When a Court Has No Jurisdiction, Does a Judge Have a Choice?

A district judge in Manchester is deliberating. He has been deliberating for a month. The question before him is whether to set aside a judgment he entered in April 2024, a judgment that has featured on this website several times.

The grounds for the application are not complex. No claim form was ever issued. No court fee was ever paid. The proceedings in which the judgment was entered were never properly started.

This is not disputed. The court’s own Case Management team confirmed it in writing in September 2024. At the set-aside hearing in January 2026, the district judge himself stated on the record that no claim form had ever been discovered. The claimants’ counsel was unable to produce one, even going so far as to try to decieve the court with an unissued claim. No witness statement has ever been filed asserting that a claim form was issued.

On those facts, the decision should be pretty straightforward. And yet, a month later, there is still no judgment.

The Facts Are Not In Dispute

It is worth restating what is know, agreed or confirmed by the court’s own records, because the simplicity of the factual position is the reason the delay invites close scrutiny.

A district judge made an unless order in March 2023 requiring the claimants to file and issue a Part 7 claim form by a specific date. The order carried an automatic sanction: if not complied with, the proceedings would stand struck out. The claimants did not comply. A circuit judge dealing with their third application confirmed the claim had not been issued and that the order was breached. He refused the claimants’ application for relief from sanctions. No appeal was brought against that decision, instead, the claimants made their fourth application the very same day, using the same defective claim number, another bite of the fast diminishing cherry (and available Judges) until they got their way. Oddly, the claimants somehow secured the court time and the time of two seperate circuit judges on the same day but in contrast, the defendant is not even allocated 30 seconds for a reply from court staff.

Despite this, the case continued. An interim injunction was granted by the fourth Judge, a circuit judge the same afternoon after they had been refused relief and aloowing that Judge to continue under a false pretense. The case was listed for further hearings. A trial took place. Judgment was entered. Enforcement followed.

The entire edifice rests on a single false premise: that a valid claim form existed. It did not. Three independent authorative sources have confirmed it was never issued. Nobody, not the claimants, not their counsel, not the court, has been able to produce an issued claim form in the three years since the unless order was made.

The Law Is Not Ambiguous

The legal principles are well established. Under CPR 7.2, proceedings are started when the court issues a claim form at the request of the claimant. Without issuance, there are no proceedings. Without proceedings, the court has no jurisdiction. Without jurisdiction, any judgment entered is a nullity.

An unless order under CPR 3.1 operates automatically upon non-compliance. The sanction does not require a further order to take effect. When the deadline passed without compliance, the proceedings stood struck out by operation of the automatic order. A circuit judge confirmed this and refused relief from sanction. That was the end of the matter… or should have been.

Could the court use CPR 3.10 to cure the defect?

That rule provides that an error of procedure does not invalidate any step taken in the proceedings unless the court so orders. But CPR 3.10 presupposes the existence of proceedings in which an error has occurred. Where no claim form has been issued, there are no proceedings. There is no procedural error to cure, there is a total absence of the foundational act that creates proceedings in the first place.

Could the court rely on the decision in Gotti v Perrett to treat the original application form (the N16A) as functionally equivalent to a claim form? This is a more nuanced question, but the answer is still no, for multiple independent reasons.

The claimants original N16A application, brimming with errors, contained no statement of truth, no evidence, no factual basis, and the box for Part 8 procedure was not ticked. The causes of action, which include defamation, are exclusively Part 7 causes of action that cannot proceed under Part 8 and must also proceed in the High Court

The judge who made the unless order specifically required Part 7 (directing that Part 8 was not appropriate) and in a subsequent order referred to “The Part 7 claim“.

In february 2026, new undisclosed evidence from the HMCTS complaits process at the Manchester Civil Justice Centre has shone further light on the matter, confirming the intended claim can only be Part 7 now raising concerns why the District Judge even suggested he could use CPR 3.1 to regularise the claim to be a Part 8 claim when he has access to all orders. It would appear that the district judge is worryingly trying to find a way to allow the claimants to benefit from their error. A matter that would offend the Appeals Court.

And Gotti v Perrett was decided in September 2025, eighteen months after the defective judgment was entered. A principle that did not exist when judgment was entered so cannot retrospectively validate that judgment, particularly when no judge, at any stage, purported to exercise a power to regularise it. No suprisingly as it is simply not possible, unless the court is determined to (try to) stretch their powers beyond their intended use to intentioally create a miscarriage of justice, and if so, for what reason?

The legal routes to saving these proceedings are closed. Each has been examined and each fails on its own terms. The question is not whether the judgment should be set aside. The question is why it has not been set aside already.

The Institutional Difficulty

There is an obvious reason why a judge might hesitate, even when the law points clearly in one direction. Setting aside this judgment has consequences.

The judgment the district judge is being asked to set aside is his own.

