HM Courts and Tribunals Service

3Miss A complains about the service she received from HM Courts and Tribunals Service.. She complains that:

• HMCTS has not provided her with a way to progress and complete divorce proceedings against her former partner, which have been ongoing since 2014.

4Miss A explained that the lengthy delays caused by HMCTS have led to ongoing PTSD and anxiety.

5This has also impacted her family. Her parents are elderly and she is concerned that if they pass away before the divorce is finalised, then her former partner will have access to anything they leave to her. This is also affecting her children, and her fiancé who she is unable to marry until the proceedings are complete.

6By bringing the complaint to PHSO, Miss A is seeking to finalise her divorce proceedings. She also feels it would be appropriate for HMCTS to provide compensation for the impact caused by the delays and believes her complaint would sit at either level 4 or 5 of PHSO’s ‘Severity of Injustice’ scale. This means seeking an amount in the region of £600 to £3,700.

7Miss A has been involved in divorce proceedings since 2014. She explained that HMCTS has lost paperwork and failed to provide any meaningful advice on how to progress the case, or to explain such a significant delay.

9The law says a person needs to make their complaint to us or an MP within a year of becoming aware of the problem. We cannot investigate complaints brought after one year, unless we consider there is a good reason to do so.

10We have discussed this with Miss A to understand the reasons why she could not do so.

11Miss A explains that documents were initially found to have been lost some time in 2020, but that HMCTS had then confirmed the documents had been found. However, in June 2021, Miss A was informed that this was not actually the case, and that the files were still missing.

12A formal complaint was made to HMCTS in November 2023. Following HMCTS’s final response, provided in November 2025, Miss A then brought the complaint to us via her GP on 21 November 2025.

13We asked Miss A about the reasons the complaint was not raised to HMCTS earlier in the period between June 2021 and November 2023.

14Miss A explained that severe trauma and anxiety she experienced because of the abusive nature of her previous relationship and her desire to move on from that meant that she did not feel able to be as proactive as she otherwise might have been. She explained that her mother becoming very ill in 2023 pushed her to confront the matter and make her complaint to HMCTS.

15She also told us that HMCTS failed to identify a complaint or to provide advice as to how to pursue one. We have reviewed the email in question, sent to the court on 30 June 2021, which says:

“You can imagine my frustration that it’s gotten lost, then nothing has moved forward, then there’s the implication via your email that it has gone through the point I could finally get the decree absolute and marry the man I’ve been with for all this time and had two children with, to then be told actually there is no decree absolute and it hasn’t been completed. What can I do to push this forward? Do I have to make an official complaint?”

16Miss A told us that if the complaints process had been properly detailed to her after this interaction, then she would have taken that road.

17We do not consider that this amounted to making a complaint, but we understand why Miss A feels HMCTS should have responded by explaining how she could make one. The email did not explicitly say she wishes to make a complaint. Even so, we have considered whether HMCTS’s response affected her ability to complain sooner. The formal complaint was made two years later. During that period, Miss A corresponded with HMCTS on several occasions, and the evidence does not show that she was prevented from telling HMCTS that she wished to make a formal complaint or from seeking advice about how to do this.

18We are very sorry to hear about the distress and uncertainty Miss A describes. We recognise that the delay in finalising her divorce proceedings has affected her, her family and her plans for the future.

19We have taken those circumstances into account. However, we do not see that there is justification to set aside such a significant period. Miss A corresponded with HMCTS on several occasions throughout this time, and we do not see that there was anything which stopped her from raising a complaint.