I've got a little list, I've got a little list ...

Don’t ask me why, but the outcome of my birthday treat to myself this year appears to have been a six-week project monitoring the completeness and timeliness of the publication by Magistrates Courts of their Common Platform hearing lists on the Courtel Courtserve system! I sometimes think I am a very weird person indeed.

Let me explain.

The play “Laughing Boy”

(see this Guardian article) was playing at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London and I had treated myself to 2 tickets for the evening performance on Sat 27 April. This entailed a train journey from Weymouth up to London which takes about 2 and a half hours. So I had plenty of time on the train to do some work or some reading.

Joining a meeting of the Court of Protection User Group for First Avenue House on Tuesday reminded me of the need to monitor closely the publication of hearings lists on the Courtserve system  as Court of Protection hearings, held in County and Family Courts across England and Wales, as well as at First Avenue House, Holborn, London and also the Royal Court of Justice on The Strand in London, were sometimes listed amongst the usual day-to-day cases that County courts deal with up and down the country each working day, and were not always listed under the Court of Protection section in the County Court listings where they are meant to be found.

I put together a map and a database to help me to research where in the country these Court of Protection hearings were being held. Here is an example (it is not a complete list by any means) of the sorts of hearings and their geographical spread around the country:

I had previously tried to get HMCTS to provide machine readable copies of these hearings lists (see my Freedom of Information request here

So that I could start to automate the analysis of the hearing lists, but so far, I had not been successful.

I was aware that HMCTS had spent at least £7 million on a new system from ReadyTech of Australia:

But the process for getting Courts to circulate their hearing lists still seemed to rely upon a lot of manual effort.

Looking at my diary, it looks as though I attempted to observe (remotely) a Court of Protection hearing in Weymouth County Court (on Thursday), and then a hearing at Bournemouth and Poole County Court and another at Plymouth County Court (on Friday).

So, as I travelled up to London on the Saturday morning I was looking through lots of entries on the Courtserve listing system.

Whilst I was in Weymouth Court centre, which is a combined Court centre, with County, Family and Magistrates Courts all in the one building, I had spent some time in the Magistrates Court, listening to proceedings there. So I started looking through the listings on Courtserve for Magistrates Courts. And there started my current project …

Because as the train trundled along towards London I realised that, for each Magistrates Court, two lists were published (or not, as the case may be!). There was a list generated by the existing Libra listing system (which I am told is emailed automatically to a list of organisations including Courtserve), together with a second list for each day from the new Common Platform system. And what I spotted was that not every Magistrates Court was publishing both lists. Some only had the Libra list.

Common Platform lists (marked CP) have to be manually emailed by each local Court.

Now, call me a cynic, but my 50+ years of experience in IT tells me that where computers are involved, if something can go wrong, then at some stage it WILL go wrong. And if there are manual steps in the process, then it is anybody’s guess what will happen.

Here we had a system where two different computer systems were being used, alongside each other, to generate lists which had to be sent to a 3^rd party, Courtserve, to be published to the world. Now, what could possibly go wrong and prevent all of the lists being published? And who would notice and do something about it if it did go wrong?

It was a bit of a pain, but I created an Excel spreadsheet and started populating it with some relevant data: name of Magistrates Court (not as simple as you might think!), date of sitting (not all Courts sit on every day, and some sit on Saturdays and Sundays as I later discovered!), which list was published on which day. And so began the Magistrates Court Common Platform list publication project.

So I now regularly page through the index of lists published by each Magistrates Court on the Courtserve system. Courts can published lists for more than one day at a time, and some publish a whole week’s worth of lists. Not every Magistrates Court sits on every Monday to Friday. Some are constituted as Youth Courts and the lists for these cases are not made public, so there are legitimate reasons why a particular Court may not have published a list on any day.

By regularly recording exactly which lists – Libra  and/or Common Platform – and on which days of the week over a period of some 6 weeks – I can build up a picture of the sort of Court and also assess how likely it is that the Court has published all of the relevant lists. But the only way to find out whether there is a missing list – as the Courts do not publish, nor indeed notify Courtserve, whether a particular day has an empty or null list, is to email the Court or telephone them and ask.

So this is what I started to do. Having captured the raw statistics of which lists had been published at a particular time of day, I then dropped an email to each of the Magistrates Courts that had not published a Common Platform list where I would have expected them to do so. Over time I have emailed around half of the 146 Magistrates Courts in England and Wales.

