7. The law says a person needs to make their complaint to an MP within a year of becoming aware of the problem. We cannot investigate complaints brought to an MP after one year, unless we consider there is a good reason to do so. We have discussed this with Miss U to understand why she could not make her complaint within one year.
8. Miss U says she was unhappy with the service HMCTS provided while dealing with her court case in 2019. She says the poor service she received led to three separate issues.
9. Between 29 April and 1 October 2019, Miss U became aware each of these issues were unresolved. This means she would have needed to complain to her MP about these matters by October 2020 at the latest for her complaint to be within our time limit.
10. Miss U referred her complaint to her MP on 19 October 2021, two years after becoming aware she had reason to complain. She had not started HMCTS’s complaints process at the time. Her first official complaint to HMCTS via the formal complaints process was on 8 November 2021.
11. Miss U said she did not refer her complaint to her MP or complain via HMCTS’s official route earlier because she was trying to complain to HMCTS in other ways. On 17 September 2019 Miss U tried to complain to HMCTS by asking for the name of the area director. HMCTS took eight months to provide this information and she received it in June 2020.
12. Miss U says she also tried to contact the CEO of HMCTS to complain and she researched how she could complain online.
13. She says ‘with no sense of direction, I was forced to halt my complaints’, which is why she did not complain to us or her MP earlier.
14. HMCTS has a three-stage complaints process. This is clearly set out on its website, with information about who to contact at each stage of the process and how to escalate a complaint if it is not resolved.
15. We can clearly see at first Miss U made attempts to complain to HMCTS without success, as she did not raise her complaint via the proper route. We can also see she stopped trying to complain for over a year between June 2020 and October 2021.
16. We would expect if somebody wanted to complain to HMCTS they would either check the HMCTS website for the complaints procedure or ask HMCTS how they could officially raise a complaint. From the information we have seen it seems Miss U did neither of these. We appreciate she did attempt to raise concerns in this time, but asking for the name of the area director is not the same as making a formal complaint or asking for information on the complaints procedure.
17. We would also expect an individual to be able to properly raise an official complaint to HMCTS after two years of trying. We have seen Miss U did not raise an official complaint with HMCTS until 8 November 2021, after she was directed to do so by us.
18. For these reasons, we do not think the reasons Miss U has provided are enough for us to put our time limit aside and consider her complaint.
19. We are sorry for any frustration our decision causes Miss U. We hope she can understand our decision and the legal restraints that surround it.