Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department is taking to (a) reduce the time taken for and costs associated with Court of Protection applications for care decisions and (b) ensure families have access to clear, publicly available guidance on those processes.

HMCTS is working to increase overall system capacity to decrease processing times across all types of applications. Measures taken include a targeted action plan to allocate additional administrative resources in response to higher demand, as well as training and upskilling new staff. Additional judicial sitting days have been added to support performance improvement. HMCTS is also working on improvements to the new case management system, to help reduce overall end-to-end processing times.

Guidance on the court process is publicly available on GOV.UK. In addition, online application forms which assist users with ‘in application’ guidance and prompts are also available for some types of applications.