The county court system is not fit for purpose and far-reaching change is needed to arrest declining standards of service, according to a new report by the Property Litigation Association (PLA).
The PLA surveyed its members on whether any improvements had been made to service standards by Her Majesty’s Courts & Tribunal Service (HMCTS) since its last court users’ feedback report in 2015.
A resounding 93.4% of respondents to the latest survey considered that the county court system is not fit for purpose. Almost 90% of participants considered the standard of court administration to be either poor or very poor, while 93% confirmed that, in the past three years, their clients had expressed concerns over the efficacy of litigation in the county courts. All the figures show a slight worsening since 2015.
Similarly, concerns over administration and non-judicial case management mirror those expressed in 2015: namely that court users are experiencing inordinate delays in dealing with correspondence, applications and court orders; unanswered telephones; administrative errors; documents and files going missing; the absence of any counter-service; hearings being cancelled at the last minute and court staff who are unhelpful/unable to provide correct or consistent information.
Kerry Glanville, chair of the PLA, and Mathew Ditchburn, chair of the PLA’s law reform committee, have met with HMCTS to discuss the main findings of the report.
Ditchburn said: “We hope and expect that HMCTS will take on board the views and suggestions of PLA members and factor them into their own reform programme to improve the quality of court service. We intend to continue our engagement with regular meetings and updates from HMCTS as further reforms are developed and implemented.”
HMCTS is already two years into an ambitious £1bn reform programme which proposes changes on a scale never attempted elsewhere in the world. These include new digital systems to move many court functions online, fewer and better court and tribunal buildings and fewer, better-trained people working in courts, tribunals and new national centres.
However, respondents to the PLA survey had mixed feelings about the effectiveness of some of the reforms to date. While the move towards paperless claims should reduce the proportion of lost documents, other areas of communication are felt to be severely lacking.
In addition, the PLA is calling for HMCTS to improve the existing system by, for example, devolving more of the administration away from judges to other senior members of court staff, ensuring the courts’ management information is kept up to date and restoring counter services.
Its report states: “Court users want better trained court staff who can answer the telephone and provide accurate information about any given claim being conducted by that court. They also want the centralised appointment booking system scrapped and court counters reinstated because the drive to streamline issuing proceedings has so far failed and it will not be possible to issue all claims online for the foreseeable future.”
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