Date for mandating defendant journey in the DCP to be pushed back
Yesterday afternoon HMCTS sent out an urgent update, confirming that the updated Practice Direction, mandating the defendant journey within the DCP – will not be going live on 2 June 2022, but will be pushed back to a date to be confirmed.
In our most recent update sent out on 27 May we outlined the current significant technical issues the DCP is experiencing, with an effective full system outage currently being experienced. This would have meant that had HMCTS pushed ahead with putting the updated Practice Direction in place from 2 June – they would then have had to manually push all served claims out of the DCP and back into the heritage system, causing significant headaches and additional work for all involved, leaving defendants open to the risk of default judgments (if cases were not pushed out of the system in time).
HMCTS are running some additional technical system upgrades today (31 May) and will presumably then need to run a series of tests over a period of time to ensure that the system is fully operational before they decide when to push ahead with mandating the defendant journey in the portal.
Yes – claims should still be issued in the DCP where they meet the criteria and at Keoghs we will ensure that we continue to do so in those cases where we act for the claimant – such as in recoveries claims.
We have an agreement in place with HMCTS that they will move any claims served in the DCP in the meantime out of the portal and into the heritage system. We are sending daily lists of claims to remove from the DCP and will continue to do so until the current technical issues are rectified and the updated Practice Direction goes live.
In our last update we put claims involving indemnity issues and those with fraud and fundamental dishonesty concerns/allegations into the group of those which are either not included in the DCP, or we do not consider suitable for the DCP.
While there is nothing explicit within the DCP which separates out these claims as not included within the DCP (and which expressly prevents claimants from issuing/serving them within the portal), we do not consider them suitable for the portal for a variety of reasons including the need for claims to be served against the named defendant/complexity of arguments/time limits applicable within the portal.
For claims involving known indemnity issues we ask that clients make clear to claimant solicitors that these claims should not be served within the portal and should be served directly against the defendant. This will obviously not be possible for all fraud/fundamental dishonesty claims (such as where the claimant may not know that such issues are to be alleged) but for any claims involving indemnity issues and fraud and fundamental dishonesty claims that are served within the portal we will be asking HMCTS to move these out of the DCP and into the heritage system when it is appropriate to do so.
We will provide a further update once we know more about the result of the technical system upgrades HMCTS are due to run today, and once a date is known for mandating the defendant journey in the DCP and for the associated updated Practice Direction is to go live.
For more information please contact Natalie Larnder.
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