THE MINISTRY OF JUSTICE has ordered the largest archive of court records essential for open justice to be deleted.

Government ministers have moved to erase Courtsdesk, a service which opens up magistrate court records.

Approved by the lord chancellor in 2021, the archive has come to be an essential tool for journalists, who often are not been informed about cases.

The platform says it has provided services to more than 1,500 journalists from 39 media outlets.

HM Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) issued a cessation notice to Courtsdesk in November, citing “unauthorised sharing” of court information and “data protection issues.”

The company asked the department for the cessation to be referred to the government’s transparency watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Courtsdesk said their request did not lead to a referral.

Government ministers issued a final refusal last week, following requests from the former justice minister Chris Philp to current courts minister Sarah Sackman for the archive not to be deleted.

Courtsdesk is now expected to be deleted within days,

The company also claims it has highlighted serious failings in the courts system, including the fact that two-thirds of all courts regularly heard cases that the media was not told about.

The platform said members of the media were not given advance notice for 1.6 million criminal hearings and that the percentage of court cases listed being accurate was just 4.2 per cent.

“We built the only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts,” Courtsdesk’s chief executive Enda Leahy said.

She told The Sunday Times: “HMCTS’s own data proves it can’t do it — its records were accurate 4.2 per cent of the time, 1.6 million cases were heard without any advance notice to the press.”