Anyone who’s been unfortunate enough to have to deal with HMCTS County Court staff will rue the day they ever did.
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.
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.
Legal Babble 