A Freedom of Information Act request to The Ministry of Justice produced the following data.
Payments made for poor service from HMCTS increasing year on year.
The data largely speaks for itself. Payments made to court users for poor service increase year on year as HMCTS falls apart.
Poor customer service by HMCTS is costing at least £292k per year in payments made to disgruntled court users. This is of course not counting the time taken to correct errors they have made which also counts as a loss to the public purse and creates delay overall in the system.
Most importantly if you’ve been in receipt of poor service from a court make sure you complain. And don’t be fobbed off: they’re experts at dissembling and denying. Of course at every stage also request to be compensated. It’s only when the budget for payment of compensation exceeds what The Ministry of Justice is prepared to pay out that service standards will improve.
Being an example of how HMCTS commit critical errors in handling civil claims and how they then evade responding properly to complaints.
Street of Shame: HMCTS are currently based in the old Home Office building in St. James’, London.
The Phoenix Partnership (TPP) are a company noted for the provision of dodgy software to the NHS. Errors in systems provided by TPP resulted in the biggest data loss in NHS history. In that incident in 2017 / 2018 hundreds of thousands of people had their medical history sold to US companies, despite having signed to confirm they did not wish their data to be shared, breaching every conceivable data protection principal.
A claim was started by myself into this significant data breach as my own data was amongst that shared against my express written wishes that it should not.
Here’s where the fun begins.
Because the standards of service at Leeds Combined Court are uniformly awful a claimant has to struggle against both the ineptness of the court’s handling of a claim as much as they have to fight to prove their case. Like many other areas of modern Britain the State by a combination of ineptness and avoidance makes everyday tasks significantly more complex and difficult than they need to be.
The results of an investigation into the errors made by the court by HMCTS Customer Investigations speak for themselves. An extract from the letter is below but to summarise (and include detail HMCTS failed to, you’ll not be surprised to learn), the errors made in the claim include – but are not limited to:
1. Fourteen months to action a Directions Questionnaire put in by the Defendant TPP. This failure by court staff to manage the claim in the most simple and basic way effectively brought the claim to a grinding halt.
2. Despite emails from myself chasing the progress of the claim within those fourteen months no action was taken by the court. In effect emails chasing progress of the claim and requesting updates on what was happening were simply ignored.
3. The court should have referred the matter of the Directions Questionnaire to a judge within a matter of a few weeks of it being received. They failed to do this. No other system in their offices alerted staff to the fact that an ongoing claim was stuck in stasis and no-one seemed to both to check on its progress.
4. Consequently this delay breached one of the Overriding Objectives in the Civil Procedure Rules to deal with cases justly and swiftly.
5. Naturally this generated a complaint from myself.
The first stage response of this was mendacious, evasive and effectively sought to deny any errors had been made. The excuses offered by the court were barefaced and failed to fit the facts such that a child could have picked holes in their logic.
6. I appealed and requested a second stage complaint response from the Court Manager at Leeds Combined Court, the reliably slippery Joanne Town.
7. And reliably slippery is what she proved to be. Or maybe she was embarrassed to have to answer for the significant error made by staff. No communication came back from her as a second stage complaint response. This was chased several times over the course of some months. See the footnote at the bottom of this blog entry.
By this failure to respond HMCTS sought to kill the complaint and I presume they believed I would walk away and forget the thing.
8. But I didn’t. Consequently the matter was referred to The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) as a complaint along with several other matters that HMCTS refused to address through their own complaints process. These other matters are presently ongoing.
9. When PHSO requested a response and data from HMCTS on this matter and the several others before the Ombudsman HMCTS decided to settle this matter immediately via a cash offer to myself. Likely they didn’t want PHSO poking around to discover some of the things that go wrong in court offices. Or maybe they simply knew that the game was up as the errors made were too great to ignore.
10. This cash offer and admittance of fault came from HMCTS’ Customer Investigations head Richard Redgrave. Normally Redgrave and his team deploy complex tautology to evade response, avoid admitting fault and avoid paying compensation.
