Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what comparative assessment he has made of the average length of waiting time for applicants to receive a grant of probate (a) before and (b) after the introduction of HM Courts & Tribunals Service new case management system.

The introduction of a new digital case management system in March 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 change enabled more transparent and accurate reporting of waiting times and these timings are now included in published official statistics.

It also coincided with legislative change to the probate application process which removed the need for applicants to travel to town centre locations to swear an oath before a court officer or a commissioner for oaths. The receipt date was previously recorded from the date an application had been checked whereas it is now recorded from the date of first receipt by the probate service.

The figures since the introduction of the new digital case management system are therefore not directly comparable to the old system.

The current waiting times are published on gov.uk via Family Court Statistics Quarterly (Table 26).