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.
The Ministry of Justice. A building every bit as ugly and brutal as some of the people and things that go on inside it.
The Paul Foot Award 2021 has been won by journalist Jack Shenker for his article (link below) on cleaners at The Ministry of Justice, specifically one of their number called Emanuel Gomes.
Gomes was told to attend work at The Ministry of Justice at Petty France in London’s St. James daily during the early part of the pandemic in 2020.
He was paid just over £9.00 per hour.
The offices were empty. All Ministry staff had been relocated to work from home. The necessity of cleaning empty offices has never been satisfactorily explained.
Despite concerns no PPE was given to cleaners at MoJ. No sick pay was available and so Mr. Gomes continued to work regardless of contracting Coronavirus and becoming ill.
MoJ denied there had been an outbreak of the virus at the Ministry, despite compelling evidence to the contrary. This is of course standard for MoJ: deny, lie and evade.
Seven ancillary staff appear to have contracted the virus but still attended work due to lack of proper sick pay.
Emanuel Gomes died on the evening of 23rd of April 2020.
Ministry of Justice cleaning services are contracted out to OCS – “a facilities management company privately-owned by the Goodliffe Family, who are worth £191 million and appear on the Sunday Times rich list… taxpayers send the firm £17.5 million per annum, and in return OCS provides the ministry with security, catering, cleaning and other services.”
There’s a lot of talk at the moment about public money being wasted. Much of this revolves around issues such as PPE for healthcare workers or the Test and Trace app. It would seem that the Government have used emergency situations created by the coronavirus pandemic as a means to transfer public money into private hands. Often the people enriched appear to be friends and donors to the Conservative Party.
But hold on a moment!
If you wanted an object lesson in “spaffing” public money up the wall there’s few who do this better than The Ministry of Justice.
Take a look at the extract from a Freedom of Information Act request seen below.
So that’s £27K that the public purse isn’t going to get back! Note that this has been spent on defence of a case regarding The Ministry of Justice failing in its obligations to keep service users data safe and private.
It would actually have been easier for all concerned and considerably cheaper for MoJ to have ensured the safety and privacy of service users data to begin with. But this assumes that enough of a damn is given about the privacy of service users data by that department.
A request was made in August 2020 for data from a subdivision of The Ministry of Justice. The response (issued outside the time limits for such in law) stated:
This is actually a two-headed matter. A complaint of poor service thrown in with a data access request for the data which proves the grounds of the complaint are correct and that multiple errors occurred. Needless to say the subdivision ignored the complaint and requested I make the data access request to London, as seen above.
You will see how this letter refers me to Data Access office as being the correct source of the data required. So Data Access were contacted in late September 2020 and the data again requested from them.
Some five months later and several chase-ups by email and Data Access deny they are the source of the data. The data is apparently best obtained from the office I originally wrote to.
There is little that can be said for this game of piggy-in-the-middle except to say that I will not play it.
The source of the apparent information that they cannot fulfil this data access request are unnamed “senior managers” whose details I have requested. Odd how it’s always some unnamed person as the source of an instruction that sends the public on a wild goose chase.
The disclosure team for MoJ are ultimately responsible for the production of data access requests made to sub departments within MoJ. The requests made in mid-2020 are indeed data access requests. They seek specific data and this is clear from the requests themselves. It is the job of Disclosure Team to work with the sub department of MoJ I first communicated with to obtain the data from them and then relay it to me.
It looks very much like both offices are attempting to evade the production of data via a game of piggy-in-the-middle and delay. Unsurprisingly the subsidiary office originally contacted has failed to respond to the initial complaint linked to this data request.
This request has been before Data Access office since September 2020 and has only just received the response of “go back to the start”. Taking this delay in response alone as a single issue would render the handling of the request wholly unacceptable and a breach of the relevant law.
By seeking to frustrate the request in this way The Ministry of Justice has earned itself a referral to The Information Commissioner’s Office.
Has someone ever asked you “Does my bum look big in this?”. Did you feel inclined to answer honestly or fib a little to offer some comfort and solace while still being truthful?
