Hard to think of two more poorly run institution than HMCTS and it’s parent organisation The Ministry of Justice.
This is a very simple post detailing a simple but significant error. So no lengthy explanation as to what’s happened on this occasion!
HMCTS shared my personal financial details with a third party.
That’s it. That’s basically all that can be said in the post.
But wait!
Stop and think for a few moments and we can see this is matter is actually considerably more significant and serious than it first looks.
The letter from The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) finding against HMCTS can be seen below.
But the operative paragraph from it is simple and plain:
The nub of the issue.
Why should this matter?
Personal data in the care of such as HMCTS and MoJ has the potential to cause significant damage if released inappropriately. Release to a third party with no requirement for or rights to such data can and does cause significant issues.
The simple fact is that the incompetence of County Court staff knows no bounds.
Indeed the vindictiveness of their management towards anyone who has received appalling service from HMCTS also knows no bounds. In this matter an out-of-court settlement was agreed upon to be paid fourteen days from the agreement. Some three months after this agreement I was still awaiting payout.
HMCTS and MoJ are simply two organisations which have ceased to function in any meaningful way and the amount of time spent on damage limitation, denying errors have occurred and attempting to maintain an image of professionalism would be better spent actually running courts efficiently in the first instance.
Anyone who’s been unfortunate enough to have to deal with HMCTS County Court staff will rue the day they ever did.
Customer services for HMCTS reply robustly to any complaint made!
Lazy, incompetent and incapable of even basic administration of claims. Their inability to do the job with promptness and accuracy is matched only by their wheedling and evasions when caught out.
Most of these people of course would not last five minutes in a commercial operation. But there’s no place else you can go to for civil court services.
The third rate service provided to court users therefore comes with a “like it or lump it” aspect.
So how long do you think a simple application in existing civil proceedings might take to be dealt with? Three weeks? Two months tops?
Try two years and three months!
Here’s how this came about…
An application was made in an existing claim to Sheffield County Court in May 2019.
Here is the proof of posting for this.
Note the date: 10.5.21
And here is the letter from Sheffield which states that this application has been received.
Again note the date. Also the claim number! Edited to remove my address.
And finally see the date on the Court Order which has resulted from this application…
All told this simple application has taken a period of two years three months to be actioned by HMCTS.
So what have they been doing in that time? Well the pandemic isn’t really an excuse as they had ten months pre-pandemic to sort the application. Then of course we’ve not been in lockdown for more than four months of the last year. So the pandemic isn’t an excuse.
I suspect as with most civil cases the file has been kept in poor condition with bits missing and documents lost. Again this comes down to the competence of civil court staff to do the basics of their job. A knuckle-dragging approach to fixing problems also doesn’t help.
They are – well it rhymes with mooseless pluckers – as there can be no possible excuse for a matter being left some two years three months before being actioned.
But of course anyone who’s dealt with County Court staff in the last twenty or so years knows what a set of mooseless pluckers they are.
This post details the extent to which HMCTS will seek to lie and mislead in order to avoid admitting a clear service level error made by court staff, particularly when such an error is serious enough to amount to a breach of a person’s right of access to justice or human rights.
Below is a copy of an email sent earlier today to Customer Investigations at HMCTS. They are the final stage of appeal in the event that court staff make serious errors in the handling of civil claims.
It follows two separate instances of the Court Manager at Leeds Combined Court, Joanne Town, seeking to deliberately mislead in her replies to a complaint. The original complaint was that court staff failed to notify me of a hearing taking place into two claims – they only informed me of a third taking place on the same date in November.
Joanne Town states that these two claims were not heard on the relevant date. All available evidence including an Order from the hearing proves her wrong but she maintains her position twice over.
This behaviour and the original error of the court failing to inform me of dates for two claims to be heard represents sufficiently shocking behaviour that I share the email I have sent to Customer Investigations in its entirety below.
The email begins…
I refer to the issue below as a formal complaint to Customer Investigations.
On 11.11.20 a hearing took place at Leeds Combined Court in [REDACTED]. I was unable to attend this hearing. Also in the same hearing two other claims were heard. These being [REDACTED] & [REDACTED]. I was not notified that these claims were to be heard on that date at the same time as [REDACTED]. A formal complaint was therefore made to Leeds Combined Court. It is a fundamental aspect of access to justice that a Claimant should be able to attend hearings in relation to claims he has brought. Indeed CPR enshrines such rights. Article 6 of The Human Rights Act states the right to be a fair and public trial or hearing at which I am allowed representation if a public authority is making a decision that has a impact upon my civil rights or obligations. The failure to notify in respect of two claims in which I was Claimant taking place on 11.11.20 thus activates my Article 6 rights. By failure to inform of hearings taking place on 11.11.20 HMCTS has breached my Article 6 rights.
Firstly as can be seen from the email below no communication was received as sent on 7.12.20 by Leeds Combined Court. A copy of a letter dated 7.12.20 has been sent to me by email today in relation to my query regarding a level two response.
