PAC seriously concerned at Court Reform Programme’s multiple delays and revisions

- HM Courts & Tribunals Service consistently underestimated scale and complexity of reforms

- Attempted reforms added significant stress to staff already under pressure to reduce backlogs

- No action yet taken to address concerning disparities in divorce and probate services for different groups, including ethnic minorities

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is seriously concerned that HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) is once again behind on delivering critical reforms. In a report published today, the PAC finds that the long history of resets, revisions and delays to the Court Reform Programme (CRP) has largely been due to HMCTS’ consistent underestimation of the scale and complexity of these reforms.

HMCTS extended its timetable for the CRP for a third time in March, and now plans to deliver most reforms by March 2024, three months later than planned. Complete delivery of its digital case-management system, the Common Platform, is expected in March 2025, over a year later than planned. Despite having just £120 million left of its total £1.3 billion budget, HMCTS has only completed 24 of 44 reform projects. 

Multiple technical and design problems throughout HMCTS’ roll-out of the Common Platform created extra problems for court staff working hard to deal with large case backlogs worsened by the pandemic. HMCTS’ failure to engage with court users on the roll-out also increased the burden on pressured courts and staff. The PAC is disappointed that court users still did not feel properly heard by HMCTS, despite past assurances that it would do more to ensure staff and stakeholders felt listened to.

The report also warns that HMCTS risks undermining public confidence in the fairness of the justice system if it does not take swift action on assessments it made in November 2022 on access to justice. These identified concerning disparities in how divorce and probate services perform for different groups, such as ethnic minorities – but HMCTS has not yet acted on these findings. The PAC also heard of issues with some reformed services resulting in solicitors not receiving necessary notifications and significant delays to cases, and is concerned that HMCTS does not fully understand how reforms are impacting court users, victims, or access to justice.

Dame Meg Hillier MP, Chair of the Committee, said:

“Our courts were already stretched thin before the pandemic, and the backlogs now faced pose a real threat to timely access to justice. These are services crying out for critical reform, but frustratingly HM Courts & Tribunal’s attempts appear in some cases to be actively hindering its own staff’s ability to carry out their jobs. In particular, the roll-out of the Common Platform digital system was a blow upon a bruise for pressured court users.

“We would expect HMCTS to appreciate by now that complex reform such as this cannot be properly implemented while failing to engage with those impacted, but our report paints a picture of a service now rushing to introduce its plans following multiple delays. HMCTS has now burnt through almost its entire budget for a programme of reform only a little over halfway complete. The Government told us that the complexity of managing some of these reforms was like ‘redesigning the jet engine while it is in flight’. It must explain how it intends to land the plane.”

PAC report conclusions and recommendations 

We are seriously concerned that despite a long history of resets to the programme, HMCTS has had to revise and delay its plans again. HMCTS has revised the timetable and altered the scope of its programme several times. This has largely been due to its consistent underestimation of the scale and complexity of its reforms. When we last examined the programme in 2019, HMCTS had already extended the time it expected to take to deliver the reforms twice, from four years to six years and then to seven years. We warned that its timetable was over-optimistic given the work still required. By November 2022, HMCTS had only managed to complete 24 of its 44 (55%) projects. HMCTS has since decided to reset the programme again. This includes extending the overall timetable for most projects to March 2024 and completing its common platform project over a year later, in March 2025. HMCTS asserts that it is confident it can deliver the remainder of the programme within the new timetable, but it gave us the same assurances in 2018, 2019 and 2021. HMCTS has also reduced the programme’s scope several times. For example, in 2021 it changed the design of its common platform which will now involve interfaces with the Crown Prosecution Service’s (CPS’s) system, instead of the more complex single system HMCTS and CPS originally envisaged. HMCTS recognises that it has a lot left to deliver for many of its projects, particularly the common platform.

Recommendation 1: In the Treasury Minute response, the Ministry and HMCTS should outline what they are doing to assure themselves and Parliament that their plans are now realistic and will not require further resets. The response should state how HMCTS will continue to monitor the feasibility of its plans.

HMCTS’s failure to engage sufficiently with staff and stakeholders throughout the common platform rollout has increased the burden on courts and staff already under significant pressure. When we last reported on the programme, HMCTS assured us that it intended to do more to ensure staff and stakeholders felt listened to. We are therefore disappointed to hear that these groups still feel that the quality of engagement has been insufficient - particularly during the rollout of common platform. HMCTS initially rolled out what it considered to be a minimum viable version of common platform to criminal courts. But this version was not sufficiently developed, and staff have had to deal with multiple technical and design issues, including system outages. HMCTS acknowledges that this has created challenges for its staff, who have also been working hard to deal with the extensive case backlogs worsened by the pandemic. However, users of common platform say that they have often not felt heard.  This is reflected in HMCTS’s poor staff satisfaction scores and user perceptions of common platform. HMCTS established a new feedback mechanism to in October 2022 and recognises that it needs to do more to improve its approach to engagement going forwards.

Recommendation 2: HMCTS should set out in its Treasury Minute response how it will improve its approach to engagement and transparency to ensure that staff and stakeholder concerns are responded to adequately. This should include how it will monitor the effectiveness of its new feedback mechanism.