An extract from the letter admitting fault. Edited to remove the compensation amounts paid in the past.
The interesting thing to note is that this all represents not an unusual pattern of mishandling of a civil claim by HMCTS. These are everyday errors in a court system in which case files are in exceptionally poor shape and staff morale is at rock bottom.
Nor is this way of handling a complaint unusual or out of the ordinary. My experience of dealing with HMCTS staff has proven to me that the deny – ignore – avoid tactics are the standard response to complaints. Consequently the service standards never improve as they are unable to accept any wrongdoing has occurred.
The usual friendly customer service from HMCTS!
Footnote: in July 2019 HMCTS issued some new guidelines for its staff.
HMCTS decided it was, ‘the human voice of justice’. Based on three commitments, HMCTS said it will listen to you, explain everything clearly and guide you. ‘It’s a useful approach we are starting to apply every time we communicate – whether it’s when we speak, write or connect with the people who use our courts and tribunals, or the people we work with.’
Yesterday one of my cases was assessed and received judgment from Mr. Justice Warby, who just last week delivered an initial appraisal of the Coleen Rooney v. Rebekah Vardy case which is presently before him.
Sir Mark David John Warby, styled The Hon. MrJusticeWarby
As one might expect based on his reputation the judgement in my claim was incisive, carefully worded and hit all the correct notes.
It makes something of a change to deal with a judge who is focused on the best and most natural route for a case in line with the Overriding Objectives as opposed to the way some more local judiciary handle cases!
In March 2017 Mr. Justice Warby was appointed Judge in Charge of the Media and Communications List and is to be appointed to The Court of Appeal from 2021.
A superb example of how the civil courts in the UK operate.
Laurel & Hardy-ish levels of incompetence from staff at Leeds Combined Court.
A hearing was set for last week and the appropriate Notice of Hearing was sent out for that case.
However what the merry pranksters at civil section failed to point out was that there were two other pending civil cases to be heard by the same High Court Judge at the same hearing on the same day.
No Notice of Hearing document was sent out in relation to these other two cases. Equally no Order in relation to them was made ahead of the hearing. In short no notification of these two other claims being in play that day at all.
Therefore there could be no case preparation for these other two claims as I was blithely unaware that these were due to go ahead in the same hearing as a claim that I was notified about.
This is pretty much par for the course with HMCTS these days: an organisation in which the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.
The consequence of this overall for court users is delay, confusion and ultimately injustice.
The consequence for your poor bloody correspondent is of course more time, effort and expense spent correcting the errors made by court staff.
Twist ending to the tale: an application in respect of this matter was sent to the court just a few moments ago with an inquiry as to what the fee would be to file this. The answer was returned almost immediately.
However a complaint about the poor standard of service in the failure to notify me of two cases to be heard hasn’t been answered at all.
Conclusion: HMCTS is more interested in taking your money to correct service level errors they’ve made than they are in responding to legitimate and justified complaints.
HMCTS has a number of ways of obtaining money from court users. Some of these amount to sharp practice and although within the Civil Procedure Rules can also be said to amount to an abuse of process.
Yesterday I discussed how difficult it is to obtain a refund from HMCTS (with an example!). Today I look at one of the ways they increase costs for parties.
Here’s one of the ways this happens.
An application in a civil claim was cancelled with a few days notice.
This is because the High Court Judge set to hear the case, The Hon. Mr Nicholas Lavender, decided to scuttle back to London before Yorkshire and the North East Circuit (for which he is senior civil judge) was put into tier three COVID restrictions. In the event this was pointless as a few days later the Government decided to lockdown the whole of England. However this caused significant disruption to civil listings at Leeds Combined Court this week. Great to see a judge who takes his leadership responsibilities so seriously.
The hearing was rescheduled with eight days notice to the parties. Which was insufficient notice for the Claimant. The Claimant informed the court of this and the grounds for being unable to attend the short-notice rescheduled hearing. Either these grounds were not out before the judge or else were ignored.
