# The letter before action: the step most people skip
Where money claims are filed: the official portal is www.moneyclaims.service.gov.uk — HMCTS’s own Money Claims service. It is new (still badged beta), and following the 181st Practice Direction update there is no upper limit on the amount you can claim through it — and if you qualify for Help with Fees, the issue fee itself can be reduced to zero, whatever the size of the claim. New to the portal? Read our step-by-step walkthrough.
The cursor sits over the button that says *Start a claim*. Stop — because before that button does anything useful for you, there is a letter you are meant to have sent already, and if you are a business chasing an individual for money, that letter has to give them thirty days to reply.
Nobody tells you about the letter at the start. You find out later, and by then it has become a problem instead of a step.
It has a name — the letter before action, or the letter before claim; the same thing — and a job. The Civil Procedure Rules, which govern how these disputes run in England and Wales, expect it before proceedings begin. The Practice Direction on Pre-Action Conduct and Protocols sets out what a first letter should usually contain: concise details of the claim, the basis on which it is made, a summary of the facts, what you want from the other side, and — if it is money — how you worked the figure out. That is the whole recipe. It is not written in Latin.
Then it names the thing everyone forgets: time. The other side is entitled to “a reasonable time” to respond — fourteen days in a straightforward case, and no more than three months in a very complex one. You do not get to spring a courtroom on anybody.
Debt is the strict one. Since 1 October 2017 there has been a separate Pre-Action Protocol for Debt Claims, and it bites whenever a business — including a sole trader — asks an individual to pay a debt. Under it you send more than a letter. An Information Sheet, a Reply Form and a financial statement form go in the same envelope. The debtor then has thirty days from the date at the top of the letter to fill in the Reply Form. If they ask you for documents, the clock resets: you cannot start proceedings until at least thirty days after you hand those over. Thirty days, and then thirty more. The protocol is slow on purpose, because a court would rather the two of you settled it across a kitchen table than a courtroom.
Which is the part people miss when they treat the letter as a hoop. It is not a hoop. It is the last cheap exit. A properly written letter before action does something the claim form never will: it tells a reasonable person, in plain terms, exactly what they owe, why, and what happens next if they ignore it — and a surprising number of reasonable people, faced with that, simply pay. It is the step most likely to end the dispute. It is also the step most likely to be skipped.
Before any of it, the free routes, because they are free and you should try them. Citizens Advice will talk the whole thing through with you for nothing. If your dispute is with a regulated company — energy, a bank, a phone contract, an insurer — the relevant ombudsman costs you nothing and can order them to put it right, which is often quicker than a court. If it is about a job, ACAS. GOV.UK carries the protocols in full. None of that is a plug for anyone; it is simply the order a sensible person tries things in.
But say you have tried, and the money is still owed, and it falls to you to write the letter. This is where it goes wrong — not the law, the blank page. You know what happened. You are just not sure how much of it a stranger needs, in what order, in language that reads as a claim and not a grievance. Too little and it does nothing. Too much and you have written a memoir. The protocol tells you what has to be in there. It does not write it for you.
Chris does that part. You tell Chris what happened, in your own words, in the wrong order — that is fine — and our technology turns it into the letter the protocol asks for: the basis of the claim, the facts, the sum and how it is calculated, the deadline to reply, said plainly, addressed to the person who owes you. It knows a debt letter needs its Reply Form and its Information Sheet, and it knows the difference between the strict debt timetable and the general one. What lands at the end is not notes about a letter. It is the letter, finished, yours to send.
The button that says *Start a claim* will still be there next month. The letter is what you do first.
Come back when it’s written — there’s a next step waiting after the letter.