court service standards

June 27, 2023June 27, 2023

Elder Abuse? Social Worker Coverup in Evidence to The High Court

This article, as seen below, was originally printed on this blog in August 2022.

Following an application made in September 2022 by the legal firm Weightmans of Liverpool at The High Court the blog was temporarily removed.

It is clear why the firm wished to remove the contents of this post. This is because they intended to commit significant malpractice towards Mrs. X, the subject of legal action brought by the firm on behalf of Wakefield Council as can be seen in a new blog entry which can be found at:

https://legalbabble.law.blog/2023/06/27/what-is-the-cost-of-a-human-life-in-modern-britain/

That entry details matters in more depth. The data seen here shows the position as of mid-2022 before the more significant misconduct carried out against Mrs. X took place.
The level of professional misconduct by the firm alongside the negligent handling of the case by the Court, who were well aware Mrs. X had protected characteristics and suchlike, led directly to the death of Mrs. X in February 2022. I have, therefore re-published this blog post, and it should be read in conjunction with the more recent post, the link to which can be seen above.

The position of Social Worker provides unique opportunities to the holder of such a post.

People who have a manipulative desire to insert themselves into the lives of others for malignant intent have a golden set of opportunities in such as social work.

When such a person is found out there is invariably an attempt to cover up their tracks. Often assisted by the Local Authority that employs them.

Just such an incident is the subject of this blog post.

In this post you will learn of the efforts of a social worker from Wakefield District Council to harass an elderly person within their region and the subsequent medical effects of the harassment on the elderly person. For the purpose of this we shall call her Mrs. X.

You’ll also see how the social worker then attempted to lie regarding communications with the elderly persons general practitioner.

Most damningly the social worker’s lies appear in a statement to the High Court made in order to try to cover up her actions and distance herself from being the cause of Mrs X’s subsequent deterioration.

Joanne Cave is a social worker for Wakefield District Council.

There have been a series of errors, omissions and malpractices from Wakefield District Council Social Services over a period of time lasting more than a year. Mrs X, the pensioner concerned, has had to suffer a series of significant errors in documentation created by the council, and the creation of reports by social services which failed to properly mention Mrs X’s medical conditions in order in part to deny her access to council services.

The Council has also sought to withhold documents requested as part of subject access requests and mishandled applications for such as discretionary disregard. In short Mrs X has been subject to appalling service by Wakefield District Council who refuse to accept responsibility for such.

An NHS assessment of Mrs. X in May 2022 at which social worker Joanne Cave was also present was the turning point for this.

This assessment showed that the prior reports written by social services at Wakefield District Council which failed to mention Mrs X’s medical conditions were clearly factually incorrect and that the medical conditions suffered by Mrs X are severe and have a significant effect on her quality of life.

Mrs X commenced series of legal proceedings regarding the council over such matters as their failure to correctly record data on her. Social worker Joanne Cave rang Mrs X to ask her questions about such legal proceedings and did so in such a way as to place Mrs X under undue stress and anxiety.

You may well wonder why a Social Worker was ringing to question someone under their care about legal issues and the claim they were bringing when Wakefield District Council has its own legal representation employed to do such things.

Social worker Joanne Cave and her immediate superior Mehmun Nessa were aware that these calls were placing Mrs X under undue stress and causing anxiety. This is clear from the content of a separate statement to The High Court not included here.

This does not stop them calling Mrs X on three separate occasions however to ask about legal proceedings Mrs X brought.

Medical report showing UTI contracted in the immediate aftermath of the call.

Because of a frail health suffered by Mrs X the stress she was placed under by the initial phone call from Joanne Cave induced in her a urinary tract infection which has since led directly to a permanent nocturnal incontinence. This can be seen in the above medical report. The UTI was contracted immediately following the phone call as a result of worry and anxiety caused by it.

Above is an extract from the GP’s medical report showing this UTI. As stated during this call Cave attempted to question Mrs X about legal proceedings, putting her to great distress and anxiety.

As a result of this a complaint was made to Social Care Complaints at Wakefield District Council. The council acted immediately on this complaint By deciding to ignore it and refusing to take any action.

However Joanne Cave herself was made aware of the terms of the complaint by Social Care Complaints and attempted to contact Mrs X’s GP to determine the extent of the urinary tract infection caused by her oppressive and distressing phone call.

Email from the GP practice confirms no data was passed to Joanne Cave.

It is clear from the data above that social worker Joanne Cave attempted to obtain information on the medical situation regarding the UTI from Mrs X’s GP.

However this was not obtained as Cave failed to obtain or to supply copies of any form of authority and indeed no authority to access her medical records was given by Mrs X.

