Can a limited company get van finance with a CCJ?

Can I get van finance with a CCJ? Yes, in most cases. Lenders will consider applications where there is a county court judgment against the business or against a director personally. What matters is not simply that a CCJ exists, but how big it is, how long ago it was, whether it has been settled, who the money was owed to, and whether there is a sensible explanation for how it happened. A settled CCJ with a clear story behind it is treated very differently from a large unsettled one with no explanation. The single most important thing you can do is tell your broker about it before you apply.

Yes. We have lenders who will finance a business where there is a CCJ, whether it sits against the company or against a director personally.

But there are CCJs and there are CCJs, and the difference between them is enormous. A £400 judgment from a parking fine that was settled two years ago is not the same animal as a £30,000 judgment from last year that nobody has done anything about. Both are workable. They are not workable on the same terms.

What follows is what actually moves the needle.

If a judgment has been made against you in the last few weeks, stop and check the date.

Pay a CCJ in full within one calendar month of the judgment date and it comes off the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines completely. Not marked as settled. Removed, as though it had never happened, and it should never appear on a credit report at all.

Miss that window and it stays on the register for six years from the date of judgment, and paying it does not shorten that. You can have it marked as satisfied, which is far better than leaving it unpaid, but it is still there and every lender will see it for six years.

Part-payment does not count. The register records judgments as satisfied or not, and partial settlements are not recorded at all.

So if you are inside that month and you can find the money, that is the single most valuable thing you will do this year for your ability to borrow. Everything else on this page is about what happens when that window has gone.

Worth five minutes, because this catches people out and it is free to fix.

When you settle a judgment, it is the creditor's job to tell the court. They do not always do it. The result is a judgment you paid years ago that still shows on the register as unsatisfied, which is the version a lender sees and the worst version to be carrying.

So if you have settled a CCJ, check that the register records it as satisfied. If it does not, contact the court with your proof of payment and have it corrected. You can apply for a Certificate of Satisfaction, which costs a £19 court fee.

An unsatisfied judgment is significantly more damaging than a satisfied one. If yours is only showing as unsatisfied because of paperwork nobody did, that is the cheapest improvement to your credit position available to you.

This is the most important thing on the page and it costs nothing.

Tell us about the CCJ when you apply. Before we go anywhere near a lender.

What happens otherwise is this. We put the application in. The lender runs their searches. They come back and ask what this judgment is, and why it was not mentioned. At that point the problem is no longer the CCJ. The problem is that you did not say, and the lender is now wondering what else you have not said.

A CCJ that was declared up front is a fact to be explained. A CCJ the lender finds for itself is a credibility problem, and credibility is most of what they are buying.

People do not hide these out of dishonesty. Usually they are embarrassed, or they have half convinced themselves it has gone away, or they assume we will find out and quietly decide. None of those end well. It has not gone away, we will find out, and the one person who could have done something useful with the information was us.

Some lenders describe themselves as storybook lenders, and it is a fair description of how these decisions actually get made.

An underwriter is not sitting there hunting for a reason to say no. They are looking for a reason to say yes, and they need enough in front of them to justify it. That is what a story is for, and supplying it is most of our job.

So we talk to you properly, on the phone, and we record our calls so nothing gets lost. What we are after is everything a lender would find reassuring and would never see on a bank statement. How long the business has been going. Whether you did the same work for somebody else before you went out on your own. How many years you have in the trade. What contracts are on the horizon. What is going well. Why the van is going to earn the business more than it costs.

Then we write to the lender and set out why we think they should lend to you. That includes the judgment, stated plainly, along with anything else awkward, because being upfront about the negatives is exactly what makes the positives believable. The job is to put everything on the table and then outweigh it.

That is the difference between a broker and a postbox. Plenty of brokers collect your bank statements and forward them to a lender. We get better results than that, because an underwriter who has been handed a reason behaves differently from one who has been handed a file.

We have been financing vans for years, including the VAT side of it, which trips up more people than anything else. We do not charge you anything. The lender pays us, and only if you end up with an offer you are happy to accept.

Four things, roughly in order of how much they matter.

Whether it is settled. This is the big one. A settled judgment with a clear explanation behind it is close to being a non-issue, particularly if it was a few years ago. It says something went wrong and you dealt with it.

Whether there is a story. Not an excuse, an explanation. A supplier dispute that went to court. A bill sent to an old address. A customer who went under and took your cash flow with them. Lenders are not looking for a spotless history, they are looking for one that makes sense. A judgment with a coherent explanation behind it is worth far more than a slightly smaller one with none.

How long ago it was. Six months is a live concern. A few years is history, particularly if it was settled.

How much it was for. It matters, but less than people expect, and much less than the first two. A large settled judgment with a good explanation often reads better than a small unexplained one.

The hardest case, and the one that genuinely gives lenders pause, is a substantial judgment in the last couple of years with no explanation and nothing done about it. Even then it is not necessarily the end. If the business is trading strongly now and the bank statements show it, there will usually be a lender.

