Our Collection Rates

What Do Our Stats Mean To Our Clients?

That’s simple – it has to be how much cash have we collected! And we like seeing the cash come in and judgment creditors achieving tangible benefits in their enforcement choices.

As Authorised High Court Enforcement Officers, members of the Sherforce team have to return statistical information to H M Court Service – on cash collected. In fact members of the Sherforce team worked with policy officials at the Department of Constitutional Affairs on ways to capture this information and make it available for the first time for all Authorised High Court Enforcement Officers.

So the bottom line is that Sherforce is seeing an upward trend in collections (currently at 72p) for each enforceable £’s worth of debt.

So What Do We Mean By “Enforceable”?

We wish we could guarantee a 100% collection rate – but let’s face it – the debt that is sent to Sherforce is at the end of sometimes a very long line of collection and litigation activity. What we have to do, is discount unenforceable Writs, which include Writs where we couldn’t gain entry to the address of the judgment debtor, or Writs where the debtor is, or becomes, insolvent.

After discounting all the unenforceable judgments, we get on with enforcing the remainder as efficiently as possible and that’s how we achieve our 77p in the £.

Of course that leaves a 28p margin for improvement and we are always working on this. A number of initiatives are underway to improve our pence in the £ - we are never complacent. Our whole team is incentivised to do better and it’s the incentives and the determination to get things right which pays dividends.

How Can We Make More Writs “Enforceable”?

Of course if we can find a way to encourage a debtor to pay a debt we will explore that – as it’s in the interests of both parties to get the debt paid as early and quickly as possible and within a defined time frame. Inevitably for some debtors time runs out, no acceptable offer is put forward, or our efforts to discuss payment are ignored, and we have to take the decision to remove available goods, which are sufficient to cover the cost of the debt, interest, costs and charges. Failure on our part to get on with the execution of the Writ is a failure to carry out our duty to the Court.

Sherforce will escalate Writs to the attendance to removal stage, to underline the position to a recalcitrant debtor that we will follow through on the wording of the Writ – we will remove and sell. We are commanded to do that – and we don’t procrastinate on that. Sherforce Enforcement Officers are removing goods throughout England and Wales everyday – with strategic partners, who assist in the removal of all sorts of items to satisfy our client’s judgments.

So at Sherforce we don’t talk about pence in the £ - we look at how much we have on our books to collect, how much we collect month on month – and how we can improve our field and telephone collections for the benefit of our clients.

We combine collections “know how”, with our own specially designed processes and strategies resulting in a successful and determined approach to cash collection – which shows in our results as compared against our competitors to do the very best we can for all our clients.