“BUILD IT AND WHO CARES IF THEY COME”: THE REGISTER ON WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH THE COURT RULES AND LISTING ONLINE: THE ABSENCE OF “SCHOOL-GRADE WEB SKILLS”

An interesting explanation of why practitioners, and others, are having problems with access to rules of court and listing can be found in The Register – which provides news on technology for I T Professionals.  The Register reports that the major problem we are having is “all because £450 m agency doesn’t have school-grade web skills”.  The article is well worth reading for anyone trying to understand the “rationale” behind the chaos of the last few days. Basically they have taken a good, effective and working system and made it worse (and they have a track record for this apparently). More significantly the new system is far less accessible to the disabled – you can almost hear the judicial review coming on…

” GDS efforts to seize and destroy revamp the MoJ’s highly regarded High Court and Court of Appeal listings webpages and email services have imposed substantially poorer alternatives on the public – alternatives even GDS admits are less accessible for the disabled than their predecessors”

WHAT THE REGISTER SAYS

Apparently this is far from the first time there has been a problem. The Register is scathing in its review of the GDS abilities.

“A crackdown by the increasingly rudderless GDS on the Ministry of Justice’s website has led to lawyers and campaigners sounding the alarm after a key legal text was mangled almost beyond comprehension by GDS’s one-size-must-fit-all approach to web development.”
“Web design principles are taught to schoolchildren. It is completely unclear how a government agency which uses in excess of £450m of taxpayers’ money per annum has failed to recruit enough people with school-leaver skills to smoothly migrate justice.gov.uk onto a new domain.”