The simple fact is that lots of people lie on an almost daily basis. The majority of these are “white lies” which are popularly thought to do no harm, but despite this have a habit of coming back and affecting us in all sorts of ways.
However we used to expect more from people in public positions. The popular myth of the lying politician has of course been around for generations. But often this was more a matter of an MP having been caught out when circumstances rapidly change, or they were simply poor communicators, as opposed to them directly seeking to deceive. Once being caught out as a liar would end a political career either via resignation or sacking. Not any more.
I have dealt with public bodies for the best part of thirty years now and I have detected a drop in standards from state-run organisations which roughly parallels the drop in standards in public life generally.
Sorry to ruin your day by reminding you of these mendacious b******* (pt. 1)
Here’s my theory.
When Tony Blair’s New Labour came to power in 1997 and Blair walked into Downing Street for the first time there appeared to be – to the casual observer – a public demonstration of joy as people lined Downing Street cheering and waving flags. Hooray for the new dawn for Britain!
Except that this wasn’t the case. Those people were all Labour Party activists and not members of the public. But we were supposed to think these were happy Londoners expressing gratitude. Thus the New Labour Goverment of 1997 – 2010 started its term in office with a cynical little deception.
And so it continued. The rise of political spin and outright deception marred any beneficial policies New Labour brought. The 1997 cohort of MP’s still present in opposition continue to practice the same spin and evasion when caught out not doing their jobs that they’ve practiced for years. For more details of the long term effects of this spin and deception ask the average Iraqi citizen.
Some time past mistakes made by organisations such as HMCTS in handling claims were few and far between. Staff were trained, diligent and in a job more or less for life. When a mistake was made an apology was issued and a correction made quickly. Thus mistakes were learning experiences which made staff better employees and future errors less likely. However from 1997 onwards I remember I detected there was a shift: mistakes became something to be covered up like guilty family secrets. Court Managers became adept at avoiding addressing the key aspects of a complaint (“we have investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong”) in order to avoid blame.
This is entirely parallel to the New Labour age of spin and public relations managment style Government. Anyone remember “A good day to bury bad news”? That one was a big hit back in 2001.
Arguably in the last few years the efforts made to avoid admitting clear errors have mutated into something far more corrosive. Such as Court Managers and Area Directors now deny – in the face of clear documentary evidence – that an error in a claim has occured at all.
The rise of political lying has been very well documented in the last few years and started in ernest with Tory Chancellor George Osborne and Michael Gove who clearly sought to decieve and deployed mendacity as a deliberate political weapon. It seems we now have a Government who are happy to issue untruths on a daily basis secure in the knowledge that the world moves on so fast that by the time their comments have been fact-checked and the truth known that the public will largely have swallowed the lie.
So it is now with public bodies. In many cases the organisation – and I speak of such as MoJ and HMCTS etc. – as I have the majority experience of these two – are so chaotically run that more and more daily errors occur and it is impossible to catch all of these and correct them. For example case files are returned to storage incomplete and disordered as staff run around a a blind panic with no clear idea what they are tasked with.
Sorry to ruin your day by reminding you of these mendacious b******* (pt. 2)
The end result of all this is clear. Any trust remaining in public institutions vanishes. No learning from an error occurs and so it is repeated.
Management cannot address every error as it occurs and so they outright deny such a problem has happened, even when it is clear the whole system is close to collapse. The rise of political lying gives them an example to follow and once again sets the tone for how those employed by the state act. It’s Nelson putting the telescope to his eyepatch and saying “I see no ships”.
I write in relation to the Julian Assange extradition attempt by the US government. This has received a ruling today which has stated that Assange cannot be extradited to America on the basis of mental health concerns.
It is widely considered that the case against Assange has been cooked up as revenge against Wikileaks publication of atrocities by the US military in the Middle East. That such was designed to frighten any journalist in the future from exposure of similar state backed horrors.
As this post will detail The Ministry of Justice in the UK is quite prepared to commit abuse of process to also persecute those who publish material which exposes its wrongdoing and incompetence.