One facet of The Hon. Nicholas Lavender’s handling of cases can be seen on a website in which it’s complained that he seeks to drive up costs for litigants. Particularly ones whose cases he finds tiresome. I suppose he has to find some amusement in the job. This site can be found at https://www.bentjudgenicholaslavender.site/index.php/contact/ [viewed February 2020]. Some of the content of the site this writer is unable to verify: in respect of his seeking to drive up costs for parties however I am able to comment.
So consequently the grounds on which the Claimant couldn’t make the rescheduled hearing were ignored and an Order made by the judge regarding the rescheduled date. As per usual the route to challenge such an Order lies in the completion of an N244 form and the payment of a fee. Indeed this is the only route to do so when an Order has been made by the judge.
Now here’s where things get funky. In addition to driving up costs for parties he dislikes Nicholas Lavender likes to take his time on dealing with applications made. Sometimes this can be up to four months when HMCTS service standards say fourteen days should be the turnaround time for such.
So the court ignored the grounds for the Claimant not being able to attend the rescheduled date in order to make an application which would then cost the Claimant £55 to overturn. There is of course no guarantee that the application to vacate the rescheduled date would be heard before the due date of the hearing (especially not with this judge!) but hey… let’s take a punt on the idea of making some more money out of a service user.
This sort of thing represents clear sharp practice but is a common enough activity within HMCTS.
Two blog entries on two separate days about how HMCTS deals with services users money.
Tomorrow is the more complex blog entry which deals with some of the underhand ways civil courts like to part you from your cash. Stay tuned!
Today is a simpler tale of how awkward they are when you try to get it back.
An artists impression of the inside of the Fees Office at The Royal Courts of Justice.
In April this year a fee was paid to Queen’s Bench Division at The Royal Courts of Justice.
Due to the pandemic QBD was largely out of action for some time, or at least the office to deal with the application was.
By July it was clear that the grounds and reasons for making the application had passed. The time which had gone without any staff present to man the appropriate office at QBD rendered the application pointless.
So the fees were requested to be returned.
“No problem!”, say QBD.
And the appropriate notification was supposed to have been sent to Fees Office. Lead time on return was reckoned to be six weeks maximum.
Four months later I’m still waiting.
Not that the fee paid was large or exorbitant. Which makes the continued retention of it even more baffling.
But what really boils my blood is that of several emails sent to both QBD and Fees Office at RCJ can you guess how many have received a response?
Go on! Have a wild guess!
That’s right. None. Over a period of some four months now Fees Office & QBD has failed totally to respond to several emails chasing this matter.
This is of course very HMCTS.
Nor have emails to The Court Manager at QBD about the lack of response received a reply. This is even more HMCTS!
Just today an email response to a separate matter has been issued by HMCTS. That took a blindingly quick two months without any explanation of why so much time had elapsed.
In separate proceedings last week the DJ complained that the case file was in very poor condition. A prior hearing in the same matter had to be abandoned on the basis that the file had been lost.
All of the above and the general woeful experiences to be had with HMCTS suggest the organisation – visibly tottering for some time – is now actually on the verge of collapsing or has actually done so. Staff largely unable to cope pre-COVID-19 appear now to be hopelessly overwhelmed by the day to day administration of cases.
Customer Relations at HMCTS dealing with another complaint with customary sensitivity and respect.
The West Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner is Mark Burns-Williamson, a largely gaff-prone failed politician. Heaven knows there’s sufficient data out there in the public domain to show that by any stretch of the imagination the man is unsuited to any role requiring public trust.
My favourite one details how he sent an inadvisable letter in a “love triangle” which would ordinarily have rendered him open to criminal prosecution. This was however covered up by West Yorkshire Police’s (then) DCI Simon Bottomley leading to the eternal gratitude of Burns-Williamson to the force he is supposed to scrutinise.
It also appears his office is prepared to manipulate and ignore facts to protect the very organisation it should be holding to scrutiny.
This blog entry tells the story of one such incident.
Burns-Williamson demonstrates the degree to which he hold the local force to scrutiny.
In May 2020 The Ministry of Justice’s Data Access Office sent data to a person (who we will call the recipient) in error.
