Summers: Action needed to reduce backlog
His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) “did not have a mechanism to deliver comprehensive training” when the Probate Service was digitised, a justice minister has admitted.
As a result, staff “did not fully understand” the changes, said Sarah Sackman KC, resulting in huge delays.
HMCTS would apply “lessons learned” to other court modernisation projects, she went on – testing and roll-out of new services was already “done differently”.
Ms Sackman was responding to a letter last May from the then justice select committee chair Sir Bob Neill, after the election cut short the committee’s then inquiry into probate delays before it could deliver a full report.
Writing to his successor, Andy Slaughter, Ms Sackman said the Probate Service was the first to go through the court modernisation programme, with the project closing in spring 2020.
Since the digital service was launched, over 1.5m probate applications have been processed, with around 80% currently made digitally.
The service had faced “many challenges” since it was reformed which were “out of the control” of HMCTS, including the pandemic. “However, mistakes were made in the way in which we reformed.”
A “lessons learned exercise” had identified four main challenges, starting with how centralising into one geographical location “led to the loss of experienced probate staff”. HMCTS responded by changing its operating model to “introduce hub sites to provide greater flexibility to deliver national services at a variety of physical locations”.
Next was the service’s reliance on a flexible workforce: “We have stabilised our workforce over the last 16 months by permanently retaining experienced probate staff, converting previous fixed-term contracts to permanent status, and consolidating our leadership team.
“This has supported our efforts to grow capability which is otherwise challenging with an inconsistent workforce.”
Third, the supposedly end-to-end digital service did not cover all application types and introduced some hand-offs where the service could not be completed digitally. This in turn created bottlenecks of work. Testing and roll out of newly reformed services “is done differently as a result”, Ms Sackman said.
Four was a “lack of robust training and knowledge transfer”. The minister went on: “HMCTS did not have a mechanism to deliver comprehensive training when new functionality was released.
“The pace of the changes was rapid, and staff did not fully understand them. Knowledge transfer and upskilling was hampered by regular system enhancements using up the available training hours.”
All staff were now trained on grant of probate applications and over 50% trained on “further journey types”.
It emerged earlier this month that the Probate Service had cut average waiting times to six and a half weeks in December 2024 from 16 weeks just over a year earlier – a 60% reduction.
The minister said that, in April 2024, HMCTS piloted case surgeries that offered appointments to users on some of its older cases “to work collaboratively to secure resolution to cases struggling to get through the system”.
HMCTS would now introduce more local open sessions with probate professions, along with more comprehensive guidance on gov.uk.
Ms Sackman added that while 2024 “was focused on recovery, 2025 will focus on maintaining performance and pro-actively addressing stopped cases and preventing cases becoming dormant”. There was now more granular performance data available, she added.
Jo Summers, a partner and co-head of virtual law firm Jurit’s private wealth and tax team, and also a spokeswoman for STEP, said good progress had been made to reduce probate waiting times, but the government should take up STEP’s recommendations to tackle the ongoing probate backlog of ‘stopped’ and dormant cases.
These involved HMCTS bringing back experienced probate staff and outsourcing some complex cases to a limited number of specialist law firms.
She said HMCTS statistics showed 27,241 cases were currently stopped or awaiting documentation and 2,171 families still waiting over a year for probate to be granted.
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