Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 7 March 2024 to Question 16213 on Probate, what recent progress his Department has made on reducing waiting times in relation to probate grants.

HMCTS remains focused on increasing outputs to reduce overall timeliness on all types of applications. Management information published by HMCTS shows the average mean length of time taken for a grant of probate (following receipt of the documents required) reduced by 3 weeks in March 2024 compared to February 2024. The average timeliness in March was 9 weeks.

The first quarter of 2024 (January to March 2024) saw the highest quarterly number of grants issued on record.

A full time series of Official Statistics back to Q3 2019 is published in the Family Court Statistics Quarterly https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/family-court-statistics-quarterly and currently covers the period up to December 2023.

More recent management information published by HMCTS (which does not go through the same level of quality assurance and analysis as the Family Court Statistics Quarterly) provides waiting time information up to March 2023 https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/hmcts-management-information.