This data was information on a third party who lived in the London area. This amounted to a serious data breach as the disclosure included the subjects name, address, date of birth and bank account details etc. as well as other disclosures regarding a series Proceeds of Crime Act proceedings against the data subject.
The recipient of the data informed The Information Commissioner’s Office and The Ministry of Justice as well as the data subject whose information had been disclosed. He also posted regarding this on Twitter but did not reveal any confidential information in so doing.
Data Access at MoJ requested the recipient remove the mocking tweet. The recipient of the data refused citing his freedom of expression under The Human Rights Act and that no offence in civil or criminal law had been committed by the tweet.
Three days later the recipient of the data was arrested at his home by West Yorkshire Police on the basis that he had breached The Data Protection Act. The allegation being that he had shared the confidential data sent to him in error on Twitter.
This was palpably untrue as an examination of the tweet would have confirmed. However police did not examine the tweet for themselves but took it “on trust” from MoJ that a supposed offence had taken place. Of course it hadn’t but MoJ were burning with indignation that a serious data security error had been made public and to their official regulator on data matters the ICO.
Police were aware that no offence had occurred.
The bar for arrest for any offence is set very high as recent cases such as Rachid v. The Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police (2020) show. Instead police took it on trust from The Ministry of Justice that an offence had occurred in a situation in which the Security Manager for MoJ’s correspondence (seen by this blogger) reveals his desire to give the recipient “a nasty shock”.
The recipient’s home was entered by police on his arrest. In the middle of the Spring 2020 pandemic a vulnerable family member who was shielding was subject to interaction with police who did not wear PPE or take any form of precautions regarding introducing COVID-19 infection into the home. Electronic devices were removed and the home was ransacked in the search. The officer leading this was PC Alan Jackson. Police actions amount to trespass to property (since there were no reasonable grounds for arrest) alongside trespass to goods and wrongful arrest.
The home of the recipient of data was raided by police without PPE in the middle of the spring pandemic.
Predictably no charges were brought. Emails seen between the Officer in Charge (OIC) and The Ministry of Justice reveal MoJ immediately loose interest when the recipient was arrested which fits in with the prior email claiming MoJ wanted to give him a nasty shock. No further action resulted to the recipient from either Police or MoJ.
A complaint was duly made by the recipient to West Yorkshire Police Professional Standards Department (PSD). Their internal investigation under The Police Reform Act 2002 confirmed – but only internally to the police – that the arrest was wrongful on the basis that WYP had not seen or been provided by MoJ with any indication that a criminal offence had taken place. Other aspects of the complaint made were ignored by PSD and not investigated.
An organisation such as West Yorkshire Police which has an international reputation for both corruption and incompetence needs to be able to head off complaints and minimise them early on. The investigation concluded in a document called an Assessment and Progress Log that there had indeed been no reasonable grounds for arrest, therefore logically the arrest was unlawful. This document was an internal document not for public or complainant’s consumption.
Police of course cannot admit that they have erred to the complainant. It opens the door for civil action for wrongful arrest and payment of compensation. It also amount to loss of professional reputation.
Thus the results of the PSD investigation which were presented to the complainant in August 2020 were totally at odds with the actual true findings of the investigation. The official line was that nothing untoward had occurred and that the arrest was legitimate: the unseen internal report stated quite the opposite. A copy of this report has since been obtained from WYP and examined.
If you find that the above shocks you then I would respectfully point out you may have little experience of the police complaints process and the extent to which it seeks to hide the conduct of misconducting and underperforming officers.
The complainant found some 21 issues with the PSD investigation response which were either suboptimal or evaded examination of the facts. Of course if you’re prepared to commit mendacity on such a scale as a police complaints office then it’s best to keep any communication simple. The response provided by PSD’s Vicky Silver was clearly exceptionally evasive and the errors in it were manifest.
Police Professional Standards Departments go to any length to dismiss valid complaints.
The complaint was progressed as an appeal to The Office of The Police and Crime Commissioner for West Yorkshire, this being a body with supposed oversight of the local force. Karen Gray at PCC was tasked with the examination of the appeal.
