My eye was caught this morning by
a link to the recently published Annual
Report and Accounts from HM Courts and Tribunal Service.
In his foreword the Chief
Executive trumpets “another challenging but successful year in which our performance
has been maintained or improved at the same time as we continue to reduce our
costs.”
He is backed up by similar stuff
from the Chairman noting that HMCTS “has continued the success (sic) of the
previous two years by delivering improvements in its performance (sick) whilst
lowering operating costs”.
All of this is covered on the
first page by gushing delight and “sincere thanks” to each individual member of
staff of the entire service from the Lord Chancellor and chums.
I really do not need to read any
more of this tosh. Who do they think
they are kidding?
Earlier this week, a mercury
switch on the “where’s my Uzi?” circuit board tipped violently with the arrival
of post from some of our favourite courts.
This week’s top prize goes to
Northampton and for those of our readers who may be confused by
that reference I am talking about the Northampton that is in Northampton, not
the Northampton that is in Salford (more of that below).
We are dealing with the County
Court Business Centre at the moment in a case that our claimant client chose to
begin by filing proceedings online. A
defence was filed in what on the face of it was a multi-track case and at that
point we were called in.
Within a fairly short period of
time we were able to achieve agreement with the solicitors for the defendant
that more than 75% of the substantial debt was not actually in issue and that
there should be judgment, by consent, for that much. More than that, we quickly agreed a draft
order which was sent to the court, with the appropriate cheque, on 23 May 2014.
We know that the cheque was not
presented until 30 June. Two days ago we
had a short letter telling us that the application had been deferred saying it
was not clear what the parties intended but above all posing the question “has
the claim been served or not?”
Well let’s just analyse that
shall we? The claimant filed details online
which means that the court office would have printed a claim form and sent it
to the defendant. Somewhere along the
line, for whatever reason, the defendants sent a defence to the court as a
result of which notice of allocation was issued.
We think all this points fairly
strongly to a presumption that the proceedings had been served.
We waited EIGHT WEEKS for that.
In the same post came Salford’s
latest bid for stardom. Tame effort this
time but still deserves a mention. Another case where we have agreed an order
with the opposition (you can tell we really do our bit to relieve the pressure
on resources).
We had agreed and submitted an
order for stay on the terms set out in a separate schedule i.e. two pieces of
paper. We get back the now typical “Order
that: 1. See attached” with a sealed copy of the schedule – but no order.
Finally, let’s not forget Staines
County Court which is probably going to earn a place in its own private
hall of fame. Delegates at the APIL
annual conference at the beginning of May who were still there on the afternoon
of the second day may remember the horror story I told then about our
current litigation in this Outer London flagship.
There is not time here to screen
the full version which now comes with intermissions and ice cream. Suffice to say that after we have filed two
notices of acting, sent a number of letters including complaints and talked on
the telephone to the court administrator in Kingston, this wretched office is
still – without a shred of explanation – sending all communications direct to
our client who has now become used to the idea of scanning and emailing them to
us.
She is quite prompt to deal,
unlike the court. We are still waiting
for formal notice of issue of a counterclaim that was sent, along with the
defence, in mid-February.
There is a glimmer of hope where we have now had notice (via our client of course) that there will be a
telephone CMC at the end of next month.
This follows notice (to our client) that all directions had been
cancelled and trial date vacated but we don’t currently know the reason for
that either.
It may be that our colleagues on the other side have written to say
that they do not know when the counterclaim was issued, what was the date for
service of the defence and cannot be clear about various consequences that flow
from that.
Elsewhere in the office, it is
now routine for members of our non-contentious team to explain to people who insist that
they urgently need a lasting power of attorney executed and registered that it
is very unlikely that they will get it done inside 14 weeks.
Why not? The Office of the Public Guardian staff will
tell you that they have a target time of 4 weeks for dealing with registration and
that they are meeting it.
What the OPG will not tell you is
that they put the post in a pile for 10 weeks and do not open it so that their
4 week target period does not actually begin. One of my consultants had a client
who died 5 weeks after submission of the LPA, at which point she was still
waiting for an acknowledgment from the OPG.
Elsewhere a routine claim for
repayment of a few hundred pounds pension to a deceased’s estate seemed to us to
be taking a long time. When our staff
managed to get through to the DWP on the telephone they were told that they are currently working
on post received two months earlier and where our application had only been
received 4 or 5 weeks prior to the call, they could not possibly say when it
would get dealt with.
So, Lord Chancellor, Lord Chief
Justice and the rest of you – don’t tell us that “services to the public are
maintained to a high standard” and about the “continued drive to improve case
management”.
I cannot recall at any time in
recent history picking up a piece of post or other communication from a
government office and thinking to myself “that was quick” or “that was
easy”. The only possible exception to
that would be the speed with which some of the paperwork comes back from some
of our local courts.
Ironically, that is probably
because they have so much less to do nowadays whilst we wait two months for a
straightforward consent order signed by two firms of solicitors to be shunted
back to us with a nonsensical explanation for its rejection.
Meanwhile, the architects of this
mess are entertaining the rest of the world with works of pure fiction.