Assange in transit in a prison van from Belmarsh high security prison where he has been held.
The ruling in the case is that extradition cannot take place as America cannot guarantee the safety of Assange in a US prison in the light of his apparent suicidal ideations. These thoughts probably stem from his continued persecution for many years over Wikileaks publication of video footage of atrocities committed by the US military against civilians.
The points made regarding the safety of the US prison system of course apply equally – if not more so – to British prisons. Belmarsh was the choice of prison for Assange on the basis of the additional security given to inmates there.
The other thing that struck me about the judgment is that the extradition to America was refused not on grounds which assert and re-enforce the freedom of the press or the ability of such as Wikileaks to publish material which challenges authority but on the grounds of safety for the defendant.
The decision was made by a District Judge. Anyone familiar enough with the British legal system will likely be aware that the judge has chosen an anaemic third way in order to dismiss the case for extradition. No wonder the decision is likely to be appealed! Rather than outright confrontation of the prosecution case which was designed both as an act of revenge against Assange and a threat to any future journalists exposing official misconduct the judge chose a way which avoids these prosecution arguments being confronted and carefully debunked.
If a decision was made to extradite on the basis of the case put on behalf of the prosecution then the risk to press freedom in future would have been grave. As it is the case has been a warning shot to anyone thinking of publishing contentious material regarding state backed misconduct.
The judge has accepted the proposition advanced by Assange’s legal team that an American prison is not sufficiently safe for someone with suicidal thoughts.
Were he still alive Jeffrey Epstein would also likely agree that an American prison is an insufficiently safe environment for people who have – like Assange – embarrassed or risk embarrassing those who hold the levers of power in America.
We don’t have to look to a high-profile case such as this to see official misuse of power in an act of revenge against those who publish material which would embarrass authority, as our own Minisry of Justice in Britain are quite prepared to carry out misconduct in public office in this way.
In May this year I was sent material in error by MoJ. This was a letter intended for the Metropolitan Police in relation to Proceeds of Crime Act proceedings against an individual in the Kent area.
The data sent to me in error constituted a considerable Data Protection Act breach and covered the name, address, date of birth and bank details of the individual and other compromising data. Such data in the wrong hands could have resulted in considerable fraud committed against the data subject by the misuse of his personal details. I informed both The Information Commissioner’s Office and the data subject about this.
I also posted – with no small amount of schadenfreude – the tweet seen below. No aspect of the content of this tweet breached revealed data on the data subject and thus was not actionable. It simply and quite rightly embarrassed MoJ as an organisation which is incompetent in the handling of personal data.
Despite the fact that MoJ were wholly in the wrong over this entire matter they decided to go on the offensive and instructed West Yorkshire Police to arrest me in relation to offences under The Data Protection Act.
Police, having seen no evidence of any offence committed in civil or criminal law, nevertheless took the word of MoJ as gospel and in so doing broke the law themselves not least by committing a wrongful arrest.
I was arrested and held in custody at the police station. It was relegated much later in an email chain from the Head of Security at MoJ that the purpose of this was “to give him a shock”. I’d embarrassed MoJ in public with the tweet and reported the data breech to ICO. Consequently MoJ wished to revenge itself and were prepared to commit misconduct in public office to do so.
Of course the other thing the emails between MoJ and West Yorkshire Police also reveal is the sudden loss of interest in the matter when I was arrested – the arrest being the short, sharp shock MoJ was aiming for. An internal investigation by police also admits there were no grounds for arrest and no offence had been committed.
The point of my explaining all this shabby behaviour and breach of duty of care from two shifty little organisations is clear. Just as Assange has been intimidated and subject to abuse of process because of what he published so have I.
Such actions from organisations such as MoJ and West Yorkshire Police serve to wholly undermine public confidence in the organisations themselves and damage their own reputation. Further it exposes the organisations as being comprised of the inept, the incompetent and the petty-minded.
If MoJ or West Yorkshire Police would like a right of reply to the content of this article then I am happy to publish any point of view they may give. I may equally produce further evidence in response which confirms the facts already stated above!
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.
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.’
Legal Babble 