Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the average time taken by the Probate Service to complete a grant of probate application in each in of the last four quarters.

Official statistics are not published on the average length of time from receipt of the application to the issue of a grant of probate. Internal management information, which is not subject to the rigorous quality assurance processes of official statistics, has been used to show the following average time from receipt of an application to a grant being issued:

These figures do not include cases which are waiting for a grant to be issued. The data from April to June 2019 has been extracted from the HMCTS Reform Core Case Data system, which is a new system in active development, and may not be directly comparable with figures for earlier periods. All figures, especially those for April 2019 to June 2019, are provisional and subject to revision.

Some grants are experiencing delays of between four and six weeks outside of our targets as a result of significant increases in work during March and April and some IT issues which have now been resolved. We have recruited more staff and are now issuing in excess of 1,000 grants a day that is bringing waiting times down further.