Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what her Department's target processing time is for probate applications in the next financial year.

The Ministry of Justice publishes average waiting times for processing grants of probate here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/family-court-statistics-quarterly.

HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) currently advises applicants to expect probate applications to be processed within the target time of 12 weeks, although this could take longer if a user needs to provide additional information. Currently, the average waiting time is under 5 weeks.

There are 1.2 FTE Registrars and 2 FTE Deputy Registrars currently in post. There are no vacancies, and capacity is sufficient to meet the requirement for these roles.

One of the main lessons learned following the Reform of the probate service in 2019 was that the centralisation of administrative work alongside the digitisation of the service led to the loss of experienced staff and a training gap for the staff in the Courts and Tribunals Service Centres. These issues have since been overcome and average processing times continue to improve.