What are the significant errors in Cave’s statements to the court?

Cave tactically lies in her statement and claims the contact with the surgery for help came 31.5.22.

The medical record show the matter was actioned by a GP on 24.5.22. This is to minimise her involvement in the UTI contracted by Mrs X. There is no other reason Cave would have miss-reported the date of the call for help by Mrs X to the GP.

Cave purposefully states that Mrs X was seen in the surgery. This is clearly incorrect.

Cave claims she emails the surgery twice.

This is not the account given by the surgery. They do not state an email was received. Instead they explicitly state no email was not received. Cave claims they were emailed twice. No copy of any consent was received by the surgery. This is clear.

Cave seems to claim asking the surgery to contact Mrs X on her behalf.

The surgery did not make contact with Mrs X or relatives in respect of any matter related to Cave’s call to them.

The dates of calls etc. given in the surgery email and Cave’s statement are also inconsistent.

The content of the GP email seen above are clear on this. Joanne Cave appears to have acted to mislead The High Court.

The issues are now clear. Joanne Cave sought to mislead the Court in respect of information passed over from Mrs X’s GP.

There are numerous claims across each of Cave’s two statements to The High Court regarding dates of calls with the GP and data passed over. Invariably these claims seek to put the date of the UTI contracted outside of the timeframe around the call made by Cave to Mrs X.

But regardless of the distress and medical effects caused by the first call a second call from Joanne Cave’s supervisor Mehmun Nessa was made in July 2022 and then a further call from Cave herself in August. A statement provided in proceedings by Cave makes is clear Wakefield Social Services are aware of the distress this places on Mrs X.

In statements to the High Court Cave have sought to mislead regarding information passed over by the GP surgery. That the surgery is clear that no information was passed over and no forms of authority were returned.

Joanne Cave’s assertions in her statements regarding data passed over by Mrs X’s GP are therefore total fabrications.

Recordings made by the GP surgery confirmed this, and the surgery itself confirms that no data was passed over to social worker Joanne Cave.

It’s clear then that Joanne Cave has misled the court in her statements. This amounts to perjury, misconduct in public office and an attempt by Cave to absolve herself of any responsibility for inducing in Mrs X a urinary tract infection in May 2022.

That anyone should lie in a statement in court is a serious matter. Any person doing so has committed perjury and is liable to find themselves in contempt of court for such behaviour. Generally we would expect that anyone acting as a social worker, who has regular and frequent contact with the vulnerable, the confused and the easily harmed should hold themselves to higher standards.

In this matter Joanne Cave rang Mrs X in May 2022 to attempt to obtain information which was related to legal proceedings. This is clearly not her job as a social worker but Mrs X was more likely to “let her guard down” with such a person than if a solicitor called. In order to be able to discuss these mattes with Mrs X Cave began the conversation on a separate matter, discussing any care that Mrs X may want and her medical needs. Joanne Cave then began to broach the subject of civil legal issues causing Mrs X distress and anxiety. This a direct cause of a UTI and subsequent lasting nocturnal incontinence.

Mrs X is currently therefore worse off medically and in terms of her health and well-being as a result of contact with Wakefield Social Services.

In happier days a Social Worker would not lie to a court in order to try to cover up the fact of their own misconduct toward a client.

These are not happy days. These are days in which people who work for large organisations will lie, conceal, dissemble and manipulate in order to cover up facts around their own professional misconduct and incompetence.

Joanne Cave, Social Worker for Wakefield District Council has been thoroughly and completely caught out on this matter.

Will we have to wait too long to see the effect of any internal investigation into the provision of knowingly incorrect data in court proceedings by Wakefield District Council? An internal investigation as been requested but those familiar with this Council’s propensity for dissembling, hand-wringing and wrangling would be wise not to hold their breath.

August 27, 2021August 27, 2021

HMCTS Under Fire From The Information Commissioner’s Office. Again!

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:

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.

August 16, 2021August 16, 2021

HMCTS & The Two Year Delay

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.

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.

February 12, 2021September 19, 2021

What is a Dismissal List Manager responsible For? Substandard Case Administration?

Was going to write a length diatribe on how badly served we are by Civil Appeals Office at The Royal Courts of Justice but a short explanation, a couple of screenshots and a reproduced email do the job just as well.

This is a blog entry about how a civil appeal matter has received suboptimal service by HMCTS staff, how it’s taken some five months to identify claimed issues with documents supposedly not being sent, but in fact these documents were supplied. How is this related to the shady post of Dismissal List Manager which HMCTS dislike revealing the details of?

