Dear Lord Chancellor

Since moving to my present address, I have unfortunately felt the need to make use of Eastbourne County Court on four occasions. Soon after I first applied for an injunction order against a neighbour, I received a letter from Ian Magee of the Court Service which said that the service wanted to find out what the public thought of what the service offered. A questionnaire was enclosed, which I filled in and returned, though I thought the exercise premature and rather a waste of public money, as at that time I knew very little about the court in question. I have since, to my cost, found out much more.

This open letter is designed to improve on my response to the questionnaire. When I wrote to you previously (in May 2002 and February 2003), your department informed me that you cannot comment on "matters of judicial decision". Most things at Eastbourne County Court seem to be matters of judicial decision, as the court manager seems to be little more than a paper-pusher. Rule 3.2 of the Civil Procedure Rules 1998 allows a court officer to refer to a judge before taking any step, and Eastbourne County Court seems to be following this rule when one's letters to the court remain unanswered: the letters have evidently been referred to "the judge", who may or may not ask for a brief answer to be given.

My first experience of Eastbourne County Court was of the court officers' capacity for the provision of misinformation. I went into the office to ask about the procedures for applying for an injunction order, and was told that I could not do so myself, but that it would have to be done through a solicitor. I only found out months later through the Internet that this was untrue. Later, when I wanted an order for neighbours to remove an FM aerial from above my property, a court officer asserted that for a neighbour to have an aerial erected over one's property was not illegal, I knew that she was wrong and went ahead anyway. When I wished for another order against the same neighbours because they had taken over the rear wall of my garage, and asked for advice because when I had previously tried to deliver a copy of an application I had met with volleys of verbal abuse and three refusals to accept the application from me, I was asked to pay £30 so that a judge could pronounce on the matter. In this case I later got my £30 back, because when I actually read the form for the application I found that it could be posted via Royal Mail or simply pushed through the neighbours' letter box. Recently I have discovered that the solution to my problem appeared in the Civil Procedure Rules of 1998, Part 6.2(b) and (c), so I suppose telling a member of the public how to deliver an application might be considered "legal advice", which court officers are not supposed to give.

The Agency responsible for the running of Eastbourne County Court "provides the necessary services to the judiciary and court users to ensure its impartial and efficient operation." The Agency is not successful in its aim. When newly arrived neighbours painted a fence belonging to me red and hung containers for flowers from the top of it, I said nothing, but when they had an aerial erected over my property despite my objections, I applied for an injunction order. For costs, I claimed only what I had paid the court. This apparently simple case, mainly a matter of trespass, took four hearings by four different judges (Tennant, Radcliffe, Griggs, and Robinson), plus a fifth judge (Fawcett) to do a little office work. That seems to me a grossly inefficient way of arranging things, though it presumably makes it convenient for the judges, and profitable for any other lawyers involved.

The advice given me by a solicitor that I should not take to court a man who had fenced off part of my garden for himself, shut me out from a larger area of my garden, and thrown a fence post at me, was endorsed by the partiality the court seems to have for defendants and solicitors, and a bias against claimants.

For instance, on at least four occasions I attended court without having seen copies of documents from the defendants that the judge had in his or her possession. In two of these cases, I never saw those documents. On two occasions defendants had hearings deferred by simply writing to the court. On the one occasion when I suggested that a hearing might be deferred because I was having difficulty getting information from the Land Registry, my letter to the court manager was not answered. At the beginning of the hearing, on the set date, the irascible District Judge Robinson asked the defence solicitor if he had received a copy of my letter to the court. When the solicitor, a "fee earner" called Griffiths, who operates under the name of Mayo & Perkins, said he had not received a copy, the judge immediately declared the meeting a waste of Griffiths' time (which was untrue as I was about to present the court with new plans of my property), and asked him how much he wanted to be paid for his time. I was ordered to pay £176.25 because Griffiths had not received a copy of my letter to the court. The reason he did not receive a copy was because Mayo & Perkins had given the copy I sent them to another incompetent called H. Manktelow, who had made it page 91 of the trial bundle of another case (EA101669) without checking the case number and the name of the defendant, and presumably without even glancing through the document. Even though both the court and Mayo & Perkins were told what had happened, the order stood and Mayo & Perkins insisted on collecting the money. That seems to me to make the court little better than a racket run for the benefit of the legal profession.