The exercise of judicial discretion in rent arrears cases - Sheffield ...

3. Interviews with district judges
Interviews were carried out with 26 district judges. Judges in the three geographical areas
were approached through the District Judges Association, and asked to take part in the
research. Judges were free to refuse. Interviews lasted between one and two hours and
were recorded and transcribed.
The interviews were structured into two broad parts. The first part drew on a semi-structured
questionnaire around a number of key topics about the judge’s background experience; their
approach to decision-making in possession cases; their views about procedure and external
factors (including housing benefit); the impact of landlords and their representatives; and the
impact of tenants and their representatives; finally, they were asked about warrants of
possession. This part of the interview was designed to elicit information about the influences
on decision-making, for example from their training to the kinds of considerations about
‘repeat players’ which are mentioned in the literature (see further Chapter 5, below). (See
Appendix 2 for the interview schedule.)
The second part of the interview involved the presentation of scenarios to the judges to
gauge their responses to them, the order they would make in that case on the basis of the
facts provided in the scenario, and their explanations for making that order. The scenarios
are set out in Appendix 2, and also included at relevant points in the report. This part of the
interview was designed to overcome the problem, anticipated by the research team, that
district judges would not feel able to talk about specific cases. The scenarios were
developed, then, to reflect the run-of-the-mill, ordinary possession case with a number of
variations reflecting variously increased vulnerability of the occupier, issues with housing
benefit, technical problems with non-rent expenses, possible variations on the worthiness of
the occupier.
In order to prepare these scenarios, a focus group comprising a mix of senior practitioners
and district judges was held. A number of potential scenarios were developed prior to the
focus group being held which were then further refined and developed following the
feedback from the focus group. The response of the district judges to these was very
positive, in that they commented that they were very “familiar” and reflected similar cases
which they had recently encountered.
Given the qualitative nature of the interviews we have generally not. The earlier focus
groups suggested that there would be a range of attitudes from judges and this was borne
out by the interviews, and it seems inappropriate to try and ascribe any numerical
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