It is a basic element of any investigation that the investigator should have access to all of the data available to be able to reach a reasoned conclusion. This is common sense. In the course of the PCC’s investigation they either failed to obtain copies of documents such as the PSD Assessment and Progress Log or else were provided with a copy of the relevant data but chose to ignore it in favour of a rubber-stamped approval of the earlier PSD investigation.
Thus the office of West Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner have shown themselves to be either as throughly dishonest or professionally incompetent as the police force they are supposed to supervise. Further they are prepared to support the local force in their dishonesty.
A further complaint was made regarding the failure of the PCC to obtain all relevant data meaning that the Karen Gray investigation was fundamentally flawed. This was responded to more recently by PCC’s Jane Owen who has stated that Karen Gray could not have been aware of the Assessment and Progress Log on the basis that it was produced after the conclusion of the original PCC review.
However the document in question from PSD is dated 5.6.20.
Therefore it was produced BEFORE the complaint was referred to PCC by around two months. The response that it was not available in the original PSD investigation is therefore an outright lie.
It is of course inconceivable that an investigation properly conducted would not have requested a copy of, assessed and examined the PSD Assessment and Progress Log which was in existence by this point and therefore PSD’s position that Karen Gray had access to all of the required documentation to enable correct conclusions is not only incorrect but also deliberately misleading.
The essence of the complaint to PSD regarding wrongful arrest etc. was proven – as that office was well aware – by 5.6.20.
All subsequent efforts of PSD and the office of the PCC for West Yorkshire have sought to bury the facts under an increasing mound of guff and nonsense.
PSD chose to issue a response completely opposite to the facts they had themselves established and The Office of The Police and Crime Commissioner has assisted them in this cover-up and continues to do so.
In a desperate final attempt to avoid further scrutiny Jane Owen writes:
I have concluded that you have used the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner’s complaints process to try and change the outcome of your complaint… and the subsequent review undertaken by this office but – in line with the statutory guidance that has been issued that sets out how reviews have to be handled – you do not have a further right of review
Is it any wonder that both West Yorkshire Police and The Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner have such a poor reputation both locally and nationally?
Certainly both are prepared to bend the truth into impossible angles to avoid any admission of error or loss of professional reputation. Perversely this ends up in a situation as described above in which loss of face and reputation end up occurring both from the original issue and the labyrinthine efforts made to conceal it.
In Doncaster in early January 2020 a child died. His name was Keigan O’Brien.
Doncaster overall has an appalling reputation as a place in which children can grow up safely and free from fear of harm. Several incidents in recent years have put the city’s child protection measures into the national spotlight. At one point the relevant responsibilities would have rested with the local authority.
Doncaster Council offices, Waterdale
However Doncaster Children’s Services Trust (DCST) is an offshoot organisation set up by Doncaster Council. This follows a series of disastrous child protection failures from Doncaster Council (itself a noticeably underperforming local authority) and the establishment of DCST was clearly to place some element of distance between the Council and child protection services in the city. A useful tactic for the senior organisation avoiding blame and bad publicity. But the service provided by DCST is still the same appallingly poor standard as when matters were under the Council’s jurisdiction.
Tellingly the most recent OFSTED reports that DSCT show on their own site end in 2018.
The head of DCST is Jim Foy, the improbably titled LADO or Local Authority Designated Officer. The title is of course a hangover from the days when the service was an in-house Council run operation.
On the occasions this correspondent has encountered him Jim Foy seems a man hopelessly disengaged with the job he has to do and the overall impression is of a man who is the cause of chaos in his employment which others run then around correcting. This is bad enough in any post but in one with the responsibilities of LADO the consequences of failure are catastrophic to service users, their families and the local community.
