Data

RRO statistics

What the published tribunal decisions actually show about how often applications succeed, what they are worth, and why the ones that fail fail.

Data sources

One of our former clients, Chris, a former guardian and data specialist, has been helping us check on the RRO statistics so far. When we first started, the tribunal didn’t upload its decisions to the HMCTS website — after we wrote a number of times about this they eventually started uploading some. Now pretty much every decision gets uploaded there. The Upper Tribunal has a different upload site for its decisions.

Chris has set up a bot (@dev_rro) to repost new decisions from both sites. He has also downloaded all the decisions and analysed them for useful information. Flat Justice uses this information to support arguments on behalf of clients in RRO cases, but it’s also useful for general information on RROs, which we give here.

What are my chances?

For 2021 we calculate that the overall success rate for RRO applications was 84%, and the average award was approximately £4,500 per applicant.

For 2022, after some more restrictive Upper Tribunal and Court of Appeal decisions, it was 77%, with the average award per applicant falling back to approximately £4,100. Still not bad.

The drop is largely explained, we believe, by the Court of Appeal’s reversal of the Rakusen v Jepsen decision, which stopped tenants bringing RRO applications against superior landlords: many cases that had already been submitted would have failed on that basis.

How much rent will I get back?

The success rate should not be mixed up with the percentage of rent that you can get back. RRO awards are very often given as a percentage of the rent claimed: reductions from the maximum allowable figure are made for a number of factors such as tenant and landlord conduct and whether utilities were included in the rent. It also depends on the latest case law and guidance from the Upper Tribunal (Lands Chamber). After the 2020 Vadamalayan v Stewart [2020] UKUT 183 (LC) decision there was a marked improvement in RRO awards. This was chipped away at by a number of decisions in 2021, particularly Williams v Parmar [2021] UKUT 244 (LC), where the Upper Tribunal held that 100% awards should not be the default.

What awards look like now, and the four stages a tribunal works through in fixing the amount.

What are the main reasons for a case failing?

Normally there’s one main reason for failure; where there’s more than one, they are listed in order of importance. The most frequent are all avoidable:

• applying outside the time limit;
• naming the wrong respondent;
• the property turning out not to have been licensable on the dates claimed;
• not proving occupation or the rent actually paid;
• a licence application having been duly made earlier than the applicant thought.

The detailed statistical tables are held in a separate data file. Please contact us for the full RRO statistics dataset.