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g-mork | 13 days ago

Confused what to make of the comments here. Access to court lists has always been free and open, it's just a pain in the ass to work with. The lists contain nothing much of value beyond the names involved in a case and the type of hearing

It's not easy to see who to believe. The MP introducing it claiming there is a "cover up" is just what MPs do. Of course it makes him look bad, a service he oversaw the introduction of is being withdrawn. The rebuttal by the company essentially denies everything. Simultaneously it's important to notice the government are working on a replacement system of their own.

I think this is a non-event. If you really want to read the court lists you already can, and without paying a company for the privilege. It sounds like HMCTS want to internalise this behaviour by providing a better centralised service themselves, and meanwhile all the fuss appears to be from a company operated by an ex-newspaper editor who just had its only income stream built around preferential access to court data cut off.

As for the openness of court data itself, wake me in another 800 years when present day norms have permeated the courts. Complaining about this aspect just shows a misunderstanding of the (arguably necessary) realities of the legal system.

discuss

order

dash2|13 days ago

I think you're underestimating how important "just a pain in the ass to work with" may be.

An analogy would be Hansard and theyworkforyou.com. The government always made Hansard (record of parliamentary debates) available. But theyworkforyou cleaned the data, and made it searchable with useful APIs so you could find how your MP voted. This work was very important for making parliament accessible; IIRC, the guys behind it were impressive enough that they eventually were brought in to improve gov.uk.

owisd|13 days ago

The problem with "cleaning the data" is it sometimes strips away so much context as to give you a misleading impression. Rory Stewart once said it took him 40 hours to fully understand a piece of legislation he was voting on, yet was expected by the whips to vote on multiple pieces of legislation every week, but most people wave an MP's voting record around like they 100% understood and agree with everything they voted on, despite it being mathematically impossible. If they'd voted differently would it have changed the outcome? Was it even a binding motion? Most of the real debate in the UK Parliament happens beforehand anyway and the government will withdraw any votes they know they're going to lose before it even gets into the chamber so the real rebellions don't even get recorded on theyworkforyou.

ajb|13 days ago

Hansard is a great example, because originally parliament did not allow publication of its proceedings; to get round this "Several editors used the device of reporting on parliamentary debates under the veil of debates of fictitious societies or bodies. The names under which parliamentary debates were published include Proceedings of the Lower Room of the Robin Hood Society and Debates of the Senate of Magna Lilliputia."

braiamp|13 days ago

Yeah, this is a common problem with these kinds of issues. Data can be open, data can be available, but if it's not easily exploitable and parseable by anyone there will always be a third party that would do so for a premium. Data has to be ready for consumption when shared by the state. That's why one of my very strong objections that we divide datasets by year on a continuous registry. It should be one dataset with a single column that tells you the year the row corresponds to.