My blog is littered with tales
of inefficiency and incompetence within the Court Service and government
offices.[1] My colleagues in the litigation industry
won’t be surprised to know that we don’t catalogue every event. We haven’t the
time!
Today I have something special
to relate – special because of its intensity, much to the misfortune of one
particular client. There’s also a ray of
sunshine from the Dorset coast...
Other litigators will have
noticed that whilst many court offices now take far too many days or weeks (or
months – Staines!) to process fairly simple correspondence and applications,
increasingly they seem to find time to invent ridiculous objections.
I have in mind a number times
that we’ve had people at the Salford centre of excellence, aka the County Court Money Claims Centre send back requests for judgment because they reckon
the interest we calculated from issue until judgment is incorrect. When, as it often is, it’s a matter of a few
pound or pennies involved and the perceived error is potentially to the
advantage of the defendant, it is hard to understand why they worry.
We’ve tried helpful things
like stating in the covering letter that (as the particulars of claim already
made clear) there is a claim for
contractual interest at a different rate from that more often claimed under
the County Courts Act 1984 – so don’t bother trying to reconcile two different
figures.
That doesn’t work – but then
that’s the theme.
Anyway, we now have an
entertaining case where one poor client is the victim of a series of cock-pus
by government agencies, starting of course with one of our West Country courts.
Almost a year after we obtained
a judgment, and for sound but complex reasons that matter not here, we made
application for a charging order to secure the judgment against the male
defendant’s interest in the property solely owned by him.
The application came back to
us more than a week later – by post of course – no email, no phone call.
There were two reasons for
rejection the first of which was that the date of the judgment was wrong. Was it wrong when we submitted the
application? No.
What appears to have happened
is that on arrival of the application at the court office, somebody noticed
that they had put the wrong date on the judgment a year ago. So they amended that and then decided to send
our application back to us because the date that we had cited was now
incorrect.
Let’s not think to make a neat
manuscript amendment and apply the court seal, eh? Let’s not bother asking solicitors to send an
amended page by email. No – slap it back
in the post and waste another week or so.
Just for good measure of
course there’s a second reason for rejection.
This was that the amount of the judgment debt didn’t match the figure in
the charging order application.
Perhaps there’s a clue in the
standard wording that appears within the practice form after the monetary
amount – “which includes further interest
payable on the judgment debt”.
So we waste a week and some
more costs but after making our displeasure known, we get an interim charging
order against the first defendant. Since
he’s the sole owner, we didn’t bother with the second defendant, his estranged
wife.
Before serving copies of our
order we head for the Land Registry to get it protected by an entry on the
registered title. It’s all standard
procedure and our forms automatically draw in the name of the client as the
applicant for the benefit of an entry on the title. It’s carefully checked,
nevertheless.
It’s all done in the usual
quick time and official copies are made available to us through the electronic
portal. The only snag is that the ex-wife, second defendant, is recorded as
having the benefit of our charging order!
That’s also fixed now and we
are moving on but it seems to be more often the case that you can’t stop off at
the office of any government service now without serious risk of a screw-up
with consequent delay and added (irrecoverable) expense.
My patriotic view on this (see attached image) is that we’ve starved
our infrastructure and run it down more than enough. Another five years of this
approach and we’ll be back to the ducking stool and the toss of a coin as the
only available means of dispute resolution.
It’s time for some
resuscitation.
Not all the patients are in a
coma, I’m pleased to report. The spirit
of competence and enthusiasm seems not (yet) to have died out in Weymouth.
Years ago when forum-shopping
was allowed, I took to issuing every claim I could – large numbers – out of
Weymouth County Court because they were so efficient, so friendly and so
helpful.
I remember going to see the
chief clerk (as they then were called) to warn him that we were going to triple
the volume of business we put through his office. I wanted to be sure that this wouldn’t cause
a problem.
Characteristically he
shrugged, smiled and said “if we need to, we’ll bring in more staff”. And they did. And it worked.
Sentimentally, I felt glad to
see an email from Weymouth at the beginning of the week raising a query on
another charging order application. They
said that they didn’t have our fee account number. They did, as it happens, but the email enabled
us to make that clear within the space of 10 minutes and the interim charging
order was made later that day.
There is hope yet – provided
that it’s all change at the Ministry of Injustice
in three months time…
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