Category: Uncategorized

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:

1. Date of birth.
2. First line of address.
3. Postcode.
4. The organisation prosecuting me.
5. The type of offence.
6. 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.

Monday, 12 October 2026 — A belated entry

William Shakespeare died more than four hundred years ago.

He never had to telephone His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service. He never listened to a recorded voice asking him to select an option from a menu. And, so far as I know, nobody ever subjected him to sixty consecutive minutes of hold music.

Yet by the end of Monday, I was beginning to suspect that Shakespeare understood my predicament rather well.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Act I: To Press One, or Not to Press One

My Monday began with what seemed a relatively straightforward objective.I needed to locate the court records behind an old MS90 conviction — an offence involving failure to provide information about the identity of a driver.I dispute that I was responsible for the alleged offence. The conviction appears to have contributed to the revocation of my full driving licence, and I had only recently become aware of the proceedings.

The circumstances surrounding that period of my life were complicated. COVID had disrupted almost everything, and I’d changed addresses several times. I cannot yet say precisely what happened to the original notices, or why the conviction came to be associated with me.That’s what I’m trying to establish.

Surely, I thought, the court would have a record.I telephoned HMCTS.Immediately, I encountered my first obstacle.

The automated telephone service wanted to know whether my enquiry concerned the Single Justice Procedure.Now, many relatively minor motoring offences are dealt with under that procedure. But I didn’t know whether mine had been.

And that was rather the point of calling.

Unfortunately, the automated system offered no option for “I don’t know; could somebody please tell me?”

It offered Yes or No.

To press one, or not to press one?

I spent approximately half an hour waiting to reach the relevant departments. In the end, neither could provide the historical MS90 case information I needed.

The first act concluded without a case number, a court record or even a clear idea of who might possess either.

Act II: A Welsh Voice and a Circular Journey

By about 10am, I decided to try DVLA.If the conviction had resulted in penalty points and the loss of my driving licence, perhaps the agency responsible for maintaining driving records could identify the original endorsement.

Unfortunately, the person I spoke to couldn’t locate the historical information I needed.

There was, at least, the consolation of a pleasant Welsh accent.

The adviser suggested contacting the penalty office and gave me a telephone number.

Excellent, I thought. A new lead.

I dialled it.

And found myself listening to the very same automated service with which I had begun my morning.

I had completed an entire administrative circuit and arrived back at the entrance.

Had Shakespeare written this scene, I suspect the audience would have laughed.

I was less amused.

But the adviser had inadvertently given me something useful: the name of another department.So I searched online and found various contact numbers for penalty offices, many apparently concerned with collecting payments rather than investigating old cases.

Eventually, I found a number for a North East England penalties office, based in Lincoln.

Onward to Act III.Act III: The Hour of Waiting

The next telephone call involved approximately another hour on hold.

There is something peculiarly exhausting about waiting on a telephone.

You cannot quite concentrate on anything else, because at any moment the music might stop and a human being might answer.

You must remain alert enough to explain a complicated situation immediately, yet passive enough to endure the same short piece of music repeating indefinitely.

It is neither proper rest nor productive work.

It is a kind of administrative purgatory.

When I finally reached someone, they were helpful. Unfortunately, the office no longer held the historical penalty information I needed.

They could identify a more recent matter, but not the old MS90 case.

Another dead end, or so it seemed.Then came the most useful suggestion of the morning.

Because I had recently become aware of the historical matter through enforcement agents — commonly known as bailiffs — I should try contacting the court enforcement team.

This was a department I hadn’t thought to approach.

After all, I was trying to investigate the origins of a conviction, not pay an outstanding penalty.

But perhaps the people responsible for enforcing a decision would retain information that the people answering general court enquiries could no longer find.It was worth one more call.

Act IV: Enter the Enforcement Team

By this point, it was approaching midday.

I telephoned the enforcement team.Another hour on hold.Another hour of listening for the tiny interruption that might signal the arrival of an actual person.

And then, finally, something happened.The adviser could see information relating to my historical MS90 matter on their system.

For the first time that day, I was speaking to someone who could read back details connected to the very case I had spent the morning trying to trace.

