Frustration at the service lawyers receive from some court administrators was further manifested this month when a Surrey solicitor filed a High Court order to force a county court to list a hearing on a landlord-tenant case.

Clive Wismayer, of Wismayers Solicitors, Great Bookham, said he was seeking a judicial review for the sake of his client – and to protest at what he claims is the ‘appalling’ level of administrative failures at courts.

In his application, Wismayer accuses Central London County Court of failing to list for trial a case issued in March 2007 and for which the court was given directions in November. It claims that ‘neither letters to the court, telephone calls nor even a letter written under the judicial review pre-action protocol, copied to the Treasury Solicitor… have produced any action’.

Wismayer’s complaint is the latest addition to a growing file of grumbles about court administration. In a letter to the Gazette earlier this month, Judge Harvey Crush of Quadrant Chambers complained of clerical staff being ‘either innumerate or illiterate, or both’.

David Gowlet, of Daybells solicitors in Stratford, London, complained of a court failing to answer telephone calls, failing to respond to letters and faxes and failing to make medical reports available to a district judge. ‘A letter to the court manager complaining about this has still not elicited a response,’ he said.

HM Courts Service (HMCS) declined to comment on individual cases but said it ran counter to a general downward trend in complaints. In 2007-08, 8,556 complaints were made about county courts, 18% down on the previous year.

‘We have recorded more than 2,800 compliments from county court users happy with the service they had received,’ a spokesman for HMCS said.

Wismayer said that, while not all courts’ administration is poor, the level of administrative failures amounts to a ‘national scandal’.

‘This is a real case about real rights. My client has been trying to get into his flat since March 2007. He has done everything on time but cannot get access to the courts,’ he said.