Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the Money Claim Online system.

Money Claim Online (MCOL) is a digital service first released in 2001 which allows users to start and reply to a civil money claim for a fixed amount of money less than £100,000. Digital claims and responses are processed automatically on the day of receipt, users also have the opportunity to respond on paper, these paper responses can take longer to process. Weekly performance statistics are published here - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hmcts-civil-business-centres-performance-information/weekly-performance-national-business-centres-updated-5-december-2022. If a case is defended it is no longer supported on MCOL and is printed and posted to a local county court to proceed on papers only.

HMCTS has invested £1.3bn in the HMCTS Reform Programme to deliver large-scale modernisation. As part of the Programme, HMCTS is developing the Online Civil Money Claims (OCMC) service - providing a more modern, user-friendly service beyond the functionality of the MCOL service. Cases progress three times quicker in the OCMC service (9 weeks compared to 27 weeks) and user satisfaction currently sits at 97%. The service will ultimately replace MCOL.