Tag: MoJ

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Active Discrimination by Ministry of Justice?

I have been contacted by the carer of a disabled lady who has detailed a level of misconduct from such as The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), HMCTS, Judicial Conduct Investigations Office & others that makes for shocking reading.

The lady concerned has learning disabilities and for the purpose of this blog entry and to preserve her anonymity we’ll call her Liz. She required ICO to modify their communications with her in order to assist her disabilities. ICO failed to do this, which if course made communication with them very much more difficult, and so she launched a Judicial Review. This brought her into contact with the civil court system where arguably she suffered worse discrimination than originally from ICO.

The Equality Act 2010 and the United Nations Convention on disability rights are supposed to help to enforce, protect and promote the rights of disabled people to access public services and promote equality of access to such.

However as is so often the case in modern Britain the aim falls far short of the reality. As I’ve said Liz’s issues began when The Information Commissioner’s Office failed to communicate with her in a format she could read and understand; she has limited reading and comprehension skills.

Things frequently go from bad to worse when an organisation fails to make adaptations to assist the disabled. This is true of ICO but the same issues were experienced in Liz’s dealings with The Ministry of Justice.

I should add at this point that all of the organisations mentioned in this blog entry will also have guidelines in respect of how to treat everyone equally. They have all fallen far short of this leading to mistreatment and injustice.

An email to me from this lady’s carer shows that further injustice happens from HMCTS…

“When she has attempted to request accessibility from HMCTS, regarding Judicial Reviews against The Ombudsman’s refusing to send her written correspondence, refusal to contact her by phone and when she phones their services to request accessibility, complaints responses and S.A.R’s.”

When Liz called HMCTS she was apparently verbally abused by their staff over the phone. Liz has communication difficulties and it is easy for someone to misinterpret these in a phone call. There are recordings of such calls to Manchester Civil Justice Centre.

When Liz asks for responses to her complaints due to her communication difficulties staff fail to respond appropriately or make proper allowances for her disabilities. This is of course the nub of her original complaint to the Courts in the first place! She has also been supplied the personal data of another HMCTS service user, although this is not unusual given that organisation’s haphazard approach to data protection & privacy.

Most damming of all is the response of Customer Investigations at the MoJ’s head office.

This is the final port of call to get a complaint response outside of referring a complaint against HMCTS to civil action. There are also apparently call recordings retained where Richard Redgrave, the head of Customer Investigations starts laughing and finds it funny that his original land line is inactive and been inactive for the 18 months this lady has attempted to phone him on it. There has been a similar inappropriate responses from The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman.

The courts have failed to provide the lady with any adaptation and assistance with access to their services with the seeming result that her civil claim failed and there are presently costs against her. Any correspondence from the Court is problematic as this lady cannot read. Again a required adaptation has not been made. Rather more cruelly a Civil Restraint Order was made against her and this of course results in further disadvantage.

I have a list of several named Court staff who have apparently treated this lady appallingly on the account given by her carer.

The adaptations that are needed for her to be able to deal with the Court effectively and understand the process are not extensive but are clear and evident. The level of learning difficulties experienced means that the Court has a higher level of duty of care towards someone who has such restrictions in their everyday life. Indeed there is a simple moral duty here also.

I don’t know why the Courts have failed Liz so badly.

I suspect that it would be more time-consuming and awkward to make the adaptations she needs and that because of speech issues phone calls from her would be very difficult to understand. This requires time and patience. It is not beyond the ability of any organisation however! It is equally not beyond the ability of MoJ to ensure that all service users are treated equally and fairly.

What looks like deliberate cruelty from several members of HMCTS staff takes considerably more explaining though.

That they have not treated Liz kindly, made appropriate adaptations to accommodate her disabilities and even at times shown outright cruelty is an indication of how they would treat the rest of us if they thought they could get away with it.

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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:

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.

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A Sick Story About The Ministry of Justice

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.”

The full story can be seen at.

https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2020/07/06/the-reckoning-death-at-the-ministry/

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“Spaffing” Money Up The Wall

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.

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How Ministry of Justice Evades Data Access Requests

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.

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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.

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The Rise of the Liars

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”.

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Doncaster County Court: Consistently Poor Service Standards

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!
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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.

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Desperate Times – Desperate Measures

Many ticklesome articles in the new Private Eye magazine (no. 1535, 20th November 2020) including this choice one on police recruitment.

Private Eye comments on police recruitment.

As always there’s many a truth spoken in jest.

At present the workload of the average Plod would incline anyone with the ability to obtain employment elsewhere to do so. Truly a policeman’s lot is not a happy one.

Nor are matters likely to improve with the new recruits when they’ve finally got some wool on their backs.

The lesson The Ministry of Justice learned to their cost was that sacking every experienced prison officer within range meant that the newer and less experienced were unable to handle the job with subtlety and skill. This caused a further recruitment problem as newly recruited staff also began to leave in droves once they realised the true horrors of the job they’d be facing daily.

So it will be with the new police recruits.

Possibly also unwise to have a large surge of untested youngsters in uniform, pumped up with testosterone and a newly-found sense of self-importance, kitted out with weaponry and the power of arrest let loose on the public.

One can only hope that new recruits will be paired with more experienced officers. But PC George Dixon is long since retired and these days six months or more in the frontline on the force and you’re considered a veteran. Stay for a year and doubtless South Yorkshire Police – the force that loves to hand out awards to underperforming officers – will have a decanter set and tin plaque to pass over to you.

An additional problem. Recent reports in the local press show South Yorkshire Police and West Yorkshire Police finding themselves and their transport under severe attack on entering some estates in Leeds and Sheffield. Police cars and vans were recently destroyed as they have also been outside of Goldthorpe Police Station in South Yorkshire.

Here we can see how spirited local residents have offered their opinion on police service standards.

Can it be long before armoured “snatch squads” operating in a similar fashion to those grabbing terrorist suspects in post-invasion Baghdad are sent in to spirit suspects away from troubled estates?

So if you do see such officers on the streets soon be sure to look out for their armoured snatch too.

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