FYI, apparently there was a data breach, but it would seem better to fix the issue and continue with this public service than to just shut it down completely. Here is the Journalist organization in the UK responding:

"The government has cited a significant data protection breach as the reason for its decision - an issue it clearly has a duty to take seriously."

https://www.nuj.org.uk/resource/nuj-responds-to-order-for-th...

Along with the attempt to prevent jury trials for all but the most serious criminal cases, this is beginning to look like an attempt to prevent reporting on an upcoming case. I can think of one happening in April, involving the prime minister. Given he was head of the CPS for 5 years, would know exactly which levers to pull.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20dyzp4r42o

Digital access to UK court records was already abysmal. And we're somehow going even further backwards. At least in the US you have initiatives like https://www.courtlistener.com/.

This all loops back to the same thing:

you _really_ shouldn't be allowed to train on information without having a copyright license explicitly allowing it

"publicly available" isn't the same as "anyone can do whatever they want with it", just anyone can read it/use it for research

Courtsdesk are rather misrepresenting this situation.

Quoting from an urgent question in the House of Lords a few days ago:

> HMCTS was working to expand and improve the service by creating a new data licence agreement with Courtsdesk and others to expand access to justice. It was in the course of making that arrangement with Courtsdesk that data protection issues came to light. What has arisen is that this private company has been sharing private, personal and legally sensitive information with a third-party AI company, including potentially the addresses and dates of birth of defendants and victims. That is a direct breach of our agreement with Courtsdesk, which the Conservatives negotiated.

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037...

My guess is that the company running this were found to be collaborating with contentious partners, and so the government is shutting down the collaboration as risk-mitigation, in order to internalize decisions within government.

Ministry of Justice in UK has always struck me as very savvy, from my work in the UK civic tech scene. They're quite self-aware, and I assume this is more pro-social than it might seem.

I've looked into the Courtdesk service. It's a stream of events from the courts, as they happen. They claim up to 12,000 updates in a 24 period, aggregated, filtered and organised. While court judgements are public, I don't know if the information Courtdesk provides is. This is a worrying direction.

so the government's fix for a data breach is to delete the entire database instead of fixing the access controls. classic.

So the government was being nice, letting a private company access court data. And the company decided to immediately sell all of that data.