Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether he plans to commission independent research into the effectiveness of defendants' participation in the justice system by video link.

HMCTS have externally commissioned research with defendants looking at understanding and improving their engagement, which includes exploring defendants’ experience of their video remand hearings. In addition, HMCTS commissioned an independent report from the London School of Economics to evaluate fully video hearings in civil and family jurisdictions in party-to-party hearings. This report is currently planned for publication in the of Summer 2020.

The MoJ is undertaking an overarching evaluation of the HMCTS reform programme. The evaluation will consider the effect of reform on fairness, access to justice and cost to users and will include an assessment of how video has been used across the reform programme. An overarching evaluation framework will be published in due course, and a final report will be published at the end of the reform programme.