These data consist of consumer County Court Judgment records aggregated to the Middle Layer Super Output Area (MSOA) level. A CCJ is a type of court order registered against a borrower if they fail to make repayments on a debt. They are used by creditors to reclaim the money owed, and are issued in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Scotland uses a different method called 'enforcing a debt by diligence'.
The MSOA-level dataset is derived from the individual record-level snapshots, which are released at the end of each quarter and contain the judgments registered in the six years preceding each release. Aggregated outputs are produced from each quarterly snapshot for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Outputs use MSOAs for England and Wales, Intermediate Zones (IZ) for Scotland, and Super Data Zones (SDZ) for Northern Ireland.
Content
The safeguarded MSOA-level CCJ dataset includes details of the numbers and values of judgments, along with counts of satisfied and unsatisfied judgments and counts by year of judgment data. For a 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.
The data is updated quarterly with the earliest version available from Q1 2025.
A related secure dataset is also available at the individual record level; see the link at the bottom of this page. Neither the safeguarded nor the secure datasets include creditor information for England or Wales, meaning no information is included about those who have issued the CCJs.
Please note that this dataset has a strict no-commercial-gain clause; we cannot supply it to any commercial organisation where there is the possibility of commercial gain from its use.
Quality, Representation and Bias
The dataset is produced from quarterly snapshots, each containing six years of preceding judgment records. For disclosure control reasons, small counts are suppressed, so the full data are not available for all areas. See the Variable Dictionary for details. Geographies are based on the 2021 Census for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and 2022 boundaries for Scotland.
