A bug in the British courts' IT system deleted important evidence for years — executives knew and kept quiet

For years, the British courts concealed the IT error, resulting in the disappearance of important evidence. Surprisingly, management did not correct the situation, but remained silent.

Although we are used to cases where IT people are tried (e.g, “petty” hooliganism for $200,000), this time the case concerns HMCTS. The scandal occurred in a government agency that runs all courts and specialized justice agencies in England and Wales. For several years, evidence had been disappearing, being overwritten, or lost. As a result, judges made decisions based on incomplete materials. It turned out that the authority had not conducted a full investigation to find out the extent of the problem and the impact of the error on the cases. Even though it knew about the problem. The worst part is that neither judges nor lawyers knew about the disappearance of the case files. For some reason, the management of the service decided that it would “do more harm than good.”

HMCTS denies that technical failures affected court decisions — but it sounds doubtful. For example, medical records, contact information, and other important evidence were sometimes not visible in case files. The SSCS unit that handles appeals on social assistance and alimony was the most affected. Family, civil, inheritance and labor cases were also affected.

The former head of the High Court’s family division, Sir James Munby, called the situation “shocking” and “scandalous.” It turns out that the error concerned the case management software — Judicial Case Manager, MyHMCTS or CCD, which tracks evidence in courts and appeals.

The journalists checked the Ministry of Justice’s 2024 cases related to SSCS. Out of 609 cases, 109 were selected for review, and only one was deemed by HMCTS to have a “potentially significant impact”. Subsequently, the risk was assessed as low and it was decided not to conduct additional inspections. And this raises questions. IT security experts, such as Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey, doubt such conclusions and call them “illogical.”

Anonymously, HMCTS employees compared this situation to the Horizon scandal, where they also tried to hide problems. According to them, the software, launched in 2018, was “improperly or unreliably designed” and had long had problems with data loss. One source said the reason for the cover-up was very simple: the leadership was more concerned about reputational damage than the impact on people’s lives.

In addition, in 2024, an HMCTS employee filed an official whistleblower complaint, which launched an internal investigation. The leaked report shows large-scale data breaches and delays in response, despite warnings from technical staff since 2019. Problems with the IT system continue to this day, affecting civil, family, and appellate cases. In family courts, another failure led to the disappearance of more than 4,000 documents from hundreds of state child protection cases. The error was discovered in 2023, and although it has been supposedly fixed, no investigation into the potential impact has been conducted.

The Ministry of Justice did not answer whether urgent child protection cases were affected. Meanwhile, the government called the situation shocking. Former Secretary of State for Justice Alex Chalke (who served during the first HMCTS review) said he was unaware of the problem and called it “incredibly serious.” He called for a government investigation and a complete review of the service’s management.

Source: BBC