UK justice system bug raises fears of hidden case files • The Register
The UK’s HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) is continuing to check whether an IT bug that could hide documents and data affected the outcome of any cases, a government minister has said.
In a written parliamentary answer, Sarah Sackman, Minister of State for Justice, said that the issue was of “very low incidence” and that investigations to date had found no evidence of impact on case outcomes. However, she added: “Further assurance work is ongoing.”
The bug affected HMCTS’s civil, family, and tribunal services with a particular impact on the Social Security and Child Support (SSCS) Tribunal, which hears appeals against government benefit payment decisions. Sackman said it was caused by a faulty interaction between a case management system and the core case database. “This technical issue had the potential to cause some documents and data fields to be hidden from view in certain cases across civil, family, and tribunal jurisdictions,” she said.
HMCTS identified the bug in 2023 and applied fixes in January 2025. It carried out targeted investigations into whether the bug had affected case outcomes, but has since “significantly expanded” this with additional ongoing work on SSCS cases, according to Sackman. The risk of missing documents in family public law was lower, she added, as local authorities supplied these directly to the court.
In August, the BBC published material from an internal whistleblower investigation on the bug. Sources within HMCTS compared the situation to the Horizon Post Office scandal, with one telling the broadcaster: “They’re not worried about risk to the public, they’re worried about people finding out about the risk to the public. It’s terrifying to witness.”
The BBC reported that initially HMCTS investigated just 109 of 609 SSCS cases identified as having potential issues with just one having a “potentially significant impact.”
Sackman was answering a series of questions from Conservative MP and whip Andrew Snowden. He asked her to publish the report leaked to the BBC, which she refused to do, although she said that the government has told HMCTS to strengthen its processes for incident management and governance.
In answer to Snowden’s question on the organizations involved, Sackman said that Atos, Capgemini, CGI, Cognizant, Methods, PA Consulting, Scrumconnect, Transform UK, Solirius Consulting, and Version 1 were the main suppliers of the services affected since 2016.
Asked whether the government would pause court digitization work, she said it would not: “While technical challenges are an inevitable part of digital transformation, they are investigated and triaged according to risk.”
HMCTS has experienced a number of technical challenges over recent years. In 2023, the National Audit Office criticized its introduction of a £1.3 billion case management platform, which included writing off £22.5 million spent on abandoned work to integrate with the Crown Prosecution Service.
In the same year it awarded a contract worth up to £60 million to keep a “heritage application” running before a new digital case management system could take over. ®
