Recommendation 25

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