Probate: Applications
(asked on 2nd September 2020) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the average time taken was to process an application for probate in March (a) 2018, (b) 2019 and (c) 2020.
Official statistics on the average length of time from receipt of the application to the issue of a grant of probate cover only the period from July to September 2019 onwards. HMCTS internal management information from a decommissioned case management system, which is not subject to the rigorous quality assurance processes of official statistics, has been used for the periods before that date to show the average times from receipt of an application to a grant being issued.
The introduction of a new digital case management system in 2019 changed the business process for accounting for the receipt date of applications which need to be held due to errors or missing documentation. The figures for March 2020 are therefore not directly comparable to those from March 2018 and March 2019.
Average time to grant issue for grants of representation, by grant type, England and Wales1,2 |
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| Probate | |||
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| Application submission to grant issue | |||
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| Mean weeks | Median weeks | ||
March 2018 | 3 | N/A | |||
March 2019 | 3 | N/A | |||
March 2020 | 73 | 53 | |||
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Source for March 2018 and 2019 is the now decommissioned Probateman system and March 2020 data is HMCTS Core Case Data |
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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) Includes cases stopped and put on hold for errors or missing documentation | ||||||||||||||||