HM Courts and Tribunals Service

5. Miss U complains about the service her mother, Mrs U, received from HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS). She complains that:

• The Civil National Business Centre (CNBC) twice incorrectly rejected her mother’s claim • The CNBC gave incorrect instruction and discriminated against her mother by insisting that any non-monetary claim must be made to the court in person at Birmingham County Court • During the complaints process, HMCTS failed to fully acknowledge the errors made or the impact to her mother • CNBC sent somebody else’s claim form to her mother 6. Miss U says that during the two-month delay caused by the CNBC’s errors, the first defendant (the sole earner of the two defendants) sold his share of the property to the other defendant. Miss U explained that because of this, her mother had to consider a lower settlement offer, and one which would be paid over two years, instead of as a lump sum. Additional legal and administrative costs have also been incurred.

7. She explained her mother has also been subjected to an additional two months of trespass and dangerous nuisance.

8. These circumstances have caused stress and anxiety to Mrs U, who was already in poor health.

9. By bringing the complaint to PHSO, Miss U is seeking for an acknowledgment and apology to be provided to her mother, both for the delay, and for the substantial stress and anxiety caused.

10. She is seeking reimbursement of the additional costs incurred and feels that compensation would be appropriate. She feels that the nominal amount offered by HMCTS was insulting as it did not take into account the additional costs and adverse effects of the errors made.

11. Lastly, she would like PHSO to recommend that staff undergo additional training, so they are aware of the correct processes in future.

12. Miss U complains on behalf of her mother, Mrs U, who was involved in a court case against a third party. Mrs U’s Barrister submitted her complaint to the Civil National Business Centre (CNBC), who claimed that the court fee provided was incorrect.

13. A second claim was also rejected. Miss U says both claims were wrongly rejected, and that the Barrister had provided a letter with the initial application explaining the fee, and that CNBC ignored this.

14. Miss U says that this caused a delay in the claim being issued. An ex-gratia payment of £170 was offered, but Miss U says this was not satisfactory given the impact suffered.

Rejected claim 17. Miss U complains that the Civil National Business Centre (CNBC) twice incorrectly rejected her mother’s claim (an application to recover money from a third party). HMCTS gave the reason that the wrong fee had been submitted by the barrister acting for her mother.

18. She told us that the barrister had provided a letter with the initial application explaining the fee, and that CNBC ignored this when rejecting the claim. After making a third application with the fee demanded by HMCTS, HMCTS accepted the application and issued the relevant claim forms to progress the case.

19. Following the complaint HMCTS accepted the barrister had been correct, and Miss U says therefore the claim should have been issued earlier. HMCTS apologised and offered a goodwill payment. Miss U rejected this, as she believes HMCTS has not fully considered the impact to her mother, namely that the delay in issuing the claim meant the other party’s financial circumstances had changed in the meantime, leading to her mother having to settle for a lower figure than would otherwise have been the case.

20. HMCTS provided a response to the complaint on 8 August 2024. It acknowledged that its expected timescale for issuing a paper claims was 7 days, and that at this point Miss U had advised that it was three weeks since the application had been sent by Mrs U’s barrister. HMCTS requested that she provide more detail so it could check the status of her particular case.

21. After Miss U provided more details on 7 October 2024, HMCTS responded again on 13 November 2024. It accepted that the claimed had been incorrectly returned and put this down to human error. It advised that the relevant managers had been spoken to and asked to make sure all staff are aware of the correct processed for non-monetary value claims.

22. HMCTS asked Miss U to provide a breakdown of any costs incurred before an ex-gratia (goodwill) payment could be considered.

23. A final response was provided on 10 December 2024, and an ex-gratia payment offered in the amount of £170.

24. Before we decide if we should conduct a detailed investigation of a complaint, we look at whether there are signs the event(s) complained about had a negative effect which the organisation has not put right. Having done so we have found HMCTS has already done enough to put right the impact of these events.

25. PHSO cannot consider hypothetical impact. While there may have been a delay caused by HMCTS, we cannot say what the outcome of the case would have been had the delay not occurred. We cannot know for sure that Mrs U would have received a larger settlement, and so we cannot recommend that she be compensated for that.

26. We can only consider whether HMCTS has dealt with the administrative issues appropriately, and if we upheld such a complaint, the only impact we could consider is for the inconvenience of the delay.

27. When setting recommendations for financial remedy, PHSO uses a tool called the Severity of Injustice’ scale. This divides complaints into six levels, based upon both the severity of the impact, and the length of time that the impact was ongoing. Each category is linked to a financial level, based upon what was awarded in prior cases.

28. For level 1 cases, the severity is defined as:

29. “A case will generally be level one if we consider the person affected has experienced a low impact injustice such as annoyance, frustration, worry, or inconvenience. This would typically arise from a single (one-off) incidence of maladministration or service failure, where the effect on the person complaining is of short duration, and where there are no other adverse effects or ongoing wider impact. We will usually consider an apology to be an appropriate remedy for these cases”

30. For level 2 cases, the severity is defined as:

31. “A level two injustice will typically arise when what has gone wrong has had a relatively low impact on the person affected. This will often result in a degree of distress, inconvenience, or minor pain. This could also include instances where an injustice was more serious but only took place once or was of short duration. In these cases, we consider that an apology is not suitable by itself.”

