Does anyone have any feedback on administration by the Nottingham Tribunal Service office, on appeals in North London in particular?
I don't do that much represenation in this area, but I've recently had a series of cases where I've never seen administration so bad. Faxed evidence goes missing, requested interpreters don't materialised, correspondence isn't replied to, evidence recieved isn't acknowledged and, of course there are the usual delays of 3 months plus.

I've had weird experiences in other areas, including a clerk who went to sleep and started snoring loudly, but never anything as bad as this. Have I been unlucky, or is this common?

I've asked the tribunal service for compensation and have had my request referred to an office in Bristol. Does anyone have any experience of this?

We deal with Liverpool Tribunal service and in our experience, the service is very good and very well organised.

We used to deal with Nottingham - quite a few years ago now - untill they transfered us to Liverpool and Nottingham were bad even then, i can't believe things haven't improved!

Having had the "privilege" of dealing with Nottingham in the past, the observations made are of absolutely no surprise to me at all.

Very very occasionally, they do actually provide service over and above what is needed. But, far too often (in my experience), they have been hopeless.

We always deal with Nottingham and generally things are OK. The odd case goes pear-shaped, but equally they sometimes are very good.

Most of my tribunal work goes through Nottingham but I also deal with Leeds and Liverpool. To be fair, I have no more problems with Nottingham than I do with the others, and the clerks do a pretty good job, I think. A few mistakes are made but hey......don't we all?

There is a lot about the Tribunal Service that makes me cross, but it's nothing to do with the staff at Nottingham.

I attended the Tribunal User's Group for the Nottingham office and they did say that they are transferring cases over to a new version of GAPS. This will include allocating a new reference number which of course may cause confusion although they did say that old numbers can be checked as well.

I've only ever worked with the Nottm office and, apart from a period some years ago when they last upgraded their computer system when it was absolute chaos, I've generally found them ok, although not done much casework in recent years.

I've just had a letter from the Bristol compensation office agreeing to pay compensation- probably about £900- so this avenue is definitely worth exploring.

I wonder if the volume of cases for the north London team makes them particularly bad?

As a former clerk and union official at the Tribunal Service/Appeals Service/ITS I think there are a number of historical reasons why the Nottingham office has struggled, none of which are the fault of the staff.

The Nottingham office was originally set up as DATCO and was, in my opinon, badly managed and resourced from the beginning. Eventually the decision was taken to disperse the DATs to the other regional office and make Nottingham into a regional office itself.

This meant that an office which was in bad shape then had to take on different work and the staff had to learn new processes. I'll let you imagine how well that went.

Management also decided to shut Whittington House (central London) for what I remember to be 'efficiency' reasons. The bulk of this work was then transferred to Nottingham adding to its problems.

The staff in Nottingham have, in my experience, done their best in a pretty bad situation although it is over 5 years since I worked in TAS.

David