Mick McAteer, Chair, Registry Trust
Monday, 12th May 2025
As Mental Health Awareness Month once again shines a light on the pressures people face, it's impossible to ignore the role that financial problems play in poor mental health. There is a vicious circle at play when it comes to problem debt and mental health. At Registry Trust, we maintain the public Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines for the UK and Ireland. That gives us a unique perspective on how better data could play a part in breaking the cycle.
The Connection is Clear—and Worrying
According to the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, individuals with mental health challenges are three and a half times more likely to be in problem debt. And more than 100,000 people attempt suicide each year in England alone while facing financial distress.
Our new data for the first quarter of 2025 shows the scale of the problem debt situation. There were 282,417 new judgments registered in Q1 2025. That’s 4% more than in the previous quarter and 0.9% more than Q1 2024. Some 1.1 million new judgments were added to the register in 2024 and after a dip in 2020 that can be credited to the pandemic, the number of new judgments has been steadily increasing ever since.
To get to the stage of having a judgment, many defendants are likely to be in considerable distress. Their creditor should have engaged in pre-action conduct, perhaps including letters of claim, giving them the chance to respond and attempt to settle the debt. Even though many creditors will have given people a chance to settle a debt, the low numbers of judgments left unsatisfied suggests that this is not enough to address the problems many people are facing, including those related to mental health.
Judgments affect business owners as well as individual consumers – whether as a claimant struggling to recover late or missing payments, or under financial stress themselves. At the start of April, there were over 5.4 million judgments on the Register - 88.8% are consumer judgments and 11.2% are commercial, the latter amounting to over 650,000 commercial judgments.
A Judgment Is Not Just a Number
At Registry Trust, we don’t view CCJs as inherently negative. They play a vital role in the credit system—ensuring that debts are acknowledged, creditors are repaid and lending managed. But the Register should also be a tool for fairness, recovery, and improved outcomes—especially where financial vulnerability and mental health intersect.
That’s why we’re calling for specific, evidence-based changes to the Register to better support individuals and businesses:
- Make claimant data publicly available to allow for more transparency and analysis of who is issuing debt claims—and where. We’re pleased that this is currently being taken forward by the Ministry of Justice, but we’d also like to see a further step – transparency around the originator of claims now with third parties.
- Introduce a partial settlements register so that people working hard to pay back debt aren't stuck with a record that ignores progress.
- Shift the burden of proof for recording 'satisfied' judgments to bulk claimants, easing the administrative pressure on people already in distress.
- Use granular CCJ data to target and inform the nature and location of local debt advice and mental health support services.
Better Data, Better Support
We believe that behind every judgment is a story—and a person. If the system is to support recovery and resilience, as well as accountability, it needs to reflect that. This Mental Health Awareness Week, we urge policymakers, claimants, credit industry partners, and service providers to join us in using data not just to track problems—but to solve them.
Let us know if you'd like to collaborate on any of these proposals or access further insights from the Register. Because when financial justice and mental health are aligned, everyone benefits.