Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps the Government is taking to activate the working group established by the then Lord Chief Justice and then Lord Chancellor in January 2016 to implement the problem-solving court model in England and Wales.

The Problem-Solving Courts Working Group was asked to advise on the feasibility of pilot models and its planned work did not include an implementation stage. The group concluded the workstreams set out in its published terms of reference and has not been reconvened.

There remain barriers to testing or applying the problem-solving courts’ approach in a meaningful way, including upfront resource implications and the need for primary legislation to implement some of the models being proposed, as well as gaps in evidence. However, we are testing and applying “problem-solving approaches”, for example in the testbed sites for on the community sentence treatment requirement protocol and through our support for models applied in Family Drug and Alcohol Courts.