I still didn’t have the complete court file, and the information did not resolve the question of whether the conviction was correctly attributed to me.

But it established a tangible trail.

There was information in an official system. There were references I could use. The matter was no longer just an old endorsement I was trying to explain.The adviser supplied two enforcement account numbers, each consisting of eight digits followed by a letter.

As I understood the explanation, the numbers related to different periods of records, one before 2022 and one afterwards.These were not necessarily the original court case numbers or Unique Reference Numbers. But they were identifiers that another department might be able to use to locate the underlying matters.

That was progress.The next step would be to take those references back to the Single Justice Procedure service and ask it to identify the proceedings associated with them.

For any conviction of which I genuinely had no knowledge, I also need to establish the appropriate procedure for making a statutory declaration, including whether any application would now be considered late.

Each case must be identified separately. A single account reference may not tell the whole story.

Still, after several hours, I finally had something more useful than another telephone number.

I had a lead.

And the strangest part was where it had come from.

The enforcement team — the very part of the system concerned with collecting the consequences of a decision — had been the first to help me trace its origins.

There is an irony there that even Shakespeare might have appreciated.

I had spent the morning looking for the beginning of a legal process.It was the people dealing with its ending who could point me backwards.

Act V: The Law’s Delay

By nearly 2pm, I was mentally exhausted.

On paper, I had spent only a few hours making telephone calls.

In practice, those hours had involved repeated explanations, uncertain departmental boundaries, long periods of forced attention and the constant possibility that each call would lead nowhere.

I had begun with a simple question: where are the records relating to this conviction?Several hours later, I had two account references and a possible route to obtaining them.

That might sound like modest progress.To me, it felt like winning a small battle.

I couldn’t face another call that afternoon.Later that evening, I watched a documentary about Shakespeare and the many actors and directors who have interpreted his plays over the twentieth century.

There was discussion of Macbeth, among other works, and it reminded me of a line I’d encountered in Hamlet.In the famous “To be, or not to be” speech, Hamlet lists some of the burdens people endure:

“The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office…”

The law’s delay.

There it was.

Four hundred years ago, Shakespeare was already describing the frustration of waiting for legal processes to deliver something resembling resolution.

Of course, he wasn’t talking about call centres or automated menus.

But the underlying experience seems surprisingly familiar.

The difficulty of obtaining answers. The distance between an individual and an institution. The feeling that the machinery of justice moves according to a timetable entirely unrelated to the urgency of the person caught inside it.

I had been thinking about the legal system as an engineer.On Monday, I found myself thinking about it as a playwright might.

A succession of characters entered the scene. Each knew something, but nobody appeared to know the whole story. Each directed me towards another character. The audience — in this case, me — waited for the plot to advance.

The difficulty was that I wasn’t watching a play.I was trying to find out why my driving licence had been revoked.An Unexpected Lesson

If anyone reading this is trying to trace an old magistrates’ court matter, particularly one that has reached the stage of enforcement, Monday taught me something worth sharing.

The court enforcement team may be able to identify historical matters that are difficult to locate through general enquiries.

That won’t necessarily be true in every case, and enforcement account numbers aren’t substitutes for the original court records.

But if a matter has been referred for enforcement, it’s worth asking whether the enforcement team can provide references, identify the originating court and explain how to trace the underlying proceedings.

In my case, it was the first genuinely productive route I found.I still have questions about the MS90 conviction, the notices that may have been issued, the addresses used and the consequences for my driving licence.

I don’t yet know whether the explanation is an administrative mistake, an incorrectly attributed allegation, a failure of communication or something else.I intend to find out.

And I intend to document the process, because somebody else may one day find themselves in the same position, facing the same telephone menus and wondering where to begin.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of Monday wasn’t that nobody wanted to help.

The people I eventually spoke to generally did try to help.

It was that the information appeared to be divided between systems, with no obvious route for an ordinary person to discover which one held the answer.

A system can contain the information you need and still make that information extraordinarily difficult to obtain.

Shakespeare understood the law’s delay.

I wonder what he would have made of the hold music.

To be continued.