And so it proved when Jim Foy – in the course of his duties – recorded data on a person who had engaged in a new relationship with a clerical support worker in a Doncaster area school. Not only did he record the data wrongly but he also recorded a matter which was not an offence in British criminal law. He failed to spot either of these errors. He then used this incorrect data to confront the clerical support worker and used it to try to force her out of her employment. When later faced with clear evidence that he had recorded the data incorrectly Jim Foy refused to amend or correct the error. Instead only after matters were investigated by the UK’s data regulator, The Information Commissioner’s Office, which found against DCST was the data reluctantly corrected.
The DPA 1998 states at 10(1) that a data controller is required to cease processing of personal data on ground that process of that data likely to cause damage / distress and is unwarranted.
Principal 4 also states that data held on an individual should be both accurate and kept up to date.
The error caused by DCST is twofold then: the recording of incorrect data in the first instance and the failure to correct it in the second. It is assumed that Jim Foy is sufficiently aware of these regulations and how they impact on his responsibilities although the persistent failure to correct the error when notified suggests otherwise.
In a civil case at Doncaster Civil Justice Centre North this week the defence of DCST to the claim of breach of the relevant legislation was not accepted by the judge who saw through the (admittedly very weak) set of arguments defence barrister presented.
The wider issue in this matter is that if DCST is recording data on people wrongly then how can they hope to build a genuine picture of the potential threats to children in their area? The consistent failure of DCST to protect children in the Doncaster region is evidence of where these kinds of systemic failure leads.
There is a cost to the public purse of this. So far there have been five hearings in this claim settled this week at a figure of around £1,000.00 costs to DCST each time they have sent counsel and instructed solicitor. Conservative estimates therefore put the costs to then local taxpayer of defence of a matter which was doomed to fail in any event (including pre-trial preparation etc) at around £9,000.00. This is over the matter of a simple piece of data recorded wrongly from one telephone call.
Nor is this the worst part of this matter.
In a December 2019 hearing and – presumably desperate to gain some form of hold on the Claimant and tactical advantage in the case via obtaining information on him – Jim Foy overheard a conversation at court in the case which resulted in him making enquiries regarding the Claimant’s children which by any examination breach the Claimant’s Article 8 right to privacy. These enquiries were made not only to the databases that DCST would use as a matter of course but also to local police forces.
Jim Foy was running around gathering this data with questionable legality and no operational remit to do so at the same time Keigan O’Brien was being placed in peril by the actions of his parents.
All this of course could only happen in DCST where actual child protection concerns come second to maintaining underperforming staff in post and ensuring the continuation of the organisation.
Recorder Ben Nolan QC, a part-time, fee-paid judge on the North East Circuit posted an inadvisable tweet in the late evening of 18th June, 2020:
The relevant Twitter account has now been deleted.
Like the account of HHJ Sarah Greenan, a Family Court judge sitting at Leeds and who has been subject of a prior blog post regarding judicial misuse of Twitter.
Ben Nolan QC is assumed to have sufficient seniority as a judge to be aware of the judicial conduct rules and how these relate to the expression of opinions on social media and elsewhere.
However let’s count the issues with the tweet above, shall we?
Inappropriate uses of expletives
Political opinions expressed regarding the Government
Poor diction – an issue which has been said to appear in Ben Nolan’s judgments
“fetid Primark store” expresses social prejudice against the people you’d likely find in Primark if not the store itself.
A complaint was made to the reliably ineffective Judicial Conduct and Investigations Office which supposedly enforces judicial conduct guidelines. The complaint was made in the terms mentioned above. JCIO can usually be relied upon to evade proper action on complaints about judges via a series of “trapdoors” built into the regulations which allow such cuffing off of legitimate complaints.
However – again unusually for JCIO – the issue made it as far as Nominated Judge (NI) stage. In this matter the NI being The Right Honourable Lady Justice Carr. In a complaint outcome letter dated 21st August, 2020 the JCIO stated that the Nominated Judge (NJ) concluded that:
“I do not consider that the posting of the tweet amounted to judicial misconduct. The tweet was not sent from a judicial account. The details of the account did not identify its holder as a judge. Nor did the contents of the tweet identify in any way that the author was a judge. In short, the tweet contained a private expression of opinion, albeit in offensive language, on the part of the Judge in circumstances that did not implicate him as a judicial office holder. In these circumstances, it did not risk bringing the judiciary into disrepute”
The NJ also considered that:
“the tweet did not reflect any social prejudice on the part of the Judge. Rather it reflected what the Judge had seen in the newspapers and on television”.
