Court Reporting Data

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Wednesday 11th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

Absolutely not. The first thing I would say in reply to the rebuttal put up very recently by the chief executive of Courtsdesk—it went up during my meeting with officials earlier this morning to discuss this issue—is, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Secondly, if there was nothing wrong with this, why did they not ask us and tell us they were doing it?

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, while I commend the MoJ for doing what departments do not always do—policing these contracts properly—is there an argument, given the importance of this information and of making it accessible to journalists, but also of protecting sensitive data, for the department developing an in-house function capable of sorting this out, with a panel of journalists and others to help devise the scheme?

[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

It is a very good question. In fact, that already exists in part. There is something known as CaTH, which deals with listing information in relation to civil courts and tribunals, and a criminal court listing service is going to be added to it in March. The thing about the information Courtsdesk had is that it went a bit further than that. It would, for example, give the charges; it would say what the outcome was; it would give what the sentence was. We accept entirely that journalists need and ought to have that information, but only journalists, because, first, journalists are familiar with the contempt of court rules and know what they can and cannot do. Secondly, there is an HMCTS protocol in place with journalists, which is based on the criminal procedure rules and makes it clear how this data can be used. We do not know what a third party is going to do—we did not know about this, we did not see its contract, and we want to know why not.