15 October 2026
On Monday, I spent approximately four hours trying to establish the details of historical MS90 convictions recorded against me.
I telephoned one department, waited on hold, explained the situation, was directed elsewhere, waited on hold again, explained the situation again, and repeated the process until I began to wonder whether I was participating in an elaborate government-funded endurance experiment.
Eventually, an enforcement team was able to locate historical information and provide two account references.
Progress, at last.
Armed with those references, I contacted the Single Justice Service (SJS), hoping to establish which courts dealt with the cases, when the proceedings took place and how I could obtain the relevant records.
Today, I received a reply.
It began politely enough.
Good afternoon.
Thank you for your email.
Then came the questions.
The Six Questions
The SJS asked me to provide a URN, case number or account number so that they could locate the case.
Fair enough. I now have enforcement account references, although I cannot yet say whether those references are sufficient for the SJS to retrieve the underlying proceedings.
Then, to pass security, they requested my full name and six further details:
- Date of birth.
- First line of address.
- Postcode.
- The organisation prosecuting me.
- The type of offence.
- The date of the offence.
Some of those questions are perfectly reasonable.
Court records contain sensitive personal information. The service needs to establish that it is dealing with the right person before disclosing anything.
I have no objection to security checks.
My concern is with the assumptions built into the questions.
What if the information they’re asking me to provide is the very information I’m contacting them to discover?
Please Identify the Organisation You Cannot Identify
Take question four.
The organisation prosecuting you.
In my case, that might have been South Yorkshire Police. West Yorkshire Police is another possibility, given the geographical connections associated with the vehicle’s history.
But I don’t know.
And I don’t want to turn a suspicion into a fact merely because a government department has asked me to fill in a blank.
Likewise, I know that the convictions are recorded as MS90, but that is an endorsement code. It doesn’t, by itself, give me the original charge particulars, the prosecuting authority or the precise offence dates.
Those are things I am trying to establish.
So here I am, asking the justice system to identify a case, while the justice system asks me to identify the case before it can assist.
There is a certain elegance to the circularity.
Unfortunately, it’s the sort of elegance that makes you want to put your head through a desk.
The Human Search Engine
Something else bothered me about Monday’s telephone marathon.
I contacted several government departments. Only a minority of the people I reached seemed able to access information that moved my enquiry forward.
That isn’t necessarily a criticism of those individuals.
One department may have access to a particular database while another does not. Staff may be restricted by security rules, departmental responsibilities or the age of the records.
A perfectly capable employee cannot retrieve information from a system they aren’t permitted to access.
But from the perspective of the person seeking help, the experience is bewildering.
Every time I explained the situation, I had to reconstruct the story from the beginning.
Historical conviction. MS90 endorsement. Unknown original proceedings. Multiple previous addresses. Missing case references. Uncertainty about which police force was involved.
That’s not a simple enquiry.
It’s a small investigation.
And I was effectively asking each call handler to perform it while also navigating whatever software, procedures and institutional boundaries their department happened to operate under.
At what point does a public-service call handler become an unpaid systems integrator?
Or, more accurately, an under-supported one?
Complexity Has a Labour Cost
This is where the problem becomes bigger than my driving record.
We often discuss public-sector inefficiency as though the solution is simply to demand more from public-sector employees.
Answer calls faster.
Clear backlogs.
Reduce waiting times.
Process more enquiries.
But what happens when the underlying system becomes so complicated that even understanding a caller’s problem requires substantial institutional knowledge?
The person answering the phone may need to understand the distinction between a court case number and an enforcement account number, between a police force and a prosecuting authority, between an endorsement code and an offence, and between different court procedures.
They may also need to know which department owns which record, what can be disclosed, what cannot be disclosed, and which process applies when the caller doesn’t know the information normally used to identify a case.
That’s a considerable cognitive workload.
And much of it appears to arise not from the complexity of the law itself, but from the complexity of the systems surrounding it.