You might of course wonder about the common sense of a judge who bases his opinions on things he has seen on television or read in a newspaper!
Recorder Ben Nolan QC
The Nominated Judge went on to say:
“Accordingly, the complaint has been dismissed under Rule 41 (b) of the Judicial Conduct (Judicial and other office holders) Rules 2014.”
Regardless of the NI’s findings the rules regarding judicial conduct apply if the judge is identified / self-identified as such or not. Otherwise there is little point having the rules! As such the findings of Lady Justice Carr are at best unsustainable.
The findings of the Nominated Judge have been appealed on these grounds:
The outcome letter states:
The tweet was not sent from a judicial account. The details of the account did not identify its holder as a judge.
However the March 2020 Guide to Judicial Conduct states:
Judges should be aware; however, that participation in public debate on any topic may entail the risk of undermining public perception in the impartiality of the judiciary whether or not a judge’s comments would lead to recusal from a particular case. This risk arises in part because the judge will not have control over the terms of the debate or the interpretation given to his or her comments.
The risk of expressing views that will give rise to issues of bias or pre-judgment in future cases before the judge is a particular factor to be considered. This risk will seldom arise from what a judge has said in other cases, but will arise if a judge has taken part publicly in a political or controversial discussion.For these reasons, judges must always be circumspect before accepting any invitation, or taking any step, to engage in public debate. Consultation with their relevant leadership before doing so will almost always be desirable.Where a judge decides to participate in public debate, he or she should be careful to ensure that the occasion does not create a public perception of partiality towards a particular organisation (including a set of chambers or firm of solicitors), group or cause or to a lack of even handedness. Care should also be taken therefore, about the place at which and the occasion on which a judge speaks. Participation in public protests and demonstrations may well involve substantial risks of this kind and, further, be inconsistent with the dignity of judicial office.
This is stated in the context of post on social media or to newspapers etc.
There is no requirement in the Conduct Regulations that a judge is able to state anything he or she wishes provided he is not identified as a judge. Which of course makes a nonsense of the Nominated Judge’s application of the rules. In fact it rather shows that the NI has misapplied the rules to avoid making a judgment against Recorder Ben Nolan QC.
In fact the rules apply to judiciary regardless of if they are commenting from a personal perspective, or as a judicial office holder. Different rules of course apply to such as The Secret Barrister who is believed to be a member of counsel but is not identified directly as such.
There is no mention made in the Conduct regulations that the judge is able to publicise his own views regardless of if he mentions his judicial office or not. The rules apply equally to someone identifying themselves as a judge or not.
The response of The Rt. Hon. Lady Justice Carr hinges on the basis that the judge was not identified on his Twitter account as a judge. This is the basis for her dismissal of the complaint. This is not relevant to the complaint and in this matter has been seized upon as grounds to dismiss the complaint erroneously and contrary to the relevant rules.
One might wonder about the reliability of the investigation given the deeply odd findings made.
Anyone working on the North East Circuit (presumably the majority of Ben Nolan’s Twitter followers) are able to identify the Twitter account holder as a judge and the majority of the persons following the account will also have been aware that he was a fee paid judge from either media or professional connections. That the account holder was a member of the judiciary is something clear and obvious from the account itself.
Recorder Ben Nolan QC described as “a heavyweight in criminal practice”.
The basis on which the complaint has been dismissed is therefore spurious and erroneous.
In respect of the comments regarding Primark clothing stores the findings of the Nominated Judge stretched credulity even further. For good or ill that store seems to be one ripe for mockery as a place where people without much money tend to shop. The NI claimed:
“the tweet did not reflect any social prejudice on the part of the Judge. Rather it reflected what the Judge had seen in the newspapers and on television”.