He conducted the trial. He entered the judgment. He made the costs order. If he sets aside, he is declaring that his own judgment was entered without jurisdiction, that the trial he conducted was a nullity, that the injunction he granted had no legal basis, and that the costs he ordered should never have been imposed. That is not a comfortable finding for any judge to make. Ironically, the same judge stated that it may be dangerous to proced [to trial] given there was no issued claim before him.

The consequences extend beyond his own judgment. The interim injunction granted by a circuit judge falls. The costs order made when that injunction was discharged falls. Every order made in the proceedings falls. Three years of litigation, multiple judicial decisions, and the entire administrative handling of the case are exposed as having proceeded without foundation. The systemic implications are significant.

But discomfort is not a legal basis for declining to act. A judge’s duty is to apply the law to the facts, not to manage the reputational consequences of doing so. If the proceedings were a nullity, they were a nullity from 16 March 2023, the date the unless order took automatic effect. Nothing that happened afterwards changed that. The trial did not create jurisdiction. The judgment did not create jurisdiction. Enforcement did not create jurisdiction. Each subsequent step compounded the original defect rather than curing it.

A judge who declines to set aside a void judgment because of the institutional fallout is not exercising judicial discretion. He is prioritising institutional convenience over individual justice. The Civil Procedure Rules do not permit that. The overriding objective requires cases to be dealt with justly. There is nothing just about enforcing a judgment entered in proceedings that never existed against a defendant who has been saying exactly that for three years.

The Burden Is on the Wrong Party

This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the delay. As matters currently stand, the defendant bears the entire burden. He is subject to a permanent injunction. He supposedly owes over £26,000. Bailiffs have attended his home, he has been threatened and abused. He has had to bring an application, prepare evidence, instruct counsel, and attend a hearing, all to establish what the court’s own records confirm: that no claim form was ever issued.

The claimants, by contrast, bear no burden at all. They failed to comply with an unless order. Their application for relief from sanctions was refused. They did not appeal that refusal. They continued to participate in proceedings they knew, or ought to have known, had been struck out. They asked the court not to serve the claim on the defendant. They asked for no notice to be given to him. They enforced a judgment obtained in those proceedings by sending bailiffs to the defendant’s home, they did not notify the High Court of the known jurisdictional challenge. At no point have they filed a witness statement asserting that a claim form was issued. At no point has their counsel been able to produce one.

The party that caused the defect is benefiting from it which was raise by the Appeal’s Court that the court was offended by the prospect of a party profiting from their eroor. Yet, the party that suffered from the defect is bearing the cost of correcting it. That is not justice. It is an inversion of justice.

If the district judge sets aside the judgment, the correct position is restored. The claimants are in the position they would have been in had the law been applied correctly from March 2023: their proceedings are struck out for non-compliance with an unless order, with a refusal of relief from sanctions by a circuit judge.

If they believe that outcome is wrong, if they believe their original application should be treated as a valid claim form, or that relief from sanctions should be granted, or that CPR 3.10 somehow saves the proceedings, the burden of establishing that falls on them. They can appeal. They can make fresh applications. They can argue their case. But the starting point must be the legally correct one: the proceedings were struck out and the judgment was entered without jurisdiction.

What cannot be right is for the district judge to exercise a discretionary power (if one even exists) to rescue proceedings that were never properly constituted, for the benefit of the party that failed to constitute them, at the expense of the party who has been telling the court for three years that they don’t exist.

That is not the exercise of discretion. It is the conferral of an unearned advantage on a party that has already had the benefit of every procedural failure in this case.

The Miscarriage Must Be Named

Courts are understandably reluctant to use the phrase “miscarriage of justice.” It carries weight. It implies systemic failure. It invites scrutiny of the institution, not just the individual case. But there are circumstances in which no other phrase will do.

A man was subject to a trial he did not attend, in proceedings that did not exist, before a court that had no jurisdiction. A judgment was entered against him. That judgment was enforced by bailiff without disclosue to the High Court of the known issue. He has been subject to a permanent injunction for nearly two years, including threats and arrests. At no point did the court have jurisdiction to do any of this.

If that is not a miscarriage of justice, the phrase has no meaning.

The district judge should not have any regard for the fallout. The fallout, the voiding of orders, the unravelling of costs, the institutional embarrassment is the natural and inevitable consequence of proceedings that were conducted without jurisdiction. It is not a reason to preserve those proceedings. It is the reason they must be set aside. The greater the fallout, the greater the injustice that has been done, and the more urgent the need to correct it.

The Question That Answers Itself

Strip away the procedural complexity, the multiple hearings, the three years of litigation, the complaint responses, and the reserved judgment. The question before the district judge is this:

Can a judgment stand in proceedings where no claim form was ever issued, no mandatory fee was ever paid, the proceedings were automatically struck out by court order, a circuit judge confirmed the strike-out and refused an application for relief, and the court’s own records confirm that no issued claim form has ever been discovered?

The answer is no. It has always been no. The facts are not in dispute. The law is not ambiguous.

The only question is whether the court will the court declare a nullity, if not, why not?

A month is a long time to answer a question that answers itself.