NEWS – “without comment”
Government covered up court service IT glitch which lost thousands of family court files holding evidence
08 Aug 2025
Posted by Natasha in Researching Reform
The government covered up a series of serious IT faults which affected the HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) resulting in the loss of court files holding evidence, including thousands of files linked to family court cases.
Sources speaking to the BBC said judges in family court cases would have made rulings on cases with incomplete evidence, raising concerns that miscarriages of justice could have taken place across thousands of family cases, including those involving child protection matters.
“In one instance, it is claimed a fault caused more than 4,000 documents to go missing from hundreds of public family law cases – including child protection cases,” the BBC report published today, said.
The BBC said the IT bug was discovered in 2023 and may have been present for several years before it was identified.
The government body did not alert judges or lawyers to the fault, or the missing documents.
The court service said an internal investigation carried out by it found no evidence that “any case outcomes were affected as a result of these technical issues”. The service said it had identified 609 cases with potential issues, while only 109 (17 percent) were selected for further investigation. Among those, only one case was said to have had “potentially significant impact”.
It is unclear how the court service would have been able to carry out such an investigation, which would have involved reviewing all of the cases affected in full, or how it could have come to the conclusion that such cases had not been affected by the loss of evidence without launching a formal legal review of each case.
Another source working at HMCTS speaking to the BBC said “There is a culture of cover-ups. They’re not worried about risk to the public, they’re worried about people finding out about the risk to the public. It’s terrifying to witness.”
A separate source added that there was “general horror” at the design of the software, introduced by the court service in 2018, which they alleged was “not designed properly or robustly” and had a long history of data loss.
The former head of the High Court’s family division, Sir James Munby, told the BBC the incident was “shocking” and “a scandal”.
The revelation will no doubt raise deep concerns for those families who went through family court proceedings and complained at the time that their evidence had gone missing or was not included in the judge’s court bundle at the time. Researching Reform is aware of a large number of families who have made such complaints within the context of appeals alleging a miscarriage of justice.
A very big thank you to Paul Brian Tovey for alerting us to this development.
You can read the full article here.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwye2q00k51o
Posted by: Ian (D. Withers)
www.WAPI.org