We are supportive of the principle that the name of the claimant is reported on the Register to augment the existing information on the date and amount of the judgement.

We recognise the benefits that an ability to quickly and accurately identify the claimant details could have for:

• Consumers: To identify who has obtained the judgement without needing to contact the court for the details.  Where the debt has been settled, ensure that a satisfaction is reflected on the register.
• Debt Advice Sector: When arranging a debt solution for consumers, improve the efficiency of identifying the creditor details with whom they need to engage.
• Court Services:  Improve the efficiency by removing the need for consumers and debt advisers to contact the court for the required claimant information.
• Regulators and policy makers:  In analysing and assessing regulatory activity and policy outcomes.

Lenders will typically consider the value and date of an outstanding judgement in their decisioning, and we do not have any evidence that knowledge of a claimant name would, of its own, be empirically predictive of a different outcome in a lending decision.  The proposed benefits will be most efficiently realised if the claimant data provided to the Registry Trust is easily accessible. We consider that this could be best achieved if the information was accessed by the credit reference agencies (CRAs) and reported on a customers’ credit file, although recognise that the process and costs to deliver this haven’t been considered as part of the consultation.