Probate

(asked on 28th August 2020) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what information his Department holds on the (a) average, (b) shortest and (c) longest time taken to grant probate in the last 12 months.


Answered by
Chris Philp Portrait
Chris Philp
Minister of State (Home Office)
This question was answered on 9th September 2020

The average wait for people telephoning the national Courts and Tribunal Service centre with queries relating to Probate between April 2019 to March 2020 is 2 minutes 21 seconds.

The most recently published waiting times for a grant of probate covers July 2019 to March 2020 as March to June 2019 data is subject to data quality issues following the move to a new computer system. All calculations have therefore been calculated based on a 9-month period from July 2019 rather than a 12-month period as requested.

The information requested as to the shortest and longest time taken to grant probate in the last 12 months could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.

The information requested as to the average time taken to grant probate in the last 12 months can be found in the table below:

Average time to grant issue for grants of representation, by grant type, England and Wales 1,2, 3, 4

Probate

Application submission to grant issue

Document receipt to grant issue3

Mean weeks

Median weeks

Mean weeks

Median weeks

July 2019 to March 2020

8.1

6.6

7.9

6.4

Source HMCTS Core Case Data

1) HMCTS Core Case Data (CCD) came into effect at the end of March 2019, following a transition between data systems recording information regarding The Probate Service

2) The average timeliness figures are produced by calculating the time from application/document receipt (which may be from an earlier period) to the grant issued made in that period. 3) Document receipt occurs after payment has been made and all accompanying paperwork has been received by HMCTS 4) Due to quality issues in the transition between data systems, the breakdown by type of grant has not been published for Q2 2019

Reticulating Splines