Andy Slaughter – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Andy Slaughter on 2016-02-09.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many complaints his Department received about the standard of its recent consultation document on court closures.

Mr Shailesh Vara

There has been one complaint about the standard of the recent consultation on the provision of court and tribunal estate in England and Wales.

The complaint, received by email, was from a member of the judiciary and related to St Alban’s County Court. It noted that the consultation document was inaccurate as it stated that no enabling work was required at the receiving court, Watford County Court. On investigation, it was determined that some enabling work would be required. The written response to the complaint corrected this inaccuracy. The published consultation response document was updated to present corrected information.

During the consultation process we were notified about inaccuracies in the consultation documents. These have all been corrected in the published response documents. All decisions were based on correct information together with the careful consideration of the consultation responses.

The consultation response is available online at www.gov.uk/moj.

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