Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will make an estimate of the number and proportion of applications for grant of probate that were resolved within the eight week target in the latest period for which data is available; and how many and what proportion of these applications took more than nine months to resolve.

The attached table shows the number and proportion of Grants of Probate applications resolved in 8 weeks and those that took more than 9 months.

Cases can take longer than 8 weeks for a number of reasons including HMCTS stopping a case to request further information which the user has not supplied, time taken for users to reply, cases can also be stopped due to application being made by another interested party or because the application becomes contested.