Online divorce service glitch revealed by senior judge, 70

A 70-YEAR-OLD judge has told how he discovered gremlins in the Ministry of Justice’s online divorce service after conducting his own checks.

Sir James Munby said an early version of the system did not detect obvious mistakes. He had entered “garbage” answers to online questions and found the website did not reject them.

The online service has been hailed as a success since being introduced by the ministry in May last year when Sir James was president of the Family Division of the High Court and the most senior family court judge in England and Wales.

But Sir James, who still sits as a judge after retiring as president, found flaws after being given access to the system before it was officially launched. He said he had entered a marriage date as 1880 and a date in the future for a separation date and the system had accepted both answers.

“I wanted to see whether, if I filled in garbage, it would reject it,” he said. “To my surprise, it didn’t.”

He said he told IT specialists the system had to be foolproof.

Sir James made his comments yesterday while overseeing a hearing in the Family Division of the High Court.

He had been asked to examine whether a divorce was valid after a man, who could not be named, had ticked the wrong box on a paper form that went unnoticed by both court officials and judges dealing with the case.

Sir James is expected to publish his ruling on the case at a later date.