significant, London has 7 of the top 10 local authorities by claims per household, rising to 9 out of the top 10 for actual possessions.
Only 19 local authorities saw zero possessions by bailiffs in the period.
Broadly, back to "normal"?
That's post Covid restrictions and would probably include most of the last of the Covid backlog.
And there's no sign of the massive wave of evictions and resulting mass homelessness that was predicted in a number of places.
Instead, landlord possession claims are still more than 35% down overall on the same period in 2019 (which is the last pre-covid year).
And 40% down on the same quarter in 2018 and 45% down on 2017.
There's no evidence at all of any backlog being cleared, large or otherwise.
Possession claims have fallen every year since 2013 (ignoring the pandemic years) and it looks like they've continued to fall at the same rate.
And, as far as it's possible to tell, the drop is almost entirely due to a decrease in the number of possession claims by social landlords,
as private landlord claims are broadly back to their "normal" levels.
The number of claims that can be identified as social landlord claims is maybe two-thirds of what might be seen as the previously "normal" level.
And timescales are still a bit difficult, the median time from court claim to possession being over 27 weeks (compared to about 21 weeks in 2019),
but it's much better than during the pandemic (the same figure for the first quarter of last year was nearly 58 weeks - although there were fewer than 300 actual possessions in the 2021 period, so it's possibly not that meaningful).
Regional variations are still significant, London has 7 of the top 10 local authorities by claims per household, rising to 9 out of the top 10 for actual possessions.
Only 19 local authorities saw zero possessions by bailiffs in the period.
Broadly, back to "normal"?
Comment