Lawyers who submitted responses to legal aid consultation receive email telling them it was ‘deleted without being read’

Avatar photo

By Alex Aldridge on

Ever since it was confirmed that the Ministry of Justice had had 13,000 responses to its ‘Transforming Legal Aid’ consultation, there has been puzzlement about how it would manage to read them all. But this being our trusty government, it surely would find a way, wouldn’t it…?

This belief was shaken on Friday evening when some of the lawyers who’d submitted consultation responses began receiving this email — which several subsequently posted screenshots of to Twitter (click to enlarge).

MOJ-response2

Thankfully, the MoJ has since confirmed that “all consultation responses received are being read”, with the email caused by an “IT error” that is “generating an incorrect message in a small number of cases”.

Not that everyone is entirely convinced by this explanation.

Certainly, it will be interesting to see the results of an FOI request as to the number of MoJ staff hours spent reading the consultation responses.