Repossession is where a court order has been granted ordering a debtor to hand back a property to a creditor where the property was either used as collateral (for a mortgage, loan or an unsecured debt or loan which has been secured by an order charging land) or rented or leased in a previous contract between the creditor and the debtor. The court order can be made by the High Court (for mortgage repossessions), the County Court (for ejectment cases where a property has been rented) or the Magistrates Court (involving squatter cases). If the debtor fails to obey the terms of the court order, the creditor may apply to the Enforcement of Judgments Office (EJO) to enforce it.
Physical repossession occurs when the EJO remove all persons in occupation of the property and their goods. In some occasions, repossession also occurs when there are no persons in occupation of the property and there are no goods are removed. Repossession is recorded as completed when all persons in occupation of the property have been removed, their goods removed and the property is handed over to the creditor. Repossession is also recorded as completed if there are no persons and or goods to remove and the property is handed over to the creditor.
For the majority of cases, repossession will relate to a single property, but a court order can sometimes refer to more than one property. Property that may be repossessed include private dwellings or business premises that are either leased, rented or owner occupied. It can also relate to a piece of land that contains no dwellings such as agricultural land or wasteland.
Property tenures that may be repossessed are those that are rented from a social housing authority or landlord (such as the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, or a Housing Association), those that are rented or leased from a private landlord, owner occupied properties that have a mortgage or secured loan registered against their property or properties that have a debt secured by way of an order charging land. Rented properties are repossessed by way of an ejectment order obtained at the County Court, with mortgaged properties repossessed by way of a mortgage possession order obtained at the High Court. On occasions, an order may be sought from the Magistrates' Court to repossess a property inhabited by a squatter.
The postcode recorded for each repossession refers to the correspondence address of the person to whom enforcement has been sought. This is not always the address of the property to be repossessed as the property may not have a postal address (if it is a piece of land) or it may relate to the correspondence address of a landlord or a second home.
A slight change to the methodology used to generate these data occurred during the period of this series. From 2007 to March 2014, the EJO have used the same methodology for recording repossessions (based on the recorded ‘return date’ repossession case held by enforcement officers (who manage a repossession case). Since April 2014, a different methodology has been used (based upon the date the repossession was completed which is marked against a case file). The change was made to make the methodology a more accurate reflection of the date the repossession was completed.
Users of this data may have been able to self-identify themselves due to the low values in some cells. Primary and secondary disclosure control methods have been applied to this data, denoted by cells with missing data in the tables. Values of less than four, but not zero participants, were initially suppressed, but some of these values could have been calculated using some row and column totals and thus secondary suppression was applied to the next lowest value in the row and column.
The dataset was created using the Central Postcode Directory (CPD). Unknown/missing postcodes are not shown but are included in the Northern Ireland totals. The data contain the number of cases disposed by each Health and Social Care Trust and have the following proportions of postcode coverage: 2007, 97.8%; 2008, 99.0%; 2009, 99.1%; 2010, 97.0%; 2011, 97.8% 2012, 97.8%; 2013, 97.2%; 2014, 97.3%; 2015, 97.7%; 2016, 97.6%; 2017, 98.5%; 2018, 97.4%; 2019, 97.2%; 2020, 96.4%, and; 2021, 100%; 2022, 95.9%; 2023, 97.5%.