This is problematic in a number of areas. Firstly why would Ben Nolan QC comment on something that he has picked up from second-hand experience? Is also his comment not reflective of social prejudice on the part of the source material in newspapers papers or on television in which he has seen such comments? Regardless of if a prejudice has been obtained from TV or newspapers the expressing of the same ideation by a person – particularly a person intelligent enough to recognise them as being prejudice – is effectively them expressing the same prejudice.
I would say that the tweet regarding Primark does express social prejudice on the part of a judge and that this is an exceptionally concerning matter.
The complaint outcome has been appealed. The outcome of the appeal is awaited.
It has been intimated in a separate civil case that Ben Nolan will shortly no longer be undertaking judicial work.
Judge Sarah Greenan (or HHJ Sarah Greenan) sits as a judge in the Family Court at Leeds Combined Court and also as a Crown Court Judge in Manchester. Her old chambers are Zenith in Leeds.
For most of her time sat on the bench she appears both bored and irritated by the mechanics of the job she has to do.
Specific rules exist in relation to judges and their ability to express an opinion in a public forum as well as their use of social media. These are enshrined in the Judicial Conduct Rules.
In February 2019 Judge Greenan posted a tweet to her since deleted Twitter account @Sarah_Zenith which expressed satisfaction that a High Court Judge has upheld an appeal in relation to a judgement she made and also that the Court of Appeal upheld her in a different case.
You may of course be wondering at this point why this judge has so many of her cases sent to appeal. This isn’t for me to comment but doubtless you can draw your own conclusions. Her pastoral supervisor is Judge Mark Gosnell, the senior civil judge for Leeds and Bradford, who also sits at Leeds.
However the sending of such a tweet amounted to a breach of regulations governing judicial conduct.
In cases such as this (or for example if a judge is abusive or aggressive in a hearing) there is a body to which complaints can be made. This is the reliably ineffective Judicial Conduct and Investigations Office based at The Royal Courts of Justice in London. Despite its name this is an office which actively seeks to avoid any examination into judicial misconduct and will seek to disapply – that is to say reject – complaints for a number of spurious reasons. Britain’s public life is beset with watchdogs which have no bite: it enables a “business as usual” approach to the corruption and incompetence which characterise public life in the UK.
But to everyone’s surprise this matter was taken up by JCIO. Which was one of a handful of complaints they did choose to investigate in 2019 and not “cuff off” as is standard procedure. Perhaps because this is a relatively low-level offence for which the evidence of misconduct was clear and unarguable. Or perhaps JCIO had a quota of complaints to process in 2019 to make it look as if the office was actually doing their job and this was seen as a trouble-free investigation. The matter was examined by the reliably obstreperous Isabelle Odowa at JCIO.
In short not even JCIO could not find a way to dismiss the complaint!
The basis of the complaint was that a lack of impartiality was shown in the opinions expressed, that personal opinions were shown and that the relevant codes of conduct for judges making public comments were breached.
As per standard procedure the complaint was referred to a Nominated Judge and then onwards to The Lord Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor. Each made a finding against HHJ Sarah Greenan with the ultimate conclusion being that the complaint was upheld.
The sanction imposed was informal advice in accordance with Para. 15 (2) & (3) of the Judicial Discipline (Prescribed Procedures) Regulations 2014.
This “cosy chat” approach of providing informal advice doesn’t seem like much of a sanction. And it isn’t. Because as this and several other cases referred to JCIO and upheld by The Lord Chancellor show “light touch” regulation is very much favoured particularly when it comes to misconduct from judges.
However it can be noted that judges as far south as Central London County Court were aware of and discussing this case after The Lord Chancellor’s decision and as such it may have sharpened up the behaviour of some of the judiciary on social media. Or not in the case of such as HHJ Recorder Ben Nolan QC… whose case I shall go into in a separate blog post one day.
This whole matter has made it clear to Judicial Office however that HHJ Greenan isn’t someone who can be relied upon not to make inadvisable comments in public forums. The judiciary tends not to appreciate members who are too verbose in this was & her actions may cost her a promotion or a minor title on retirement somewhere down the line.
Legal Babble 