Vos: Most county courts outside of the South-East operate reasonably well
The court modernisation project ends this month with the “very disappointing” outcome of only 23% of civil cases being digital end to end, the Master of the Rolls told MPs this week.
Sir Geoffrey Vos said it would take a relatively small amount of money – “millions rather than hundreds of millions” – to expand the scope of digitisation to encompass up to 90% of civil cases.
Giving evidence to the justice select committee as part of its inquiry into the county court, he said the senior judiciary was “contributing urgently” to the Ministry of Justice’s bid to the Treasury for the next spending round.
What was initially in 2016 a four-year project was soon extended to six years, and then pushed three more times until the final delay last year to March 2025.
Sir Geoffrey said most county courts were delivering “a reasonably good service” but identified “three hot spots of inefficiency” – the Civil National Business Centre in Northampton, Central London County Court, and “a lack of salaried district judges in the South-East of England and in London.
Talking about technology, he bemoaned the “overlapping systems” operating in the county court –paper, a legacy system called CaseMan, the current system and local efforts to scan paper documents.
“We thought when reform started that we were going to have one digital system across the entirety of the courts and tribunals,” he said.
However, its scope has been steadily cut back over the years, meaning that only 23% of county court cases were entirely digital. This was a “very disappointing” outcome.
Sir Geoffrey explained that the contrasting figure of 61% cited by HM Courts & Tribunals Service was based on the number of tasks a judge undertook – this meant a three-day trial over a boundary dispute counted the same as a two-minute online application. The statistic “does not really mean anything”.
Returning to the new system’s scope possession and property claims – which are being digitised with money provided by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government – possession claims and then bulk claims, would take it to 80-90%.
“But you would still be not making judges use digital 80% or 90% of the time, because those bulk claims very rarely go to judges, they are normally the subject of default judgements.
“So unfortunately the ones judges see are that stubborn 10% that are the more complex claims, and you will only get paper out of the county court and out of the judge’s inbox when you find a way of digitising those.”
Sir Geoffrey added that it now seemed unlikely that the county court system would be able to expand to replace the High Court’s CE-file, which would need replacing in three or four years’ time.
For complex county court claims, such as boundary disputes, he suggested using the CE-file replacement when it comes.
“I think everybody is very keen to stop the reform programme dead in its tracks as at 31 March. That is fine. It is very important that the work that was within scope previously of civil reform should be completed.”
The MR said that while the modernisation programme has “not been unsuccessful”, the problems thrown up by the complexities of the different kinds of case in civil was underestimated.
He added that he wanted to get the proportion of salaried to fee-paid district judges to 80/20, compared to around 60/40 as now.
While “fee-paid judges are great, they are extremely able, they are extremely committed”, they tended to be “a bit slower” than experienced judged who sat every day.
A former adviser to the Ministry of Justice said last May that the county court has “borne the brunt” of the failure of the programme to deliver.
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