Between a Rock and a Hard Case: Why We’re Deleting the Archive (UPDATE - we're not)

On Thursday, the Courtsdesk News UK archive - the UK’s only searchable criminal court reporting database was to be permanently destroyed. This is why. And (update) now, why we're grateful it's not.

UPDATE - 18 February 2026, Evening

Since publishing this post, below, earlier today, we have received a letter from the Government Legal Department acting on behalf of HMCTS, dated today, 18 February 2026. The letter requests that we hold off on deleting our archive while the government considers our representations and clarifies matters previously discussed, and invites us to engage in formal dialogue about applying for a new licensing arrangement.

HMCTS have issued a “market engagement notice”, which we warmly welcome. More importantly we are simply grateful for a chance to resolve a problem, and a deletion request, which we hoped could be resolved, with dialogue and cooperation.

Without a huge edit, and given the time pressure, I want to retract the statements made in this post regarding our intention to proceed with deletion tomorrow. But we are leaving the post here to avoid misinterpretation or conspiracy theories about the change in position.

The government are right to be cautious and careful about how this data is handled and we are determined to show that it has never been put at risk by us.

We are responding to the letter from HMCTS with the utmost urgency and in a spirit of full cooperation. We are genuinely hopeful that this marks the beginning of a constructive and lasting re-engagement.

We are grateful to the Ministry of Justice and HMCTS for initiating this dialogue and for the constructive tone of their letter. We will provide a full update as soon as we are able to do so.

Original Post:

I’ve spent the last three months fighting to save something that took five years to build. On Thursday, that fight ends - not because we lost in court, but because we never got the chance to get there. And not because we didn’t try. It was mainly because the Government never issued us licence that it said it would, while it interacted with us as if it had.

By the end of this week, 4.8 million court records - covering as much of the magistrates’ court in England and Wales as HMCTS published, painstakingly collected, structured and maintained since 2020 - will be permanently deleted from our systems.

It’s a shame, and the opposite outcome to the careful and quiet collaboration we tried to build with Government for all these years. I want to explain why it’s happening.

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What’s led to this

On 19 November 2025, HM Courts and Tribunals Service gave us notice to stop receiving court data and to delete everything we hold. The original deadline to comply was 19 December 2025.

We engaged lawyers, the brilliant Julian Darrall at Bristows LLP, on the recommendation of the Chair of the Media Lawyers Association, who had been backing our attempts at reform of outdated open justice policy.

Then because there were claims made about data protection issues, we recruited the best barrister we could find on that issue - Jude Bunting KC of Doughty Street Chambers.

Having had no reply to multiple attempts at mediation or dialogue in writing to HMCTS and three ministers, we took the step the lawyers advised: to send a formal Pre-Action Protocol for Judicial Review, which is the required legal process before you can ask a court to review a government decision. We sent it by HMCTS’s deadline, filing our pre-action letter on 19th December (which is a bitter way to spend your birthday, I can tell you…. happy birthday Enda from the MoJ!).

The Government Legal Department replied the same day with an interim letter. They extended the deletion deadline to 9th February 2026 and said they would respond substantively by 19th January. Their response arrived, and we held a conference with counsel on 21th January to assess it.

That 9 February deadline passed last week. We’ve been asked if we deleted the data. The answer is not that day, because we were still trying to determine whether there was a viable path forward - whether the risk of pursuing judicial review was one we could responsibly take, and we wrote to the Government to tell them that so we couldn’t be accused of trying to store the data without consent or notification - as always, we’ve operated entirely within the rules we’re given and the law of the land that applies.

We’ve now concluded that it’s not a risk we can take. Thursday, 19th February, is the deadline by which we could file a judicial review claim. After that, the legal avenue to do so expires - you must file a claim within three months from the date the grounds to make the claim first arose.

I want to be clear about what judicial review is: it is NOT suing the government.

We have never wanted to do that and we have never threatened it. It is simply asking a court to review whether a decision was made lawfully. It’s a standard process, and one we had reasonable grounds to pursue.

We wanted to help the media cover what goes in here…not end up as one of the cases ourselves

The case…or not…of the missing licence

Our legal team advised that we had a credible case. They identified several points where HMCTS’s position didn’t hold up - internal inconsistencies in the government’s arguments, errors in how they characterised the legal framework, and a failure to give us any opportunity to respond before shutting us down.

But the Government Legal Department’s response raised a fundamental problem that made the whole thing much harder.

Their core argument was simple: there is no contract or licence between us and HMCTS. The original pilot agreement had expired. To be clear: they had written since it expired literally dozens of times approving us to continue, they had helped us chase information from courts that persistently failed to publish documents, and were still apparently working away during the ten months it took, assessing our formal report to Government. But now, they said, we have no contractual rights and no legal standing to challenge how the arrangement was ended.

This is a difficult position to overcome, even though it contradicts what HMCTS itself relied on when it sent the cessation notice, which expressly cited breaches of that same agreement.

I would have thought you can’t terminate something over a breach of an agreement, and simultaneously argue the agreement doesn’t exist. Our lawyers made that point. But making it in front of a judge is another matter.