We are concerned that HMCTS does not yet fully understand how reforms are impacting court users, victims, or the public’s access to justice. In 2018 and 2019, we raised concerns around HMCTS’s lack of understanding of the wide-ranging impacts of its reforms on those who use the courts. But HMCTS has still not shown that it is doing enough to understand this. While it does have some avenues for user feedback, these are not comprehensive and do not always capture the end-user perspective, or how reforms may impact vulnerable people. Stakeholders such as the Law Society and Bar Council told us that their members have had to deal with how some reformed services are working. This includes issues with the online portal for the family public law service, which have meant solicitors have not received the necessary notifications, as well as reports of issues with the portal causing significant delays to cases. HMCTS has made too little progress in addressing findings from its access to justice assessments, which aim to analyse how access to the hearings, decisions and sentences vary by user groups and case type. By November 2022, HMCTS had completed four access to justice assessments. In those assessments it has undertaken, HMCTS has identified concerning disparities in the way the divorce and probate services perform for different user groups, such as ethnic minorities, but it is yet to make any changes based on its findings. HMCTS plans to publish some of its findings in Autumn 2023, but it will continue to risk undermining public confidence in the fairness of the justice system if it does not increase the pace at which it takes action in response to their findings.

Recommendation 3: HMCTS should outline in its Treasury Minute response:

1. a) how it intends to obtain regular feedback on how services are impacting users and access to justice more widely; and
2. b) dates for when it plans to publish access to justice assessments for the remaining services, together with any actions it will take in response to findings for all completed assessments.

HMCTS and the Ministry cannot fully assess whether the reforms have provided value for money as they have not captured the full costs of the programme. Despite our earlier concerns, the National Audit Office found that the programme costs still may not capture the full costs of reforming the courts and tribunals. HMCTS’s latest business case does not include costs incurred by the CPS in developing interfaces with common platform, following changes made to common platform’s design. Of its £1.3 billion budget, HMCTS has £120 million remaining to deliver outstanding reforms and claims that it has a clear understanding of what is left to deliver with the remaining funding as it has costed most elements left to deliver for each project still underway. However, this will not reflect all of the remaining work needed to support the reforms. HMCTS has already moved some projects out of the programme into its business-as-usual activities, even though they are not complete and require further work. For example, despite HMCTS moving the online portal for divorce cases to business as usual, the portal continues to require improvements. In March 2022, HMCTS found that 55% of divorce cases could not be completed online and required manual interventions. Although fixing this is important if HMCTS is to gain the benefits it planned from this reform, HMCTS will fund the future costs of this and similar projects from outside of the budget for the reform programme. HMCTS also plans to reform fewer services than it intended with its remaining budget because it has assessed that it could not finish all the projects within the programme timeline. As part of its recent reset, it has paused reforms to several services which will no longer be covered by the funding allocated to the programme.

Recommendation 4: The Ministry and HMCTS should write to us within six months setting out how they will assess the full cost of the reform programme. This should include:

• costs not included in its most recent business case, such as CPS’s development of common platform interfaces;
• costs of additional functionality required to get services up to the standards intended; and 
• estimated costs to complete paused projects if it decides to continue them in the future.

HMCTS has not specified how its recent changes to the programme will impact the savings promised, nor can it demonstrate whether reformed services are on track to deliver the required efficiencies. In 2019, HMCTS expected the programme to save £244 million a year and claimed that it had saved £133 million so far. The National Audit Office found that HMCTS expects reforms to deliver £220 million in annual savings from 2025-26 onwards. However, it has not outlined how these savings will be impacted by its recent decision to pause reforms to some of its services. In response to our previous concerns that HMCTS’s ability to monitor whether programme savings are directly linked to reforms, it has developed a new methodology to assess how efficiently its services are working. But HMCTS acknowledges that this methodology still needs to be refined as although it provides comparative information about the cost of services, it still cannot identify whether this is due to the effect of reforms, or due to another reason such as changes in demand. Although the analysis cannot explain why, the results suggest that the costs per user have increased rather than decreased for most services, so there is still a lot to do to reduce costs and make savings. HMCTS recognises it needs to do more to understand whether reforms are having the impacts they intended.

Recommendation 5: As part of its Treasury Minute response, HMCTS should set out:

1. a) The impact of recent changes to its plans on the expected savings from the programme; and
2. b) What it is doing to better understand how efficiently reformed services are working and how it will use this information to ensure it is on track to deliver expected savings.

The Ministry and HMCTS have not demonstrated that lessons learned from this reform programme and their other major projects have been put into practice effectively.  The Ministry and HMCTS recognise that there are several lessons to be learned from the court reform programme, particularly from the implementation of common platform. For example, the Ministry and HMCTS highlighted the importance of understanding the impact of delivering a programme of this size while also maintaining performance and the importance of having a whole programme-level view of progress. However, the Ministry and HMCTS do not appear to have learnt lessons despite previously assuring us that they had. When we first reported on the programme in 2018, the Ministry told us that it had learnt lessons from both reform and its other major programmes, such as its reforms to the rehabilitation of offenders and its electronic monitoring system. However, seven years into the programme, HMCTS continues to make many of the same mistakes.

Recommendation 6: The Ministry and HMCTS should write to us as part of the Treasury Minute response setting out how they will ensure lessons learned from digitalising their processes are fed into both the remainder of the programme and into other major departmental projects.