Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 22
22
Accepted
Paused projects and post-completion service fixes require funding beyond the core reform budget.
Recommendation
The funding allocated to the programme will also no longer cover several projects that HMCTS has paused as part of its programme reset: these relate to its civil possession service, family adoption and all special tribunals with the exception of criminal injuries compensation tribunal. This is because it assessed that it could not finish all projects within 37 Q 86; C&AG’s Report, para 1.14 38 Qq 86–87 39 Committee of Public Accounts, Transforming courts and tribunals, Fifty-Sixth Report of Session 2017–19, HC 976, 20 July 2018, para 23; C&AG’s Report, Early progress in transforming courts and tribunals, Session 2017–19, HC 1001, 9 May 2019, para 3.8 40 HM Treasury, Treasury Minutes: Government response to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Forty Third to the Fifty Eighth reports from Session 2017–19, Cm 9702, October 2018 41 Qq 99–100; C&AG’s Report, paras 1.14, 2.6 42 Qq 99–100 16 Progress on the courts and tribunals reform programme its current timeline.43 Moreover, despite HMCTS having classed the online portals for divorce and probate cases as complete, these portals continue to require improvements. For example, HMCTS found that significant proportions of its online divorce and probate cases required manual interventions from staff and in March 2022 HMCTS identified that 55% of divorce cases could not be completed online.44 Although fixing this is important if HMCTS is to gain the benefits it planned from this reform, HMCTS will fund the future costs of these and other completed projects from outside of the budget for the reform programme. HMCTS told us that it had always planned to make continued improvements to services based on user feedback, after the programme closed. But HMCTS explained that it in some instances it had been unable to make improvements to services it classed as complete and moved to business-as-usual because of interdependencies between projects in the programme which are not yet complete.45 It also stated that it carefully considere
Government Response Summary
The government agrees with the Committee's recommendation regarding assessing full programme costs and commits to responding by December 2023 with its plan, acknowledging that some costs may require estimates.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
4.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation Target implementation date: December 2023 4.2 The government will respond to the Committee by the six-month deadline, setting out how it will assess the full cost of the programme, considering the proposed inclusions where they are within the scope of the programme. 4.3 In some cases it will be necessary to rely on estimates rather than full costings as full information may not be available.