Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the cost of video hearings to (a) HM Courts and Tribunals Service, (b) the Mental Health Tribunal of the NHS and (c) other agencies involved in supporting the courts.

The costs which have been incurred in the rolling out the Cloud Video Platform (CVP) in the 2020/21 financial year, to the end of November 2020 together with costs relating to the Video Hearings Service project amount to £2.117m. There are running and other costs in supporting video hearings, but these cannot presently be easily disaggregated from the total costs of running hearings (in court or elsewhere), and the figures presented therefore focus upon the direct costs of video hearings only.

The answer can only focus on part (a) of the question, as HMCTS do not have records of costs relating to the Mental Health Tribunal of the NHS and/or other agencies involved in supporting the courts.