I feel compelled to respond to Majid Shafiq’s ‘challenge’ to find ‘a bigger failure by a court to conduct business in an acceptable way’ (see [2008] Gazette, 26 June, 11). My recent experiences of various courts include:

Can anyone beat these? I am sure they can.

  • A telephone hearing. BT could not get an answer on any of the court’s telephone lines. This was followed by an order commencing ‘upon neither party attending’;
  • A possession order with money judgment, wrongly typed from the judge’s note and made against the landlord naming the premises as his managing agent’s office. The order took two weeks to arrive then, when spotted, a letter was faxed to the court marked ‘urgent’. No response. Then, after three weeks, a telephone call to the court to find the letter was not on file. I also detected an air of disbelief. Eventually the order was amended after several more days of delay;
  • A bundle of medical reports lodged over a week before a telephone hearing did not make the file and were not available for the District Judge to read before or at the hearing. A letter to the court manager complaining about this has still not elicited a response.