32. The claim was originally incorrectly returned on 19 July 2024, and the claim subsequently issued on 12 August 2024 – a delay of just under one month. HMCTS offered an ex-gratia payment of £170. If we upheld this point, it is likely that we would find the impact sits at level 1, as the impact was short-lived, and would likely be considered as ‘annoyance, frustration, worry or inconvenience’ which would be appropriate for that level. Even if we were to find that the impact moved into level 2, HMCTS’s offer of £170 would be appropriate for that level.

33. As we would not be likely to recommend any action that HMCTS has already taken even if we were to uphold the complaint, we would therefore not move forward with a more detailed investigation of this point.

In-Person Claims 34. Before we decide if we should conduct a detailed investigation of a complaint, we look at whether there are signs the organisation has got something wrong. We do this by comparing what should have happened with what did happen. We have done this and have not found any indications that something has gone wrong.

35. Miss U told us that the CNBC gave incorrect instructions and discriminated against her mother by insisting that any non-monetary claim must be made to the court in person at Birmingham County Court.

36. During our investigation, we contacted HMCTS to discuss this, as it did not seem to be covered in the complaint responses. Although the complaint response of 13 November 2024 did advise that the form should have been served at the local court, it does not go into more detail on this and does not appear to be treating it as a complaint.

37. We wanted to look at existing guidance, to see whether there may be reason to direct Miss U back to HMCTS to discuss this further, or whether there may already be enough to make a decision here.

38. HMCTS directed us to guidance from the Civil Court Fees order which shows the fees for issuing non-monetary claims. We can see that the only options are to issue these in either the High Court or County Court. (the guidance also mentions injunction applications). The guidance states:

“Non-money claims Issue a claim for possession (fees order 1.4) Fee High Court possessions £545 County court possessions £404

39. You can issue a claim for something other than money or possessions (fees order 1.5) – for example, civil injunctions, gas injunctions, or anti-social behaviour injunctions. The fees are based on where you start your claim.”

40. Based upon this, we can see the policy explains that if a complainant is making a claim of the type that Mrs U’s was, this would need to be made to their local county court.

41. With this in mind, we cannot see that HMCTS was incorrect to give the advice it did, and it was acting in line with existing policy.

Lack of Acknowledgement 42. Miss U complains that during the complaints process, HMCTS failed to fully acknowledge the errors made or the impact to her mother.

43. The complaint response from HMCTS on 13 November 2024 notes that delays can be frustrating and fall short of the expected standard (though does not specially discuss Miss U’s mother in regard to this).

44. HMCTS provided a further (and final) response on 10 December 2024. It apologises for the delay in Miss U’s mother’s case and offers her mother a goodwill ex gratia payment of £170.

45. While the response does not specifically name Mrs U, it does note that delays can be frustrating and offers financial remedy for this (which we have found to be adequate above).

46. We have not seen anything to indicate any failings that led to the other impacts claimed, and so we would not expect to see HMCTS look to remedy these. While it may have been good practice to acknowledge the other claimed impacts, to not do so is not something we would consider maladministration or service failure, and so we would not look to take this point further.

Data Breach 47. Miss U told us that CNBC sent somebody else’s claim form to her mother.

48. When reviewing the complaint responses, we could not see any reference to this issue. We therefore contacted HMCTS and asked if it had received a complaint of this nature from Miss U. HMCTS advised it could find no record of such.

49. We contacted Miss U to ask about this. She says she contacted HMCTS about the data breach issue on more than one occasion, and that she also told HMCTS it should self-refer to the ICO because of this. However, she received no response.

50. We explained that if Miss U can provide copies of the emails she sent to HMCTS, we might be able to look into this further, but she was unable to provide any such emails. As a result, we currently will not take this complaint further. If Miss U would like this to be investigated, she should contact HMCTS to raise a formal complaint.

51. It is perhaps worth nothing that should this complaint come back to us at a later date, with Miss U having received a response from HMCTS, it is unlikely that we would be able to take it further anyway, as any potential impact would be to the third party owner of the claim form, not to Miss U or her mother.

1. We have carefully considered Miss U’s complaint about HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS). We would like to thank her for bringing this matter to our attention and were sorry to read of the impact to her and her mother during this time.

2. For the complaint about the rejection of the claim, we found that while there were potentially failings on the part of HMCTS, enough has been done to put things right.

3. For the complaints about claims needing to be made in-person and a lack of acknowledgement, we saw no indication that anything went wrong.

4. For the complaint about a potential data breach, we saw no evidence that a complaint has been formally made to HMCTS about this. Even If that were not the case, we cannot see that the claimed failings would have had any impact on the complainant or people involved in this case.