I find myself wondering how the public sector recruits, trains and retains people capable of navigating these increasingly elaborate arrangements.
Because people with strong analytical skills, technical confidence and the ability to untangle complicated processes are valuable well beyond the justice system.
In a labour market where private employers may offer better pay or working conditions, public institutions cannot simply assume that such expertise will always be available.
I don’t have the staffing or salary data to claim that this explains the difficulties I encountered.
But the question is worth asking.
If a service becomes more complicated every year, what happens when the people required to understand it are not given the resources, training or incentives to keep up?
An Email Pretending to Be a Form
There’s another curious feature of the SJS response.
It’s effectively a form, delivered by email.
Six numbered questions, plus a request for a reference number and a description of the enquiry.
Yet email doesn’t distinguish between information that is known, information that is uncertain and information that is unavailable.
It doesn’t provide an obvious option for “I don’t know the prosecuting authority.”
It doesn’t explain whether the offence date is required to pass security or merely useful for locating the record.
And it doesn’t clearly distinguish between an account number held by an enforcement team and the court’s original case reference.
A properly designed online enquiry service could do all of those things.
It could ask:
What are you trying to find?
Then:
What information do you already have?
It could accept a known case reference, an enforcement account number, an approximate date, previous addresses or a suspected prosecuting authority.
Crucially, it could allow the user to select:
Unknown.
That isn’t a failure to complete the form.
It is useful information about the nature of the enquiry.
The service could generate a ticket number, route the request to the appropriate team and provide a record of what had been requested.
Email could remain available for follow-up and for people unable or unwilling to use a web form.
None of this would magically join incompatible court databases or restore records that no longer exist.
Nor should a public website expose criminal case details without appropriate identity checks.
But better enquiry design could make uncertainty easier to communicate and reduce the need for people to repeat the same complicated explanation to multiple departments.
The Difference Between Automation and Digitisation
There’s a delightful irony here.
I’ve been writing about automated injustice: the danger of systems that replicate errors, apply rigid rules and make it difficult for human beings to challenge incorrect records.
Now I’m suggesting that the justice system needs more digital infrastructure.
But those ideas aren’t contradictory.
Automating a decision about someone’s legal rights is very different from automating the administration of a request for information.
I don’t want a computer deciding whether I committed an offence merely because a database contains an endorsement code.
I would, however, quite like a computer to tell me which department holds the original court record.
One kind of automation risks removing human judgment where it is essential.
The other could free human beings from repetitive administrative work so that they can exercise judgment where it actually matters.
Good digitisation should make the system more intelligible, not merely faster at repeating its existing mistakes.
The Real Problem Isn’t the Person Answering the Email
I want to be fair to the SJS.
Their response was courteous. They asked for identifying information. They explained that they needed to pass security before providing case-specific details.
They haven’t yet refused to help me.
And I haven’t established that their staff are unable to find the cases using the enforcement references I obtained.
Those are important distinctions.
My criticism is not that someone sent me six questions.
It’s that, after hours of telephone calls, the next step in tracing a historical court record still appears to depend on my ability to reconstruct details that may exist only within the very institutions I’m asking for help.
That suggests a system whose complexity is being transferred to the public and to the staff working at its edges.
Perhaps the next reply will locate everything.
Perhaps the account numbers will unlock the records immediately, and I’ll discover that I’ve been unnecessarily pessimistic.
I would be delighted to be proved wrong.
But even if my particular enquiry is resolved tomorrow, the design question remains.
Should finding out what happened in a court case require the investigative skills of a detective, the patience of a saint and the persistence of a software engineer debugging somebody else’s undocumented legacy system?
Because if the answer is yes, perhaps the problem isn’t that the public doesn’t understand the justice system.
Perhaps the justice system has become unnecessarily difficult to understand.
And perhaps, before we automate any more justice, we ought to make sure people can actually find it.
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