Yes you can! If you have a money claim that is less than £10,000 you can issue a claim yourself. Just follow the steps below.
So, someone owes you some money but they're not coughing up. You've chased and chased and chased but they've either stopped responding or are just refusing to pay. So what's the next step?
So long as you have sent them a letter before action (and if they are an individual, followed the pre-action protocol for debt claims) you can issue a claim at court.
What's the process?
You need to prepare some things first :
1) Your details
2) Your opponent's details (this is really important to get right as it could be the difference between a successful claim and not)
3) How much you are claiming (don't forget to add interest, if you're entitled to it, and debt recovery charges and reasonable recovery costs if its a commercial claim https://www.gov.uk/late-commercial-payments-interest-debt-recovery)
4) A card to pay the issue fee (you can check what fee to pay here)
Then, just go to...
the Money Claims Online website (www.moneyclaim.gov.uk) and register for an account. The system will take you through the process step by step. You will then be asked to pay the issue fee. Once this is the done the court will send the claim to the address you gave for your opponent. The court will also notify you that the claim has been issued. The defendant (opponent) then has a certain amount of time to respond, which will be either admit, admit in part or deny.
In some instances, they won't respond at all in which case you can request 'Judgment in Default' which will give you a judgment that you can then enforce against your opponent.
If they defend it the claim will come out of the MCOL system and you will be sent something called a Notice of Allocation by the Court which will tell you what the next steps are.
And that's it. It really is that simple!
