Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Conclusion 25
Sixty-First Report - Progress on the courts and tribunals reform programme
Published 30 Jun 2023
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Court Reform Programme: progress review All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
HMCTS’s analysis covering April to June 2022 found that unit costs of its fully or partly reformed services were 19% to 146% higher than expected. HMCTS undertook some analysis of these services to try and understand this variation. Its analysis indicated that some services were not working as efficiently as expected. For example, it found that cases in its online probate and divorce services still required significant manual interventions from staff.51 We asked HMCTS how it planned to ensure that reformed services will deliver the intended savings, given that it does not have routine data to determine how efficiently they are working. HMCTS told us that it intended to use its unit cost approach to identify where there are variations between actual and expected costs. It explained it will then do further analysis to explore reasons behind this variation and develop action plans to address any issues it identifies. We asked whether HMCTS was confident that it would deliver the efficiency savings expected from the programme. HMCTS accepted that it still had a lot of work left to do to ensure savings materialise, but that it expected to be able to deliver them, and that it had built contingency into the efficiency savings to support it to achieve this.52 Lessons learned
From: Public Accounts Committee, Sixty-First Report - Progress on the courts and tribunals reform programme (HC 1002), 30 June 2023
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 24 September 2023 (deadline 30 August 2023).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government states that it "agrees with the Committee's recommendation" on each of the six conclusions, describing five as "Recommendation implemented" and one, on assessing the full cost of the programme, with a target implementation date of December 2023.
- On assurance of plans, the response says the programme is "conducting ongoing reviews of plans", overseen by programme boards and a portfolio board, with updated confidence assessments reported against each portfolio-level milestone.
- On access to justice, it commits to publishing four completed assessments in autumn 2023, with further publications "in 2024 and into 2025". Where impacts are identified, it will do further work and, "where appropriate", implement a service fix.
- On full costs, the government will respond within the six-month deadline, considering the proposed inclusions "where they are within the scope of the programme". It adds that in some cases it will be necessary to rely on estimates.
- On savings, it says delay will mean £50 million fewer recurring annual net savings by the end of 2025-26. The full £227 million is "still expected" a year later than originally expected, by the end of 2026-27.