Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the average waiting time is for a Child Maintenance Service appeal to be heard under Her Majesty’s Courts & Tribunal Service in each court area in Wales.

General information about waiting times for appeals in the First-tier Tribunal (Social Security and Child Support) (SSCS) are published at:

www.gov.uk/government/collections/tribunals-statistics

The table below contains the average waiting time for Child Maintenance appeals between July and September 2019 (the latest period for which data are available) at HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) hearing venues in Wales¹.

¹ Wales SSCS Region

~ denotes five or fewer cases. If the number of disposals are five or fewer, the average disposal time is redacted.

Although care is taken when processing and analysing the data, the details are subject to inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale case management system and are the best data that are available. Data include appeals cleared with and without a Tribunal hearing.

Waiting times are calculated from receipt of an appeal to its final disposal. An appeal is not necessarily disposed of at its first hearing. The final disposal decision on the appeal may be reached after an earlier hearing had been adjourned (which may be directed by the judge for a variety of reasons, such as to seek further evidence), or after an earlier hearing date had been postponed (again, for a variety of reasons, often at the request of the appellant). An appeal may also have been decided at an earlier date by the First-tier Tribunal, only for the case to have gone on to the Upper Tribunal, to be returned once again to the First-tier, for its final disposal.

HMCTS recognises it is important for appeals to be heard as quickly as possible, and is in the process of recruiting more judicial office holders to the SSCS jurisdiction in order to increase capacity and help to reduce waiting times for appellants. In 2018, 118 specialist members were appointed and trained to the jurisdiction, and an extra 129 fee-paid judges were appointed in 2019. The jurisdiction will also benefit from 114 salaried judges and 170 fee-paid judges being recruited across tribunals more widely.