At the end of an abuse of process hearing a judge was very critical of the police, and supportive of their victim. Clearly there defendant/victim in the case would like a copy of what the judge had to say in his judgment and you might think, a copy of this would be given to him.
No such thing, firstly he had to write to the judge and ask for permission to get a copy.
The judges office replied that as he was legally represented the letter asking for permission had to come from a solicitor
So he got the solicitor to ask and the Judge gave permission.
But the court does not produce these this has been franchised to another company, so you then have to get a quite for its production
After some delay the quote came back £575.75 (made up of £490 plus vat) for what the judge said in a few minutes. What would it take a competent typist or word processing operator to produce this 20 minutes or half an hour at the very most, so they are quoting at the rate of £1000 an hour for a typist.
On http://www.number7.demon.co.uk/papers/legallinks/links.htm#links Barrister Roger Horne says
"Unfortunately the reports of Judgments of the Court of Appeal and lower courts are not as yet available. This is due to contractual, rather than copyright reasons. It has been the practice for many years for the Lord Chancellor's Department to contract out the reporting of these cases and the contractor is entitled to sell transcripts for what it can get for them; it is naturally unwilling to make them freely available on the internet.
This position must change in the not too distant future: it is somewhat illogical that while judgments of the highest court in the country can be obtained free of charge on the internet or for £5 for a printed copy, it costs many times that sum to obtain a transcript of a judgment of the Court of Appeal."