Recommendation 5

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: a) The impact of recent changes to its plans on the expected savings from the programme; and 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.