My initial survey on 30 April 2024 revealed that 41 Magistrates Courts were sitting that day (as they had published a Libra generated hearing list) but had not published a Common Platform (CP) hearing list. Now, as I have mentioned, there may be a good reason why a Court had not published a CP list but 41 seemed a very large number.

And so it turned out. As the responses started to come in from my emails enquiring about whether there were any adult i.e. non Youth, cases being heard that day that were not on the published Libra list, a variety of reasons started to emerge.

Sorry, forgot, will send it now.

Where it was claimed that a list had been sent to Courtel I contacted Courtel by email and the Admin staff there doubled checked their systems and the emails from the Courts.

A number of issues were discovered as a result. In some cases Courts were sending lists but these were not in a format that the Courtserve computer systems could accept and they had been rejected by the system.

It also became clear that some Courts were only sending the lists because they had been prompted by my emails.

Where the reason for not sending was “youth case” in the lists, Courtel provided some guidance to the Court staff as to how and what to send in what lists, so that the public information that could and should be published was being sent.

For one Court, Coventry, it took multiple attempts to get to the bottom of what was going wrong and over 2 weeks to get the technical issues ironed out, but eventually Coventry lists started to flow through the system and get published.

As of today, Sunday 9 June 2024, out of 146 Magistrates Courts, 21 do not appear to be sitting, 112 are sitting and have published either a Common Platform list or both a Libra and a Common Platform list. And just 13 Courts appear to be sitting and have not published a Common Platform list.

That is a huge improvement since I started around 6 weeks ago.

But there are still problems that need to be addressed.

First there is the monitoring of the system.

There is no way for me (or indeed anybody else) to know from looking at the Courtserve system whether all of the Common Platform cases that should be listed for the public to see, ARE actually listed.

How many of those 13 Courts really do not have any CP cases to be heard on Monday. The only way to really know is to email them or phone them and get a response (not all of the Courts responded to my enquiry emails, although to be fair most of them did respond (eventually)).

And how many of the 21 Courts that have published no lists ARE not sitting on Monday. Again the only way to know is to email them or phone them (if you can actually get through to them!) or to visit them and bang on the door (figuratively, if not literally).

Then there is the timeliness of the publication of the lists. It is no good, as one Court did, publishing the list of cases to be heard starting from 10:00 a.m. at around 11:30 a.m. that morning. That, I would suggest, is 24 hours TOO late!

Libra case lists are usually published at least 24 hours and usually 48 hours (working hours) or more before the case is to be heard. The new updated system Common Platform relies upon staff at each Court to manually generate the list and to send it for publication. There appears to be no timetable agreed for this to be done, judging by the greatly varying times and days that Courts around the country do this.

In one case, the Common Platform hearing lists for a whole week are generated and sent, so are available, along with the Libra lists, is very good time. Whether the lists generated so far in advance are accurate and complete by the time of the hearing is a question that remains to be answered.

In other cases the lists are generated on the morning of the hearing and just about make it through the Courtserve processing system (which I am told take about one hour from receipt by Courtserve of the email from the Court) in time to be published BEFORE the hearing begins. But this is too late for public observers to obtain the list, decided which cases they want to observe, and travel to the Court house.

But getting accurate, timely lists of cases is just the first step. What about the details that are published in the lists that make it on to Courtserve? Is it just Court number, name of defendant, case number and time of hearing?

Or does the list, as is the case in a minority of Magistrates Courts, provide the name of the prosecutor, the nature of the offence, the stage of the case, the names of the magistrates hearing the case or that the case is being heard be a legal adviser, together with the other basic details shown in other lists?

Thanks are due to the many staff in listing and enquiries departments at Magistrates Courts around the country for their kind assistance whilst I pestered them for information about the Common Platform lists. Thanks also due to the member of staff at Courtserve who has worked with me and spoken and emailed to several Magistrates Courts helping them to sort out the issues that have prevented their lists from being published.

And that LITTLE LIST – well it is a bit longer and more accurate. But it is by no means complete and I fear, without constant attention, will start to deteriorate over time. A proper system – dare I suggest – automated system needs to be put in place. Happy to help – only 50+ years IT experience to offer and some years working as a compliance officer, so know a little about monitoring and feedback loops – closed vs open systems …

Another case of – that will teach me to be inquisitive. Why didn’t I just read a book on the train?