Without a licence or contract in place, there is nothing to interpret, nothing to enforce. Unfortunately if you’re asking a court to adjudicate the first hurdle is establishing what the terms are on which to judge it. Counsel advised that to properly pursue the judicial review, we would first need specialist commercial legal advice to resolve the contract law questions - because whether the case was even admissible by the court could initially hang on whether there was a binding arrangement and, if so, what its terms meant. That advice alone would cost several thousand pounds more, on top of the fees we’d already spent, and we were already losing clients and revenues.

The bottom line is this: the government delayed giving us a licence for over a year, then argued that because we don’t have a licence, we have no rights. That’s what we’re up against.

Why we can’t take the risk

We are a small company. We built this over five years, with a tiny team, and we created something that more than 1,500 journalists across 39 media organisations came to rely on. We did it because we believed in open justice and because nobody else was solving the problem. And frankly, newspapers don’t pay a whole lot because their own economic model is being badly challenged.

Judicial review is expensive. The legal costs to take this to trial were estimated in the region of as high as £150,000 - solicitors’ fees, leading counsel, potentially a junior barrister on the commercial law questions, and another to help prepare the papers given the tight timeline. Another component was that, while I was born and raised in England, a country I love and whose justice system I respect more than any in the world, the company was based in Ireland, where I now live. And because of that the Government have the right to request that we put down money in case we lost to cover their costs - so not only would we have to have that available, yes, that’s the other risk… if we lost, we’d face the government’s legal costs on top of our own.

All of that adds up to a lot of money to put on the flip of a coin not because we don’t believe in it, but because the Government never issued a licence to us.

For a company of our size, that is not a calculated risk. It is an existential one.

What made this impossible

The main issue is here is that, while I like to think that the risk of losing isn’t the quality of our legal arguments, the real reason was related simply to administration time.

We submitted our pilot report to HMCTS in September 2024, exactly as we’d been asked to do. That report set out everything we had learned from five years of processing court data - what worked, what didn’t, how media access could be improved, and how data protection could be strengthened. It was co-signed by senior figures across the media industry.

It took nine months for Minister Sackman to respond. I’m sure she’s busy and I respect that. But small companies which are innovating need support in more ways than money - engagement from key stakeholders and regulators is also critical. We did everything right - her written approval last July to give us a formal agreement (albeit one which ignored every single recommendation we made) says so.

But her approval took 10 months to arrive, and only then did HMCTS start looking at drafting a licence. They asked for documentation - a DPIA, compliance information, technical details. We submitted everything they asked for because we have never done anything wrong or contrary to the agreement and had nothing to hide.

They said they had a concern with one small thing we did - a test feature now well documented which we created and worked on with great care - and weeks later, with no responses to anything we asked or submitted, and no referral to an independent body, the cessation notice arrived without warning.

We engaged immediately. We met every deadline they set. We followed their process to the letter. And at every stage, the timeline was dictated by how long the government took to respond - not by any delay on our part.

The result is that at least 14 months passed between our submission of the pilot report and the moment we were forced into this corner we find ourselves in. By then, the commercial reality of fighting back was simply too precarious. We would have been asking our investors and our families to bet the company on a case where the odds were uncertain, against a government with unlimited legal resources and who had formally stated they are unwilling to talk to us or to mediate at all.

We couldn’t do that. Not responsibly.

What we’re losing

This isn’t just our archive. Over five years, we identified 261,525 cases with press reporting restrictions - the only searchable record of its kind ever assembled. We linked cases across courts, tracked defendants through hearings, and flagged the legal issues journalists needed to know about before they published. Our data showed that on 45% of court days, HMCTS failed to publish both a listing and a register. We found 1.6 million cases heard without any advance notice to the press.

That evidence - of both what the courts do and what they fail to do - will be gone by Thursday.

We have always been compliant with all data protection laws in how we managed this information, and we intend to remain so. We have been instructed to delete it. We have explored every alternative. And we have concluded that we have no legal basis on which we can safely refuse. So we will comply.

What happens now

Our right to seek judicial review expires on Thursday. After that, the legal avenue closes. The archive will be deleted. The data is gone.

It’s worth noting that our archive data is NOT the same as the government’s data. Yes the underlying raw data is, but here a few reasons why our archive is different:

• Individual cases are searchable, and not only that, they are presented properly with the history of all case events, so important points like reporting restrictions which are often not repeated, are not lost. This is not available from HMCTS.

• Deep understanding of what is an incredibly chaotic source of information, combined with analytics developed from that work, has allowed us to develop systems to make the data safer and standardised for ease of access and use - reporting restrictions are a good example.

• It’s not just the data in the cases that matters - it’s the data about the entire justice system which matters here too - about the track record of courts, of publication and access, and of adherence to policies in place. That was literally what we were mandated by the Lord Chancellor to investigate and report on, and that’s what we did.

I don’t write this to blame anyone. I understand that government is complicated, that decisions take time, and that the people we worked with at HMCTS over the years were generally doing their best within the constraints they had.

But I do think it matters that this is recorded, because the outcome extends well beyond our small company. What’s being lost isn’t just a database. It’s the infrastructure that made meaningful, systematic court reporting possible at scale for the first time in England and Wales. Nothing like it existed before we built it. As things stand, the historical archive that work created will be lost.

We built something that worked. We asked for a licence to continue. We waited more than a year for one. We were shut down before it arrived. And now we’ve run out of time and money to fight it. I think it’s a shame.

But we still stand ready, willing to work with Government further, whether this minister or any other one, to share our learning, and indeed the unique platform we’ve built.

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