Teesside vs Cumbria: legit vs ghost courts
A deeper dive into the construction of the legal system and its architectural fault lines
I am working to scope out how serious the problem is with “ghost courts” in the UK. How many cases might be voided if the High Court agrees that there is a disconnect between the “court” name on a summons and the statute that actually creates the court? At the risk of boring everyone into submission, here’s another instalment that drills the question down a level. It is AI-generated, but the result of hours of work, and responds to people who have reached out about their own situations.
The bottom line: the sloppiness has different consequences depending on where you are. This analysis suggests we are dealing with less than the “omni-void” I first feared — a wholesale constitutional collapse of the magistrates’ courts. But there is still a systemic problem that likely affects hundreds of thousands of convictions over time.
My instinct was right the day I looked up the “court” on my summons and found no trace of it on the official website. It has taken me six months of painstaking effort to understand what has gone wrong. In that time, not once have I received a written explanation for the statutory basis of the court’s name — or even a definitive name for the court itself.
I really wish I didn’t have to be doing this. But here I am. Every stage of this process has stunk: a fabricated crime, defective paperwork, an unlisted court, contradictory identities, ignored motions, missing rulings, absent orders, deflected complaints, denied information, unprocessed appeals, improper reasoning, procedural silence, abuse of the Single Justice Procedure, and prejudice concealed under delay.
I have come to the view that anything not worthy of a jury is not worthy of prosecution — get over it and move on. Justice should not depend on whether your case happens to be funneled through a “real enough” court or a fictionalised one. That kind of postcode lottery is a direct violation of equal protection under the law.
I look forward to a day when I can focus on something else. In the meantime, back to ChatGPT…
The Single Justice Procedure (SJP) depends on a deceptively simple anchor: that a valid court issues the summons. Section 8 of the Courts Act 2003 provides that “there shall be a magistrates’ court for each local justice area.” That statutory court is the only lawful source of jurisdiction.
But how must such a court be named? Does the summons need to echo the Act word-for-word (“the magistrates’ court for the [X] local justice area”), or can shorthand like “Teesside Magistrates’ Court” suffice? And what happens when multiple labels are used without any public record tying them back to the statutory court?
Teesside: a workable shortcut
In Teesside, summonses often cite “Teesside Magistrates’ Court.” Strictly speaking, no statute creates a court of that name. Yet in practice:
There is a single venue in Middlesbrough, so the location is obvious.
GOV.UK lists “Teesside Magistrates’ Court,” giving the public a clear anchor.
No prejudice arises — defendants can attend, appeal, and identify the authority involved.
Here, the shorthand is technically imprecise but functionally adequate. Under s.123 of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980, any defect is cured where the court’s identity is clear and no injustice results.
Cumbria: when clarity collapses
North and West Cumbria is very different. Three competing names circulate:
“Carlisle Magistrates’ Court” (a building, listed on GOV.UK).
“North Cumbria Magistrates’ Court” (not formally constituted).
“North and West Cumbria Magistrates’ Court” (appearing on summonses, but not on GOV.UK).
Unlike Teesside, Cumbria has multiple venues (Carlisle, Workington, Barrow). When the summons uses one name, correspondence another, and the judiciary a third, the defendant cannot know which entity has jurisdiction.
This is more than a clerical defect. It is substantive ambiguity about the very court in play.
The publication gap
If HMCTS had published a list of “aliases” (e.g. “North and West Cumbria Magistrates’ Court = the magistrates’ court for the North and West Cumbria local justice area”), then shorthand could be justified.
But no such list exists. Absent formal publication of recognised aliases, the only legally certain way to identify the court is to use the exact statutory wording: “the magistrates’ court for the [X] local justice area.”
Any other naming is guesswork, and leaves the defendant at risk of being summoned by an entity that does not exist in law.
The broader lesson
The contrast between Teesside and Cumbria proves two points:
Not every SJP summons is void — where GOV.UK anchors the name and no ambiguity arises, defects can be cured.
But where multiple names are mixed and no alias is published, only the statutory formula is safe. Without it, jurisdiction is fatally uncertain.
The County Court model shows this problem could have been avoided. Each County Court has a robust statutory identity, even if it sits in many venues. The magistrates’ courts system, by contrast, has drifted into casual naming conventions that in some areas produce genuine constitutional defects.
A call for clarity
This is not pedantry. A citizen cannot be convicted by a court they cannot identify. “Court” is not a floating label — it is the juridical source of authority.
The lesson of Cumbria is simple: unless HMCTS formally publishes its aliases, the only safe course is to use the statutory words. Anything else risks void proceedings.
Martin, are there any other LJAs where this confusion arises? If not, then it would seem to me that this whole problem you have faced was simply an oversight, where the original legislation (and the people who drew it up) simply assumed all LJAs had only one possible court. On the other hand, if many LJAs have this confusion issue due to alternate possible "courts" or the legislation and practice have allowed bureaucrats to act as judges, then either the legislators were incompetent when drawing up that legislation, or the confusion was a feature and not a bug, done in order to provide lots of ambiguity so that these administrative summonses and tickets and so on could be quietly taken care of by bureaucrats and not risk the expense and time and hassle of having to provide jury trials and other high-overhead requirements or involve more highly trained judges for low-level fines and so on.
On the first hand, it's a mistake that can be readily fixed (though the Cumbria LJA's past fines and other actions might have to be reversed or suits handled by settlements).
On the second hand, there was intent to raise the profits generated by the low-level draining of the taxpayers through fines and council fees, etc., by increasing numbers of actions and decreasing legal hurdles required for legitimate convictions.
Seems to me the big question here is no longer specific to the magistrates system but whether there was intent to defraud the British people at the lowest level of the overall court system by shadowy legal nips and bites of pocketbooks and wallets.
Further, if it can be shown that even the legislation setting up the properly authorized jurisdictions (Crown Court system, and especially the County Court system) was *also* set up, though with proper warrant, to expand the opportunities for bureaucrats to handle more matters than they should have been allowed to, there might even be intent to raise the legal equivalent of "profit" at the County level (for example) by writing legislation that is too loosely written to properly protect the rights of the citizens even at those levels. That kind of approach at the County or even the Crown level would make convictions easier and less costly, thus able to oppress the citizens more frequently but also more subtly, with associated increases in the cost citizens face to obtain justice when accused.
Here are my new questions: How well were the pieces of legislation for the three court systems written, and were the intents for each piece of legislation fully legitimate and protective of the citizens (though in the case of the magistrate court system, containing a simple mistake for your LJA), or were they *all* loosely written or (worse) written with intent to remove citizen rights and protections at all levels using methods only apparent now to fall into a deliberately deceptive pattern? In other words: a simple mistake at the magistrates level, or a deep state action designed to control the citizens for the benefit of the elites? It seems that such an approach has been designed into the family court system in the USA per your description of that recent adventure of yours, so has something similar been done in the UK to protect the bad people and push down the good people of the UK?