Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that emergency applications for grants of probate are processed promptly; and whether he has made an assessment of the impact of staffing levels at the Probate Service on the processing time for emergency applications.

HM Courts & Tribunals Service has invested in more staff in 2026, alongside system and process improvements and a programme of upskilling in order to improve the processing time for applications and to ensure outstanding caseload does not increase.

Service users can indicate that their application is urgent either at submission or at a later stage and operational teams have processes in place promptly to review such applications.

The Ministry of Justice publishes regular data on probate timeliness and open caseload in our quarterly Family Court statistics bulletin: Family Court Statistics Quarterly - GOV.UK