Another day, another scandal in Britain’s collapsing public sector. Today’s concerns the country’s courts. A BBC investigation has turned up an internal report, not for public circulation, from HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) about an IT bug that deleted or hid information on hundreds of pending cases.
The problem itself was bad enough: Britain’s state IT capacity is very poor, worse than many comparable nations. Things get deleted or disappear; vital information is stolen or hacked. The administrators of these systems are so often simply not up to it. But how this disaster was handled appears to be even worse.
This particular software error, found in ‘case-management software’ variously called Judicial Case Manager, MyHMCTS or CCD, according to the BBC, meant that some data was not visible – including medial information, contact details and evidence at issue – in case files used in court.
The report seen by the BBC said that the tribunal dealing with child support and benefits appears to have been the most affected. But the problem went further, including the family courts, employment tribunals, civil claims and probate – essentially most of the legal system to do with the trials of ordinary life.
This is all scandalous and dreadful enough. It’s not surprising, because the gears of state always stick and scream and things in the public sector are rarely done efficiently and well. But there’s one thing that’s even more damaging than the routine ineptitude of the state: all of this appears to have been hidden from view until the BBC happened to get its hands on secret internal documents.
You were never meant to hear about any of this.
The IT problem itself was concealed; the lawyers and judges who likely lost access to vital information – who argued and decided cases on incomplete information – were never told about it. The people whose cases were affected were not informed.
Even the eventual report assessing the damages of this error was also concealed. This is the dire nature of justice and life in Britain.
The software was in use for years, sources within the HMCTS told the BBC, but if objections to its problems were ever raised, they were ignored. The internal report seen by the BBC said that data problems were discussed from 2019 onwards and definitively discovered in 2023.
Higher-ups just didn’t want to know, let alone to fix things. And when the problems grew so large as to be unignorable, the whole thing was hidden from the public and from everyone remotely affected. Internal emails seen by the BBC seemed more interested in the ‘severe reputational impact to HMCTS’ than anything else.
This is what the British state looks like; this is how it operates. It’s a culture of ineptitude with the bureaucracy protecting itself against all transparency, against every attempt to hold the system and its people to account.
The primary purpose of the British state is waging a continual campaign to conceal from the public how badly we are governed. How many more stories like this one are there? There’s no way for you to know – they’ve all been well covered up.
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