To start with here are the screenshots. I’ve been waiting for a response from Civil Appeals Office on this matter since November 2020, their last communication to me prior to this taking some two months to be sent.

Joseph Goswell states his position is in the Case Management Section at Civil Appeals office. He writes:

What is stated to be wrong with the application…

Rather a tight time limit for a letter sent to an Applicant on 11.2.21!

In actual fact none of the stated errors with the application exist. All the documents required in the matter were supplied in September 2020. See the reproduced email below.

One thing Joseph Goswell doesn’t tend to advertise is his other job at HMCTS – Dismissal List Manager. This is certainly not the post he mentions in the above letter.

It is noted that HMCTS are very shifty and refuse to answer reasonable data access requests for what a Dismissal List Manager actually does. For more on this bizarre refusal to address a perfectly legitimate question see the link below:

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/duties_of_dismissal_list_manager

Ludicrously it is claimed no data exists on the role and the responses given to the data access request above are so vague as to be meaningless. In a position paid for out of the public purse why such coyness unless there’s a vested interest in keeping the data secret.

However we can theorise that this role may be someone within HMCTS whose purpose is to frustrate claims at an administrative level for the purpose of enabling them to be dismissed. This seems to tally with the letter content written above in which non-existent issues are identified with a bundle. Of course if HMCTS would like to explain what this role actually is then I’d be happy to include the data here.

My email in response to the letter from Civil Appeals Office states:

I refer to your email below.

I note the delay in response to any issue arising out of this matter and that there has been no communication from your office since November last year. I note that the email prior to that took some two months to receive a response.

The core bundle was filed and served on 2.9.20. Since that point CA have not identified any issue with the bundle which would make it non-compliant.

You state that there is no index. A copy of the index was supplied (index.doc). This shows the reference number for each of the following documents which corresponds to the number starting each document. As was a copy of the sealed order being appealed against (4). The Judicial Review claim form is at (12) and the grounds for JR both follow on from this. In other words all of the grounds you give for the bundle being in error are in fact present and correct and have been with your office since September 2020.

I note further that there has been no communication from CA since September 2020 in relation to the bundle supplied. We are now some five months gone from September 2020. Perhaps you could explain why this is so if there are thought to be errors? For your convenience I have attached a copy of all correspondence so far with CA office.

To go from September 2020 to February 2021 without identifying errors in a bundle and reverting to the Claimant five months later and only at the point at which the Claimant chases the matter up represents an unacceptable service level failure for which I now make a formal complaint to The Court Manager. The errors you state exist with the bundle are not present, as I have shown.

It is further poor service that the attached letter of 11.2.21 states you require these errors correcting by 18.2.21 when you have been sat on these issues for so long. However as stated above each of the documents you claim not to be present is in fact present within the bundle.

A further copy of the bundle is attached to this email.

Please inform me of the progress of this matter, and the progress of the complaint alongside the name of the Court Manager to whom the matter has been referred.

Email of 12.2.21 ends.

So there are the following issues arising here:

Let’s assume there WERE errors in the bundle supplied to The Court of Appeal… why does it take five months for these to be identified?
More to the point why wait until an Applicant emails the court five months later before informing of these?
..and then give a total of seven days in a pandemic (five if we discount the weekend) for these to be corrected when these matters have been left to lay on file for five months now?
Admin staff can see that all of the documents they claim were not supplied were in fact attached with the original bundle. So why do they claim they were not?
Why has there been no communication on this claim for some three months?
Why is there seemingly no data on the post of Dismissal List Manager which can be made public?
Why does Joseph Goswell not use his correct title in the letter to me of 11.2.21?

Suspect the answer to the above questions can be found in the shady and little-stated other position of Joseph Goswell as “Dismissal List Manager”!

Is the handling of this matter standard HMCTS incompetence or is the role of Dismissal List Manager a shadier one than we can imagine and one in which civil claims are subject to interdiction and mishandling to frustrate them?

As always anyone or any organisation cited in this blog post has a right to corrections which I will be happy to make on receipt of relevant evidence.

UPDATE TO THE ABOVE: 19.9.21.

I have today been contacted by email by another person who has had a very similar experience with the same people in the same department as I have.

The experience relayed by this person is interesting. Goswell’s position as “Dismissal List Manager” suggests a specific purpose: does HMCTS have a policy of purposefully frustrating and delaying certain types of claim which might prove embarrassing or politically sensitive to the organisation? More data needed but at least three persons to my knowledge have had experiences which suggest so.

December 5, 2020December 6, 2020

Compensation for Poor Service by HMCTS

A quick follow-up post from yesterday.

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.

November 19, 2020November 20, 2020

Another Fine Mess… from Leeds Combined Court

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.