The form you need is called N9B, and filing it costs nothing. The clock costs plenty: fourteen days from the day the claim reached you, and it does not pause for the weekend, the flu, or your firm belief that the whole thing is a nonsense.
It arrives in a buff envelope, or an email with a reference number that means nothing to you. Inside there is a claim form, the particulars of claim, and a “response pack” — a phrase that manages to sound both administrative and faintly menacing. Someone says you owe them money. Say it is £2,200 for decorating you never signed off, or a debt you are fairly sure you already paid two summers ago. The figure is on the page. Your name is on the page. And near the bottom, in the flat grey register of officialdom, is a date by which you are expected to do something about it.
Here is the part nobody warns you about. Do nothing, and the process does something for you. It is called default judgment — a County Court Judgment entered not because you lost the argument but because you never turned up to have one. That is the quiet cruelty of it. The claim does not have to be right. It only has to go unanswered. The person who ignores a bad claim and the person who never received a good one end up in the same place: a mark on their credit file and a bill they didn’t get to dispute.
So you answer. Before you spend a penny, know that the free routes are real: Citizens Advice will walk you through the pack at no charge, and GOV.UK sets out every response in plain terms. The pack itself is not trying to trick you, though it does assume you already speak its language. It offers you a small menu. You can admit the claim. You can offer to pay by instalments. Or — the box most people are reaching for and are too rattled to find — you can defend it. That is N9B: defence, and, if the claimant owes *you* something, counterclaim.
A word on the counterclaim, because the money surprises people. Filing a defence carries no court fee. Adding a counterclaim does, and the fee scales with the amount you are claiming back — so the decision to counter is a decision, not a reflex.
Now, the clock. The general rule under the Civil Procedure Rules is fourteen days after you are served to file your defence. But the pack contains an acknowledgment of service, and returning that single sheet on time changes the number: you then have twenty-eight days from service instead of fourteen. It buys you a fortnight of thinking, filing, and finding the receipt. Beyond that, you and the claimant can agree to extend the deadline by up to a further twenty-eight days — but you must tell the court, in writing, that you have. A handshake the judge never hears about is not an extension.
One caution, because the routes differ. If the claim came to you online, it runs on its own timetable printed on the claim itself, and that clock can start from a different event than the paper one. So do not count fourteen days from memory. Read the date on *your* claim, the actual one in front of you, and treat that as gospel.
Then there is the defence itself, which is where good intentions go quietly wrong. A defence is not a letter of complaint and it is not a paragraph of feelings about the claimant’s character. It is a reply, line by line, to what they have said. For each thing they allege, you do one of three things: admit it, deny it, or say you cannot admit or deny it and require them to prove it. “I dispute all of it” is a mood. “I deny paragraph 4; the invoice was for work I did not authorise and no such agreement exists” is a defence. And it ends with a statement of truth, which means every denial has to be one you would stand behind — because signing a false one has consequences of its own.
Most people can find the receipt. What defeats them is turning a shoebox of grievance into fourteen numbered paragraphs that answer the claim on its own terms, in its own boxes, before Friday.
That is the part Chris is built for. You tell it what the claim says and what actually happened, in whatever order it tumbles out, and it helps you shape a proper defence — the right form, the right structure, each allegation met, ready for you to check, sign, and file yourself.
The deadline, not the debt, is what beats most people. Answer it on time and you have simply asked to be heard.
*Come back when the next form lands — there is a plain-English way through that one too.*
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