The order gave you a date and a time: four o’clock on the Friday. “Exchange of witness statements” — three flat words out of Practice Direction 32, arriving without a template, without an example, without a single hint of what a witness statement is meant to look like.
So you did what anyone does. You opened a blank document and started at the beginning, which for you means the day the boiler was fitted, or the money left your account, or the letter came. Eight pages later you have written something true and unreadable. It seethes. It circles. It calls the other side “dishonest” in the second paragraph and never leaves. Every sentence is a small trial, and you are the prosecution — and there is no jury, only a judge with forty other files and a lunch break that isn’t going to happen.
Here is the part nobody prints on the order. A witness statement is not your case. It is not your argument, your outrage, or your reading of the law. It is evidence: the written version of you in the witness box, saying what you saw and heard and did, in the order it happened. The judge doesn’t want to be persuaded by it. The judge wants to be shown.
Which is why the format isn’t decoration. PD 32 wants the statement in your own words and in the first person — “I”, not “the claimant.” It wants your full name, your address, your occupation, and whether you’re a party to the case. It wants numbered paragraphs. It wants every number, dates included, in figures — not “the third of March” but 3 March. Small, clerical, and entirely load-bearing, because a statement the court can navigate is a statement the court can trust.
Then comes the harder discipline, the one the rules only imply. Cut the adjectives. “He aggressively refused” is you giving evidence about a mind you cannot see; “he said he would not return the deposit” is a fact. Cut the law — the judge knows it and you probably don’t, and the paragraph where you set out to explain it back to them is the paragraph they stop reading. Cut everything that doesn’t touch the issues the court actually has to decide. Where you rely on a document — the invoice, the message, the photograph — you don’t paste it into the sentence; you refer to it, in bold or in the margin, and you attach it as an exhibit.
What’s left is shorter than you feared and far stronger than you hoped. A dozen numbered paragraphs. A spine of dates. Things that happened, stated plainly, every one of them a thing you could stand behind under questioning.
And you don’t have to build it from a blank page. Before you spend a penny, the free routes are real: Citizens Advice, Support Through Court and Advocate all help people representing themselves, and GOV.UK carries the rules in full. When you want it drafted with you — the eight furious pages turned into the numbered, figures-in, first-person document the rules describe — that’s where Chris comes in. Chris asks what happened, in order. Chris keeps you to facts and flags the sentences that are really arguments. Chris sets it out to the standard PD 32 lays down, puts your exhibits in sequence, and does the part everyone forgets until 3.55 on the Friday: the statement of truth at the foot, in the exact words the court requires —
“I believe that the facts stated in this witness statement are true. I understand that proceedings for contempt of court may be brought against anyone who makes, or causes to be made, a false statement in a document verified by a statement of truth without an honest belief in its truth.”
— with a line for your signature and the date, in figures. That sentence isn’t a formality. It is the whole reason the court reads the rest: it means a real person stands behind every line, on pain of contempt.
That is what you file. Not a grievance. A witness statement a court will actually read.
Come back when the next form lands. There’s always a next form.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
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