HMCTS response to National Audit Office report on Reform

23 Feb 2023 09:39 AM

CEO Nick Goodwin responds to the National Audit Office (NAO) report on the HMCTS Reform Programme.

Responding to the National Audit Office (NAO) report published today (23 February 2023), Nick Goodwin, CEO of HM Courts and Tribunals Service said:

We’re grateful to the NAO for its report and will carefully consider the recommendations, many of which, I’m pleased to report, are well in hand.

We’ve undoubtedly achieved a lot through our reforms, with our digital services used over 2.1 million times times so far.

Completing a programme of this scale in a live operational environment is not without its challenges. There are reasons for this: some of them fall outside of our control, such as the pandemic; and some of them are things that we didn’t get right, such as introducing too much change too quickly. We can and will put this right.

Common Platform remains a vital cog in the success of Reform. It will replace legacy systems that are fragmented and unsustainable, but we recognise the areas of challenge raised in the NAO report having listened to our staff, partners and those using the system, and we have learned from experience how to do things better.

We’re already acting on their feedback and will soon be confirming some adjustments to the programme timelines, that seek to ease pressure on the people implementing reform wherever it’s sensible to do so.

We will formally respond to the report and its recommendations in due course.

Guidance

Some of the biggest achievements delivered through the HMCTS Reform Programme as of 23 February 2023 include:

• more than 400,000 Online Civil Money Claims processed since their introduction in March 2018 with a 96% user satisfaction rating for the service
• by December 2022 digital uptake had increased to 80% of all probate applications received online with 94% of personal applicants rating the service good or very good
• less than 1% of online divorce applications returned due to user error, compared to 40% with the original, paper-based system
• Common Platform is live in 173 Crown and magistrates’ courts, meaning 76% of all criminal courts are managing cases on the system. Over 500,000 hearings have now been managed on Common Platform across the criminal courts
• over 70% of all courtrooms – including over 90% of Crown courtrooms – can allow parties in a case to join hearings remotely, where deemed appropriate by the judiciary
• between 1 January 2022 and 30 September 2022, over 530,000 low-level criminal cases were completed through the Single Justice Procedure
• 5 centralised administrative and user contact centres (Courts and Tribunals Service Centres) opened
• a new digital tool for listing court and tribunal hearings has been developed and is already being used by all our civil and family courts, handling 50,000 cases each week
• a digital service has been delivered to support local authority child welfare cases which has already been used over 12,000 times
• the Single Justice Service has an 88% user satisfaction rate

Notes to editors

Figures are drawn from management information and are not official statistics.