Transparency data

Strategic Engagement Group Meeting – Chair’s Summary – 3 September 2024

Published 20 September 2024

Applies to England, Scotland and Wales

1. Introduction

This document summarises the discussion of the Strategic Engagement Group (StratEG) meeting held on 3 September 2024. The meeting was held online.

Members of the Bar Council and Law Society met representatives of HMCTS for the latest quarterly meeting.

The meeting included verbal updates covering:

• An introduction to the HMCTS Board
• Operational and strategic overviews

Presentations covered:

• Pre-recorded evidence technology update
• Probate service update

2. An introduction to the HMCTS Board

In autumn 2023, HMCTS’ strategic vision required clarity on the role of the courts and tribunals and an updated business approach.

It agreed that HMCTS has a role to actively promote efficiency and effectiveness through facilitation and collaboration with all parties across the justice system, supporting and delivering improvements. That has meant focusing on how to develop and improve, including active consolidation, stabilisation, simplification and continuous improvement.

Several measures have been implemented since on the Reform Programme, governance, information flows as well as recruiting additional non-executives on to the Board.   

The Board’s current focus is on resourcing and risk, that covers change load, digitisation and culture.   

3. Operational and strategic overview

As the Reform Programme is due to conclude in 2025, HMCTS is also setting out the strategic direction for the next phase. At its core this is a vision about supporting people to access justice when they need it, working together with partners across the justice system to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of courts and tribunals services.  

HMCTS has outlined four objectives around collaboration, consolidation, continuous improvement and commitment recognising the role everyone plays across the justice system. Recent priorities have been supporting the new Ministerial team and preparing for the cross-government spending review.

The government’s focus in its early weeks has been on criminal justice due to public disorder and challenges in the prison system, with further detail on its vision for other areas of the justice system to be set out in the coming period. 

HMCTS had previously shared data on the impacts of hearings related to recent public disorder and thanked legal professionals for their role in dealing with hearings swiftly.

4. Pre-recorded evidence technology update

A presentation explained pre-recorded evidence aims to help vulnerable and intimidated witnesses give their best evidence to the court by recording their evidence at an early stage in the court process.

It is currently managed through the Section 28 Service, provided by a third-party supplier, which has a number of restrictions around capability, usability and aging technology.

The presentation covered HMCTS designing in-house technology to facilitate pre-recording of evidence, using third parties to develop the system. This will allow continued provision of a pre-recorded evidence service, expand the capacity of the service to improve the useability and offer greater flexibility for users under a more tailored system.

In February 2022, a ‘proof of concept’ exercise in Leeds Youth Court met the core requirements expected of the service. After gathering feedback, HMCTS is currently enhancing the infrastructure to support national roll out across all Crown Courts.

Consultation has taken place with professional justice stakeholders. HMCTS has arranged webinars to include support available to users, judicial focus groups, and is listening to feedback from early adopter sites. 

A national roll out is anticipated to begin in early 2025, including appropriate training. All Crown Courts are expected to be using the new service by mid-2025.  

5. Probate service update

In July 2023, HMCTS implemented a detailed performance recovery plan focusing on building capacity and productivity to help improve wider service performance. The number of open probate cases has dropped significantly and waiting times have reduced. Capability levels amongst probate staff have also significantly strengthened.

The probate service receives nearly 365,000 calls per year from users and over 3,000 exit surveys from the digital service have provided important feedback.

New updates are tested with probate practitioners and ‘citizen users’ to ensure the system works, and feedback provided in various ways, including in-person events, webinars and call handling logs.

In March 2024, a pilot offered 90 appointments to probate practitioners to handle some of the oldest and most challenging cases in the system. Appointments have been running on a monthly basis and feedback has been positive.

Probate user groups have been held in Newcastle, Liverpool and Birmingham and HMCTS is planning to widen these to other locations.

HMCTS introduced revised operating phoneline hours for the probate service, initially for 12 weeks, and this has since been made permanent in order to support the ongoing reduction of waiting times.

6. Reform programme – jurisdictional updates

Written jurisdictional updates were provided to the group.  

6.1 Crime

The main focus with Common Platform is to ensure continued support to users and to improve the consistency of approach in courts, alongside continued efforts to ensure the platform is stable and working as expected.

