The number of people actually declared vexatious and similar can be seen here:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/civil-restraint-orders--2 and
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/vexatious-litigants It doesn’t cover people under a basic civil restraint order which only relate to one set of proceedings – to stop continuous interlocutory applications which Mr Ebert, for example, was so devoted to.
There’s been a rise in the number of civil restraint orders since judges were instructed to make a formal declaration that an application was utterly without merit. Once that’s been done a few times, a restraint order is fairly inevitable. The latest addition to the list, Graham Quintana, has brought the same application four or five times in the last 12 months or so, and so his fate was fairly inevitable. Quintana is a fairly typical type – he’s trying to appeal one set of court proceedings by bringing another, rather than by making use of the appeal procedure which Parliament actually provided.
How casually making an ECRO can appear can be seen in the case of
Banfield v Harrow LBC. The Banfields were a couple whose main pursuits seem to have been a) not paying for stuff and b) suing people. They helpfully applied for judicial review of a council tax liability order on every conceivable ground, meaning that there is now a reported case on them all, and at the end of it, almost by the way, you might say, Haddon-Cave J listed all the various actions they’d brought, said “all good things come to an end”, and made an extended civil restraint order.
The growing ease among judges in making CROs is one thing forcing people into other routes. FOIAs and complaints are popular – you just have to look at What Do They Know? to see the number of people who try to get HMCTS, CPS, Cabinet Office etc to confirm that Magna Carta is the only true law, the High Court is a business, the Crown Court is a ship etc etc,. Replies are getting increasingly brusque, but they all have to be answered; there is no such thing as a vexatious FOIant.
Also vexatious criminal prosecutions seem to be on the rise – Waugh, Berry and so on, though until there is a proper way of measuring them (on its way), it’s hard to tell. There’s no such things as a vexatious prosecutor, so each time they apply, a judge or justices’ legal adviser has to consider the application, though since the
South Tyneside case, at least the fact that someone has made the same application somewhere else is definitely a bar to proceeding. However I think the main reason they’re on the rise is that there’s no fee. The primary disadvantage is that most of them are refused by the judge or justices’ legal adviser right at the outset (again, Waugh and Berry) and the only way from there is to apply for a judicial review which is going to get the same reaction from the judge as it got at first instance. Very few of these will be known outside the back office of a court - apart from court staff and two judges, we only know about Waugh's because he told the internet about it.
As someone who advises courts on pseudo-law, I can say that pseudo-law is absolutely endemic, and has been for about a decade, but once it’s spotted, it's simple to deal with, which does not mean that it's always easy. Fans of the PLD Facebook page will have seen a standard form of words which HMCTS is sending out to everyone who sends in a Magna Carta notice. It tells the sender that their notice has been received and will have no effect, and that’s that.
However most attempted uses of pseudo-law in courts and tribunals won’t get into Bailii. They’re strangled at birth - like Waugh’s prosecution - don’t reveal a cause of action, or are put forward as defences which don’t work. Local newspapers sometimes pick up cases, but court reporters are rare nowadays. Probably the most likely sources on line are Facebook and Quatloos.
What else, oh yes, EWE is entitled to legal aid as the outcome of the hearing could be imprisonment and he’s indigent. He’s just refused to apply.
The whole vexatious litigant thing is a purely common law thing (the real common law, I mean). Civil legal systems don’t have them. It’s not because they don’t have people like that – in the 19th century Krafft-Ebing identified “querulant paranoia” in Germany, and de Clerambault in France.
Access to legal aid has been slashed over the last decade. I was denied twice, despite having no job, no savings and no assets. Inconveniently it was only approved AFTER the plea hearing. 
