In 1961, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American (and second man) in space, was asked by Mission Control what he was thinking about while waiting for the launch of his Mercury-Redstone rocket. He infamously replied, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.”
I recalled this while reading about an investigation by the BBC that has revealed that HM Courts & Tribunals Service’s case management software, known as myHMCTS, has suffered from a bug which has caused evidence to go missing, be overwritten or lost. There is therefore a concern that judges in civil, family and tribunal cases will have made decisions on cases where the evidence was incomplete. There is also deep concern that HMCTS may have covered up this problem and failed to assess properly whether there have been miscarriage of justice as a result.
The bug appears to primarily have affected the Social Security and Child Maintenance Tribunal, but may have impacted other areas of work, including cases in the Family Court. Sir James Mumby, the former President of the Family Division has described it as “shocking”. He told the BBC that “these hearings often decide the fate of people’s lives,” and added “An error could mean the difference between a child being removed from an unsafe environment or a vulnerable person missing out on benefits.”
A different IT flaw in the Family Court is also reported to have caused thousands of documents to go missing in hundreds of public family law causes. Public law cases involve children who are at risk of harm or neglect and where a local authority is seeking an order that the children be removed from its parents and taken into care.
It is not clear if the bug has affected any private law cases (private law cases involve divorces, financial remedy applications, disputes between parents about children and domestic violence injunction applications).
The dreadful state of HMCTS’ IT systems will come as no surprise to family law practitioners. For years, we have become accustomed to emails and documents sent to the court vanishing into the ether.
A few years ago, my local Family Court took the entirely sensible decision to become a paperless court. Court proceedings can generate a vast amount of paper, and a paperless court was entirely desirable. Unfortunately, the court’s email system was hugely unreliable.
Solicitors were informed that an email to the court should ensure that the information in the title bar was set out in a specific way, saying what the case number is, what sort of document was attached and so on. In theory, if the solicitor carefully ensured that the information in the title bar was correctly set out, the email and attached document would be automatically sorted into the correct file on the court’s IT system.
In practice, this has proved hugely unreliable. I have experienced many hearings where documents such as statements, applications and hearing bundles cannot be located anywhere on the system by the judge at the hearing. I recall one telephone hearing where the court legal adviser started the hearing and had to be interrupted by me:
“I’m sorry to interrupt, Sir, but before we go any further, I think I should point out that the respondent’s solicitor Mr Bloggs isn’t on the call with us.” (As I said these words, I received a WhatsApp from Mr Bloggs, asking me if the court had called me to start the hearing).
“I wasn’t aware that the respondent was legally represented” said the Legal Adviser.
“A Notice of Acting has been filed with the court by Mr Bloggs, Sir. And I did email the court with the parties’ and both solicitors’ contact details. I am aware that Mr Bloggs is waiting to join the hearing. Can I give you his phone number?”
Mr Bloggs was called and joined the hearing. I continued with my client’s application.
“May I just check that the court has received the bundle that I emailed to the court last week, and the draft order reflecting the agreement reached between the parties which I emailed to the court yesterday?”
The Legal Advisor sighed. “No, Mr Armstrong, I’m afraid that I haven’t seen them either.”
It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that the cash-strapped HMCTS, somewhat less well funded than NASA, had bought the cheapest email management system that it could find. Inevitably, it isn’t very good.
Document handling in divorce and financial remedy cases has improved vastly in the past few years with the introduction of the myHMCTS online portal which allows solicitors to commence applications and to upload and access documents. This is a vast improvement on the old system, although it is not perfect. It is also mentioned in the BBC
I recall a hearing where we insisted that the other side had failed to file a document. The judge informed me that it had been filed and he could see it on the system. He implied that perhaps I hadn’t looked properly for it on the system. I checked the system again and it definitely wasn’t there. I have concluded that when the court staff uploaded the document (which had been sent to it by a litigant in person) the court staff had marked the document as confidential, so only the judge could see it. This appears to been a result of human error by a member of the court staff rather than due to an IT glitch.
The portal however is not yet able to deal with private law children cases (apart from a portal limited to commencing applications) or domestic violence injunctions. I understand that the portal will soon expand to these types of proceedings as well.
HMCTS has been accused of insufficiently investigating if any cases have been impacted by the IT bug. A limited enquiry has taken place in which out of 609 cases identified as having potential issues, only 109 (17%) were selected for further investigation. Among those, just one was said to have had “potentially significant impact“.
MVCTS has suggested standard court procedures would mean that staff would spot any anomalies and manually correct them. However, the very limited investigation has been criticised as insufficient.
I would not wish to sound complacent about whether any case I have been involved in has suffered as a result of the court’s poor IT systems. Where solicitors are involved, they have to prepare a hearing bundle before every hearing, which contains all of the relevant documents required. Theus should ensure that the court has always had all of the relevant documents before it, and in a case such as the one I describe above, where stuff is missing, steps can be taken to ensure that the documents are found and put before the court.
However, there are many cases where neither party has a solicitor. In those cases, there is a very real danger that court documents never reach the court file, nobody spots their absence, and the court makes a decision without the benefit of seeing them.
10 August 2025
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