Single Justice Procedure roll out for police to manage traffic cases remains on track, with the next forces due to go live in early September in the Midlands, Gwent, and South Wales.

The police Single Justice Procedure national rollout has progressed smoothly and is now being used in five regions across 12 forces.

The last set of improvements to the preparation for effective trial (PET) and better case management (BCM) forms were deployed in June 2024 and HMCTS continues to monitor the impact of the changes, while being on hand to support to users.

6.2 Future hearings

Work continues in partnership with Vodafone to deliver a special measures solution and an enhanced interpreter function.  

The video hearings service continues to be used in three prisons in the North East and work is about to commence with four prisons in the West Midlands area.

The use of video hearings in the criminal jurisdiction is under review and therefore the evaluation of the Chester Pathfinder findings has been paused. 

HMCTS continues to develop ListAssist to support live services, having delivered functionality for Social Security and Child Support cases to automate the allocation of judges.

Immigration and Asylum Chambers have also started to use the integrated version of the product for bails and appeals, with it due to go live with civil work next month.

The Single Justice Procedure lists continue to be published on the new external publications tool, the Court and Tribunal Hearings (CaTH) service.

6.3 Civil

Over 524,000 Online Civil Money Claims (OCMC) have been issued by litigants in person.  The service is available to litigants in person issuing claims up to £10,000. Legal representatives can also use the service to issue claims up to £25,000 and more than 43,000 claims have been issued.

In June 2024, HMCTS updated and expanded standard directions orders (SDO) so that more cases stay online. This provides three new SDOs for use by judges in noise induced hearing loss, flight delay and dispute resolution cases.

In July 2024, HMCTS rolled out the case progression and general applications features that were tested in early adopter sites to all county courts except for Birmingham, which will be going live in September.

In the same month, the team also expanded the general applications functionality to support a legal representative to digitally make and respond to an application prior to an SDO being made.

In Autumn 2024, HMCTS anticipates releasing the next phase of the process for citizen users, allowing litigants in person to issue claims up to £25,000 against other litigants in person.

6.4 Family

In July, the Private Family Law Service was expanded to the remaining solicitors within the jurisdiction of Swansea and Mid & West Wales courts, enabling more applications to be received and further testing of the service.

The technical supplier completed agreed planned deliverables by end of July 2024 and handed over remaining feature delivery to the PET team.

The work in Swansea and Mid & West Wales is progressing well and HMCTS is monitoring to ensure the end to end digital service is working as expected, before testing the process for litigants in person in further early adopter courts. Conversations are ongoing to agree a national rollout timeframe.

6.5 Tribunals

Social Security and Child Support (SSCS) released an integrated Scheduling and Listing function into the early adopter site in Cardiff in March 2023. The approach for national rollout is being finalised based on the experience of Cardiff, with Leeds anticipated to be the first site.

The latest digital uptake figures are 88% for personal independence payments appeals, 87% for employment and support allowance appeals, 89% for Universal Credit appeals and around 87% for 13 other benefits categories.

The SSCS service is currently transitioning from the Civil, Family, Tribunal Reform Programme to the HMCTS Digital and Technical Services team (DTS) as part of planned closure of the project, by 30 September 2024.

The Immigration and Asylum Chamber has implemented an online system for both legally represented and unrepresented appellants, that introduced new ways of working for both the parties and the tribunal. The online service allows a representative or appellant to submit, track and manage appeals all the way through the First-tier Tribunal system.

The project team has also been delivering digital changes required to support the implementation of Nationality and Borders Act 2022.

Following the release of integrated ListAssist for bail cases in the early adopter site in Hatton Cross in April 2024, the national rollout is now complete. Integrated ListAssist for appeals was launched at an early adopter site in Glasgow in July 2024.

In April 2024 an enhancement on Rule 92 was released, enabling a claimant to make an application through the citizen user interface when the other party is not a digital user or not registered to the MyHMCTS portal.

For employment tribunals, in May 2024 the ET1 claim form was released on the MyHMCTS portal for represented claimants. In July 2024 national rollout to all employment tribunals sites with the reformed service was completed.

In August 2024, the reformed service started the transition to DTS. The project is planned to close at the end of September 2024, and currently going through the necessary governance.

7. Next meeting

The next meeting will be on Tuesday 3 December 2024.