HM Courts and Tribunals Service

3. Mr A complains about the service he received from HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS). He complains that:

• The Courts have lost documents, and wrongly stated that other documents have not been provided or received • Court orders have been incorrectly drawn up and at other times not been provided at all • The Courts failed to respond to communications or answer questions, and provided incorrect information both during his initial interactions with them, and during the complaint process itself

4. Mr A explained that because of the claimed failings by HMCTS, he has still not been given a trial date.

5. This has caused considerably stress, delay and inconvenience for Mr A and his partner. His health has been affected by this, and he is now having to take blood pressure tablets due to the stress. During this time, his partner gave birth to their daughter who was born with medical complications, also potentially linked to the stress.

6. He has also been impacted financially. He explained that this has also jeopardised the outcome of his court case.

7. By bringing the complaint to PHSO, Mr A is asking us to recommend that HMCTS give him a proper written apology, including an action plan to show what it will do to reduce the risk of the same problems happening again.

8. He wants to see HMCTS change its policy on expected response times to meet a response time of 14 days.

9. He also feels that compensation would be appropriate for the impact to him and his partner. Mr A would like PHSO to recommend compensation at Level 5 on our severity of injustice scale, which would be an amount in the region of £3,750-£12,450.

10. Mr A was involved in a court case against a car dealer. The dealer served a defence on HMCTS, but HMCTS lost or misplaced this, so it had to be sent again. As a result, the case was delayed.

11. The case was due to be heard at one courtcourt, but a judge ordered that it should be transferred. Although HMCTS followed the order, it failed to include the reason for the transfer so, when it arrived at the new court, they simply transferred it back. This caused further delays.

12. This matter was later put right and the case transferred again.

13. In responding to Mr A’s complaint about these issues, HMCTS acknowledged that its errors had delayed the case. It apologised for this and offered Mr A an ex-gratia payment of £100 as a way of putting matter right for him.

16. There is no dispute that HMCTS made an avoidable error when it could not locate the defence documents. This caused some delay in putting the documents before a judge. However, we cannot say it caused a significant overall delay to the case.

17. The evidence shows that, once the documents were received, the judge decided the case should be moved to another court. We have seen nothing to suggest the judge would have decided differently if HMCTS had not made this error. This means the case would still have been transferred, and that likely meant it would have taken longer to be heard than Mr A expected.

18. We have also seen that HMCTS made another error by not clearly explaining to the new court why the case had been transferred. This meant the case was sent back to the original court when it did not need to be. However, again, we cannot say this caused a significant delay to the case overall.

19. Unfortunately, at the time of these events, court hearings were taking longer to arrange than anyone would want. This was often because there are not enough judges available or enough court space. There is also the question of what priority a case is given, which is a matter for judicial decision-making. Because of this, even if HMCTS had not made these errors, we cannot be certain when Mr A’s case would, or should, have been heard.

20. That does not mean Mr A was not affected by what happened. We know that being involved in court proceedings is often stressful, and anything that appears to make the process longer is likely to add to that stress.

21. We are pleased that HMCTS recognised the distress its errors caused Mr A and offered him £100. We have looked carefully at whether that was enough to put matters right. Having done so, we think it was.

22. In reaching this view, we referred to our Severity of Injustice Scale. This tool is based in part on similar cases we have considered, and it helps us make recommendations that are consistent and fair.

23. The Scale divides complaints into six levels, based on how serious the impact was and how long it lasted. Each level has a range of payments.

24. An offer of £100 falls within our Level 2 range, which is described as follows:

25. “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.”

26. For the reasons we have explained, we cannot say the time it took for Mr A’s case to be heard was caused mainly, or to any significant extent, by HMCTS’s errors. Because the case was transferred by judicial decision, and because there were already delays in listing court hearings, we cannot say with any certainty that the case would have been heard earlier if nothing had gone wrong. For that reason, we think Mr A’s case falls within Level 2, as does HMCTS’s offer of remedy. We have therefore decided to take no further action on this issue.

27. We were sorry to learn about the distress Mr A and his family experienced while waiting for the case to be resolved. Although we cannot link that distress directly to HMCTS’s failings, we do not doubt that this has been a very stressful time for them. As we have said, being involved in court proceedings is often stressful, especially alongside the strain of a difficult pregnancy. We hope Mr A and his family are now in a better position.

Communication issues and complaint handling

28. Mr A says the courts did not always respond to his communications or answer his questions, and that he was sometimes given incorrect information.

29. Mr A also told us that the complaint process itself was not good enough. He said there were delays and that he did not always receive responses or answers to his questions.

30. Mr A first complained to HMCTS in August 2025. We can see that HMCTS sent its final appeal response on 25 November 2025, about three months later. We can also see there were other responses and communications between Mr A and HMCTS during that time.

31. As part of our investigation, we reviewed the email exchanges between Mr A and HMCTS, as well as the formal complaint responses from HMCTS.

32. We also reviewed the HMCTS document called ‘Complaints procedure’, which sets out how it investigates complaints and the timescales it aims to meet. It says:

• When a complaint is first received, HMCTS aims to respond within 10 working days • If the first response is not satisfactory and a review is requested, HMCTS aims to respond within 10 working days • If the complainant is still unhappy after the review, they can ask for an appeal. HMCTS aims to respond within 15 working days

33. In our view, the key word here is ‘aims’. This means those response times are targets, not guarantees. We understand that delays can be frustrating. But there may be times when, because of workload or other pressures, HMCTS cannot meet those targets. In those situations, we would expect it to apologise for the delay. So we look at the overall picture and consider whether the complaint was handled reasonably and within a reasonable time.

34. The email exchanges show that Mr A did sometimes have to chase HMCTS for a response, and that it did not always meet its target timescales. We understand why that would have been frustrating. However, we do not consider a total period of three months for the complaint process, including the initial response, review, appeal and ongoing correspondence, to be excessive. We can also see that HMCTS apologised for the delays, which is what we would expect.

35. With that in mind, we think HMCTS has already done enough to put right any delay in its complaint handling by apologising. We would not have expected it to do more.

36. We recognise that this has been a very frustrating process for Mr A. But we do not see any unresolved issue here that would justify a wider investigation.

1. We have carefully considered Mr A’s complaint about HMCTS. We would like to thank him for bringing this matter to our attention and recognise that this has been a frustrating and stressful time.

2. Having looked at the evidence, we think there are signs HMCTS may have got some things wrong. However, we think its offer of an ex-gratia payment of £100 is enough to remedy matters. This is because we cannot link the more serious impacts claimed by Mr A directly to the potential failings by HMCTS.