Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what performance monitoring is in place to monitor how many calls are unanswered in County Courts when individuals are trying to book a public counter appointment.

HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) does have management information that includes data on telephony performance, such as volumes of answered and unanswered calls. This information does not specifically detail metrics related to unanswered calls for counter appointment bookings at County Courts.

However, centralising calls into our national contact centre has provided improved visibility into true call demand and the volume of unanswered calls. By combining this with post call data and speech analysis from answered calls, we can identify trends and make informed assumptions about the key drivers behind unanswered calls.

Individual County Courts may have their own procedures for managing appointment bookings. For instance, some courts require appointments to be made via specific phone numbers or email addresses. For example, Birmingham Civil & Family Justice Centre schedules counter appointments through a dedicated phone line our centralised telephony team would sign post our customers to.