The onus of the complaint to Customer Investigations is as follows:
The response provided on 23.11.20 and that dated 7.12.20 both state:
The court did not receive any applications or fees on [REDACTED] & [REDACTED] to set aside, vary or discharge the order of Mr. Justice Lavender dated 27th February 2020 and as such these cases were not listed on the 11th November 2020 these files were not forwarded to the Judge
Further that the position as outlined above is the same argument outlined by the Court in its defence in the 23.11.20 email. There has therefore been no review of the appeal to the first stage complaint response. It would additionally appear that no further investigations into the matter have taken place by Leeds. A simple check of the Order of 11.11.20 would have shown Joanne Town that the statements she has made are wholly factually wrong.
I attach further a copy of an Order made on 11.11.20 in the matters of [REDACTED], [REDACTED] & [REDACTED]. This clearly shows that the matters of G00LS437 & [REDACTED] WERE heard on 11.11.20. I attach also a Notice of Hearing in respect of the 11.11.20 which is the only Notice of Hearing received in relation to any proceedings on this date. I was therefore not informed of the hearing of two other claims on 11.11.20.
As a consequence of this both the email seen in the attached Word document from Joanne Town of November and the PDF of 7.12.20 also attached have deliberately and purposefully set out to misrepresent the facts, mislead and are a clear breach of the duty of care of the Court Manager to act with good faith in relation to service users. When you have a Court Manager who is prepared to mislead in such a way but is so easily caught out I would suggest that it’s pretty much the beginning of the end for HMCTS as an organisation. If you are incapable of honesty and integrity in your dealings with the public then any confidence in the organisation will vanish. The errors seen in the original complaint are compounded by the mendacity of the Court.
I have additionally noted that Joanne Town has acted to respond to both the first and second stage of the complaints and as such there has been no actual second-stage review of the issues raised: the PDF of 7.12.20 simply repeats the response put in the original of 23.11.20.
Consequently I appeal the second stage response on the basis that both that and the first stage response are wholly mendacious and fail to accept that a serious service level failure amounting to a breach of my Article 6 rights has occurred. The situation is no different to that of [REDACTED] in which the same Court Manager was aware that no action was taken in a claim for over a year but failed to respond to complaints in respect of that service level failure.
As a consequence of the error by court staff I have had to make an application in respect of [REDACTED] & [REDACTED] which has also cost me money.
In respect of this matter I seek a financial settlement appropriate to the breach of my rights by Leeds Combined Court in failing to notify of the hearings into [REDACTED] & [REDACTED] and the mendacious response of Court Manager Joanne Town. I have also lost time and amenity chasing this matter and have been vexed and harassed by the behaviour of the Court in respect of the original failure and the mendacious responses provided. I seek compensation in relation to these matters also.
The behaviour of the Court Manager is sufficiently shocking that I believe others should be aware of this and as such the content of communications in this matter thus far – including this email – will be published online.
This blog is in danger of becoming a post largely carping on about service level failures by court staff at HMCTS.
Having said that the errors they make are sufficiently numerous and serious in consequence that they’re like busses: there’s always another one along in a minute. This makes it very easy to produce material for this blog. Although I’m likely to get bored of telling you about all of these errors long before HMCTS stop making them.
Doncaster: the County Court here fails to serve the people of the city well.
The kind of service level failures court staff specialise in would – in any normal workplace – result in disciplinary proceedings. But HMCTS is presently sufficiently desperate to retain any form of staff to keep at least a semblance of function in civil courts that even the most spectacularly gaff-prone employees are retained. Better the devil you know than someone even more slackly incompetent.
The end result of this for court users is of course loss of time, expense and waste of effort.
And so it has been today in relation to a claim at Doncaster County Court, (already noted for more than its fair share of errors in handling this particular claim) at which yet another service level failure has take place.
In several occasions in the past both parties have been all set for trial only for the trial to be cancelled when all are in attendance. Grounds: over-running of a prior matter, file in poor condition etc. On one occasion the file was even lost!
There’s always an excuse for appalling service but the basic grounds ultimately come down to two things: an inability on the part of court staff to administrate claims properly and the failure of District Judges to deploy appropriate oversight of a case or to get a grip on case management issues.
An application in this claim was made in April 2020. Estimated time to hearing was 12 weeks, which of course came and went without any Notice of Hearing.
Two other hearings In the same claim took place in October and November at which the application could have been scheduled to be heard. Needless to say it wasn’t even though the District Judge made clear she was aware of its existence.
This is a critical fact: that staff failed to schedule the application in a way that would have dealt with it reasonably at an appropriate time within the claim, saving the parties time and effort. Having acknowledged receipt of the application they simply forgot all about it
…until the point I sent them a timely reminder in relation to the application. This brought a further hearing date. Which again drags all the parties over to Doncaster for what ultimately ends up as a futile exercise.
When the matter of the application could have been heard within other hearings in the same claim but wasn’t because court staff forgot about it we have clear evidence that the civil court system has collapsed and cannot now administrate in even the most basic respects.
How do many legal professionals react to their cases being so poorly run? Often by keeping their heads down and accepting the situation. To speak out in public or in the court itself would perhaps cause damage to careers and lead the judiciary to take against them on future appearances. And so nothing in the civil system improves.
HMCTS service standards are… well not very good at all really!
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.’
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.
Legal Babble 