Probate
(asked on 16th March 2020) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how long, on average, it takes to be granted probate after filing inheritance tax forms with Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.
Her Majesty’s Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) internal management information (which is not subject to the rigorous quality assurance processes of official statistics) has been used to show average times from receipt of an application to a grant being issued in February 2020.
Measure | Average Weeks to issued | Median to issue |
Submission to issue for all grants issued in the month (including those stopped for queries or missing documentation) | 7 | 3 |
From submission to issue for grants issued in the month that were not stopped. | 4 | 3 |
These figures include applications made via the online service and use the receipt date of the digital application for recording the time of issue, rather than the time the necessary supporting documentation is sent to HMCTS in order to start processing the application. The data has been extracted from the HMCTS Reform Core Case Data system, which is a new system in active development, and may not be directly comparable with figures for earlier periods.
Probate users can telephone the national Courts and Tribunal Service Centres with queries relating to Probate applications. In the month of February 2020, calls were answered within 3 minutes on average.
Official statistics are not held or published on the average length of time to grant probate after the filing of an inheritance tax form.