Several judgments weigh more heavily than one, as you would expect. But the same rules apply, just with more at stake.

Two small judgments with a clear explanation behind them are a very different proposition from several with no explanation at all. The explanations people bring us are usually ordinary life rather than anything dramatic: a house move that left post going to the wrong address for months, a marriage that broke down and took the admin with it, bills that were somebody else's responsibility until suddenly they were not. Those are understandable, and if you have anything in writing that supports the account, bring it.

What does the damage is not the number. It is several judgments where nobody knows who the money was owed to, what happened, or what has been done since. At that point a lender stops seeing bad luck and starts seeing carelessness, and carelessness is the thing they are actually underwriting against.

An arrangement to clear a judgment counts for a great deal, and it reads nothing like having ignored it.

It does not have to go through a court, though if it did you will have the paperwork already. An arrangement made directly with the creditor is fine. What matters is that it is real and that you can describe it: what the judgment was for originally, what you are paying each month, and when it will be finished.

If you can answer those three questions, you have something a lender can work with. If you cannot, it is not yet an arrangement, it is an intention.

This one surprises people and it is worth understanding.

If the CCJ came from unpaid vehicle finance, a lender being asked to put you into another vehicle is going to be noticeably less comfortable. You are asking them to do the thing that did not work last time.

If it came from a credit card, a parking fine, a mobile phone bill or a supplier dispute, it is a good deal easier to look past, and especially so if they can also see that you kept up the payments on your vehicle finance throughout. That contrast does real work in your favour.

So when you tell us about the judgment, tell us who it was owed to. It changes which lenders we approach.

Both are workable, and a judgment against the business is slightly the harder of the two.

In practice, for most of the businesses we deal with, the distinction matters less than people imagine. If you are the sole director and the only shareholder, the lender is looking at one operation with one person behind it, and which name the judgment sits in is a detail rather than a dividing line.

This is the most common misunderstanding we hear and it is worth correcting plainly.

Your limited company is a separate legal entity, and that is a real and useful distinction. But if you are the only director, the only shareholder and the only person with significant control over it, a lender assessing the company is assessing you. Your personal credit history is often as important to that decision as the company's.

You are not a sole trader, and the separation is genuine. It just does not mean a lender will look at the company and ignore the person running it, because no lender does that.

Two things tend to follow from a CCJ.

A larger deposit. Where a lender wants more comfort, this is usually where they find it. Expect to put down more than a business with a cleaner history would.

A personal guarantee. On a case with adverse credit, a lender will almost certainly want one, where they might not have asked for it otherwise. That makes you personally liable for the company's borrowing, so it is worth understanding properly before you sign rather than discovering it at the end.

If your company has another director with a clean credit profile, that is worth raising early, because a guarantee from them can carry a case that would otherwise be harder work.

A lender may also offer a shorter term rather than a larger deposit, which reduces how long they are exposed. It is the same instinct arriving in a different form.

Bank statements. Usually the last three to six months, for the company.

Whatever is on the credit file, that is the document that decides it. What a lender wants to see is money coming in consistently, the account being run properly, and a business that plainly generates enough to cover what it is taking on.

A strong set of statements does not make a judgment disappear. It does decide whether a lender is prepared to look past one.

There is a practical reason to do this properly rather than hope it goes unnoticed.

A CCJ does not simply decide whether you can borrow. It decides how much of the market is prepared to look at you, and the size of that range is what sets the terms you end up with. A small, settled, well explained judgment keeps most of it open. A large unexplained one closes a good deal of it.

If you want the lenders who offer the sharpest terms, you need to be transparent, you need to be upfront from the start, and ideally you need not to be carrying a large unresolved judgment. Where that is not your situation, there are still perfectly good options, and the gap is narrower than most people assume before they ask.

We have deliberately not put figures on this page. They move, and a page full of numbers goes quietly out of date without anyone noticing. If you want an idea of what monthly payments look like, there is a finance calculator on this site.

The cost of financing a business asset is a business expense, set against your profits in the normal way. How it is treated depends on the structure of the agreement, and your accountant is the right person to confirm the position for your business.

Everything on this page is really about asset finance, which is the industry's term for borrowing secured against a piece of equipment the business is buying or already owns. A van on hire purchase is one kind of asset finance, and the rules do not change with the asset.

If your company needs a lorry, a trailer, plant, machinery or equipment rather than a van, the position on a CCJ is the same. We arrange van finance through this site, and the business behind it, First Oak Capital, covers the rest.

A CCJ is one of several things that can sit on a file. If your situation is broader than this, our main page on van finance with bad credit covers the wider picture and the specialist lenders we work with. If you are also in an IVA, or have completed one, there is a separate page on van finance with an IVA, because the position there is different again.

Speak to a specialist

Bring us the awkward bit first and we will work with it. Tell us what happened, what you have done about it, and where the business is now, and we will tell you honestly what is realistic.