Thousands of cases have been disrupted or delayed across England and Wales after the courts service’s main computer network repeatedly crashed, preventing lawyers and judges from working.
The communication failures, which started last week, are a significant embarrassment for the Ministry of Justice, which is investing £1.2bn in a high-profile programme promoting online hearings which aims to replace the legal profession’s traditional reliance on mountains of paperwork.
The IT breakdown meant that staff at the MoJ were unable to send emails, wireless connections went down, jurors could not be enrolled and barristers could not register for attendance payments. Courts were left unsure of when some defendants were due to appear and some court files could not be retrieved, leading to prosecutions being adjourned.
Susan Acland-Hood, the head of HM Courts & Tribunal Service (HMCTS), tweeted on Tuesday evening: “update on the issues across MoJ systems that have been affecting courts & what is being done to fix them. I’m hugely grateful to HMCTS staff, professional users & others who’ve worked so hard to keep courts working through the problems – very sorry it was necessary.”
A longer statement on the MoJ’s website apologised to those who had been affected, admitting: “We know this is unacceptable and how deeply frustrating this has been for our staff and users.”
The department said access had been restored to “a large number of Ministry of Justice sites” and that the main suppliers of the affected technology, including Atos and Microsoft, were “working hard to restore access for the remaining sites and users”.
The MoJ denied that the disruption was due to a cyber-attack and insisted that there had been no loss of data.
Richard Atkins QC, the chair of the Bar Council, which represents barristers in England and Wales, said: “I have no doubt that the Ministry of Justice and HMCTS are doing all that they can to rectify this major problem, but it illustrates how vulnerable the delivery of justice is with reliance on weak IT systems in our courts.
“Whilst HMCTS is moving forward with its programme of online justice, these problems would suggest that more investment in the basics is needed first. We cannot have a justice system that comes to a shuddering halt the moment the IT does not work properly.”
Chris Henley QC, the chair of the Criminal Bar Association, told the Law Society Gazette: “Short-term savings often result in wider costs to the public purse and cause a broken criminal justice system to fall further apart. Crumbling court buildings are bad enough for court users – both the public and criminal practitioners – but digital failures can have far more profound consequences for all those awaiting trial.
“Prolonged IT failures do a disservice to the victims of crime and their families who may have already suffered the costs of delays from an already overstretched, chronically underfunded, broken criminal justice system.”
The Secret Barrister, an influential legal commentator on the state of the courts, tweeted: “The entire digital infrastructure of the courts has been broken for days. Phones aren’t working, court computers are offline, email is down. Imagine the headlines if it were the NHS. But it’s only justice, so no one cares. No accountability, no lessons learned.”