Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department is taking to tackle delays in the Probate Service.

Despite the unprecedented challenges faced by the probate service during the Covid 19 pandemic, and the increased volume of applications that have been seen since, the average length of time taken for a grant of probate following receipt of the documents required has been maintained at between five and seven weeks. This is almost two weeks quicker than a year ago.

Average waiting times for probate grants, from April 2022 to June 2022, are published on gov.uk via Family Court Statistics Quarterly (Table 25): https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-court-statistics-quarterly-april-to-june-2022.

Information covering up to September 2022 will be published on 15 December.

More recent management information published by HMCTS (which does not go through the same level of quality assurance and analysis as the Family Court Statistics Quarterly) provides waiting time information up to August 2022: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/hmcts-management-information-august-2022.

HMCTS has increased resources to meet the higher demand and is further increasing resourcing to further bring down overall timeliness on digital and paper applications.

The improvement of the online probate system remains a priority for HMCTS, to ensure more applications can be issued first time and resources can be focused on reducing waiting times.