Fact sheet: National digital support service
Updated 6 February 2024
Applies to England and Wales
Since June 2022, we have been offering a free digital support service for users across England, Wales and Scotland. The service supports users who are unable to, or struggle getting online.
We’ve partnered with We Are Group (formerly known as We Are Digital), a social impact company whose entire remit is helping others. We Are Group offer face to face or remote sessions to help people complete their online applications. Users can receive free digital support to complete the following online applications:
- Appeal a benefit decision
- Make a plea for a non-imprisonable offence
- Making or responding to a small money claim
- Get help paying court and tribunal fees
- Apply for probate of an estate
- Apply or respond to a divorce
We receive referrals from a variety of sources, including:
- Courts and Tribunals Service Centres (CTSCs)
- GOV.UK
- We Are Digital’s partner network
We currently have over 80 partners in the We Are Group network who provide support to court users. We can be flexible to meet our users’ needs.
1. Main outcomes
We’ve achieved several outcomes so far, including:
- national rollout of the service - launched on 1 June 2022
- providing different ways to reach court and tribunal users who need digital support
- introducing additional support for users of the Single Justice Service (SJS), Divorce and Online Civil Money claims (OCMC) from December 2023. Users can now get help with checking notifications, confirming their application, requesting a County Court Judgement, making a payment and responding to an application.
2. Looking ahead
We’ll focus on:
- developing and implementing a full end to end model of support
- onboarding new services so that we can support more users
- developing the list of partners delivering the service to make sure we deliver quality support to all users that need it
- analysing user experiences to better understand their needs and improve our service accordingly
3. Further information
Read our news stories:
- Access to justice improved with HMCTS national digital support service
-
Helping our online users with a new national digital support service
- Watch a webinar on how we’re helping people to access and use HMCTS services online.
The data included on this page is drawn from either management information or Ministry of Justice (MOJ) official statistics. Management information reflects the data held on our case management system, and is subject to change. Official statistics are fully quality-assured and form the agreed definitive position.