That document is a County Court Judgment in default. It says you did not reply to the claim form, so the court has entered judgment against you for £315.24, dated 04-NOV-2025, payable “forthwith”.
Because more than one calendar month has now passed since 4 November, simply paying the £315.24 will not remove the CCJ from your credit record. It would only mark it as “satisfied”. The CCJ will still sit on your file for six years unless it is set aside by a judge.
From here you really only have two realistic choices.
First option is to accept the CCJ. You either pay the £315.24 to DCB Legal (as the form explains) or you do not. If you pay, the judgment becomes “satisfied”; if you do not, it remains “unsatisfied”. In both cases it stays on your credit file for six years and will make any borrowing or mortgage application more difficult. The court will not do anything further unless the claimant applies for enforcement.
Second option is to apply to have the default judgment set aside. This is the only route that can actually remove the CCJ. In your case there is at least an arguable ground for a “mandatory” set aside because you did email a defence to claimresponses.cnbc
@justice.gov.uk on 23 April and you say you can prove it. How are you going to "prove" it? Did you receive the auto acknowledgement from the CNBC that confirmed receipt of the email? Did you CC yourself and receive it? Do you have the original sent email with the headers intact that show the date and time of sending and the SMTP server response that it was received?
The judgment says you did not reply to the claim form, which appears to be wrong if your defence was received on time. For a set-aside application you would:
– Phone the Civil National Business Centre with the claim number M9KF44K6. Ask them whether they have any record at all of your defence filed on 23 April and ask for the exact date the default judgment was entered (it should match 4 November 2025 on the order). Make a note of what they say, who you spoke to and the time and date of the call.
– Prepare a short timeline in your own words: when you received the claim, when you emailed the defence, what you attached, that you heard nothing further (no N180, no allocation, no hearing notice), when you first opened this judgment letter, and what you did immediately afterwards.
– Keep safe your proof of sending the defence: the sent email with date and time, the attachment, and the copy that was CC’d to yourself. If there was any auto-acknowledgement from the court, keep that too.
You then complete an N244 application asking the court to set aside the default judgment, attaching three things: a witness statement with your timeline and an explanation of the error, the evidence of your defence email, and a copy of the defence itself. You ask the court to set the judgment aside under CPR 13.2 because a defence was filed on time and judgment should not have been entered at all, or alternatively under CPR 13.3 because you have a real prospect of defending the claim and you acted promptly once you became aware of the judgment. There is a court fee to pay for this application, and there will usually be a short hearing where you explain to a judge what happened.
If you decide not to make a set-aside application, then there is nothing more the court will do for you. In that situation the only remaining decision is whether you pay the £315.24 to avoid any risk of enforcement action such as bailiffs in the future, accepting that the CCJ will remain on your credit file for six years either way.
So, in plain terms: you cannot “ask the court to realise their mistake” informally or by email and expect them to fix this for you. You must either live with the CCJ (paid or unpaid) or take positive action with an N244 application and fee to try to have the default judgment cancelled.
