Our Mission Statement
To serve customers who have been let down by HMCTS family court administration offices, and to help customers effectively communicate their complaints.
Modern and relevant access to justice is also about HMCTS ensuring that there are funded, well-documented, organised quality assured systems, procedures and controls in place to enable the admin offices to deliver an excellent standard and quality of service to the consumer. Our aim is to promote this objective.
Independent Complaints Service:
HMCTS admin offices should be managed and run like a good business, set up to achieve excellence. It means HMCTS offices being open to scrutiny, and providing an independent and transparent complaints service, in each and every family court. The system must give confidence to the customers who use it.
'The buck stops here’, should be the motto of each family court admin office Manager, so that complaints do not have to be escalated, and take years to resolve.
There must be financial consequences for poor quality service, at the point of service. The service must provide refunds and compensation where the HMCTS admin systems fall below the required quality and standards of excellence. It is in the public interest for this requirement to be incorporated into their complaints procedure.
Family Law #Watchdog has 3 objectives:
- To establish the quality and standard of service provided by the Family Court offices to litigants, and discover who has really been let down by that service. We will be collating data provided to us from Litigants who have used and corresponded with the Divorce Units and any other family court (admin) offices, in their dealings with any family law proceedings during the last 5 years.
- To collate, record, and analyse evidence, and report back to the Litigant, on whether they should lodge a formal complaint with the Family Court office about the standard and quality of service they received, with a view to obtaining a refund or compensation for having been the victim of a poor standard and poor quality service.
- To provide complaint letter templates for the Litigant with which they can apply for a refund of court fees or compensation.
Example horror stories
Admin office loses entire case file, for the judge, before the start of a Financial Dispute Resolution Hearing Appointment, so the hearing had to be adjourned, with an order that the parties must make copies of all documentation for the court and each other, causing additional expense of photocopying and postal charges, and for having to attend and return at a later date.
- Admin office failing to update the case file with every document which the court had received, in time, for the hearing, causing one party’s comprehensive Witness Statement not be read by the judge and taken into consideration at the hearing, prejudicing the litigant.
- Admin office receiving a financial application, and customer paying for it the same day, but Admin losing the paperwork and not processing it for 4 months.
- Decrees of Decree Nisi not being listed for 6 months after petition lodged, served and answered.
- Misleading counter and phone advice.
- Admin offices failure to answer phone calls for days and days, and failure to respond to emails for weeks and weeks.
- Admin Offices returning applications by post, erroneously claiming that not enough copies were provided, delaying the lodging and processing of applications, by months.
- Admin Offices sending off the wrong hearing tape recording to the transcription service, causing significant delay and confusion.