Welcome to this afternoon’s session of the Justice Committee. We are looking today at the work of the county court, which is one of the three main inquiries that the Committee is doing. This will be the last evidence-taking session before we move on to report writing after the Easter recess. Therefore, we are delighted to have the Minister of State, Sarah Sackman KC MP, to give evidence. She is going to be ably supported by some of her officials, Mr Latham, Mr Jarman and Mr Flury. Minister, we will look to you for answers, but, if there are technical aspects you need to refer to, we have officials aplenty. Just before I ask you to introduce yourselves, we have to give our declarations of interest. I have Warinder Juss and Tessa Munt as the members of the Committee here. Warinder, do you have anything you wish to declare at the beginning of the meeting?

Yes. I am Warinder Juss. I am a member of the GMB executive council. I am a solicitor and a member of various APPGs.

I am a non-practising barrister, I am a member of the GMB and Unite trade unions, and I am the patron of two justice-related charities. One is Hammersmith and Fulham Law Centre and the other is the Upper Room, which is for ex-offenders. Could I just ask you all to introduce yourselves and say what your responsibilities are?

My name is Jason Latham. I am the development director at HM Courts and Tribunals Service. My key responsibilities are the improvement of services and the development of new services.

My name is Steven Jarman. I am the deputy director for civil justice and law policy at the Ministry of Justice. My remit broadly covers what it says on the tin: any legislation or framework related to civil justice and law.

I am Sarah Sackman. I am the MP for Finchley and Golders Green. I am here in my capacity as Minister of State for Courts and Legal Services.

I am Daniel Flury. I am the operations director. I am responsible for the performance of the 14,500 members of staff who work in HMCTS.

Thank you very much. Can I kick off with a few generic questions? Minister, you did not give us a list of all your responsibilities because that would have taken the first 15 minutes of the Committee. One of those is responsibility for civil justice. Even within that, the work of the county court is what we are concerned about in particular. Given your very long list and broad range of responsibilities, how much of your time are you able to dedicate to civil justice?

As you will appreciate, we have challenges right across the justice system. That is no secret. We know the challenges within the criminal justice system and the Ministry of Justice’s ambitions to implement once-in-a-generation reform of the Crown Court. We know what the challenges are with the backlog there. The realm of sentencing, where David Gauke is leading his independent review, is quite clearly taking up considerable time. Be that as it may, I do not want the Committee to think for one second that in some way civil justice is the poor relation of criminal justice. My own background before coming into Parliament was as a civil practitioner at the Bar. We recognise and I recognise, in my capacity as Minister for Courts, the vital role that civil justice plays, not least because it is the part of the justice system that the vast majority of people interact with. Gladly, many of us will never have reason to interact with the criminal justice system, but, be it in one’s capacity as an employee or a small business or in the realms of housing or debt, across the full gamut of cases that the county court considers, many members of the public will interact with the civil justice system. We know that civil justice—our county courts in particular—is absolutely critical to our economic performance. If businesses do not know whether they can enforce a contract or whether they can get timely resolution of disputes, the productivity drag is huge. As a Government, our No. 1 mission is growth. Civil justice has a huge role to play in that. To answer your question directly, we have lots and lots of challenges right across the justice system, but be in no doubt that civil justice, the performance of the county court and indeed the civil work of our tribunal system occupies a considerable amount of my time because of the reasons I have said. They are vitally important both to the public and to our economy.

As you say, there is a contradiction. The fact is that the civil justice system is probably the one that most citizens come across in various aspects of their life. Only a minority, whether as defendants, victims or in another capacity, are going to be involved in the Crown Court, and yet civil justice often does feel like a Cinderella service. If you think about the challenges that all parts of the justice system are facing now, such as backlogs, the condition of court buildings and things of that kind, there is much more focus on the criminal side. How are you going to ensure that those issues, such as the issues to do with sitting days, adjournments or delays in getting to court, are being dealt with specifically in relation to the county court?

I understand where you are coming from, but I reject the characterisation of the civil justice system as a Cinderella service. It is fair to say that much of the political bandwidth concerns the criminal justice system, rightly, because the No. 1 duty of Government is to ensure that people feel secure and protected. That is why questions around prisons and criminal justice take up a lot of time. In terms of the priorities of this Department and where we are putting policy resource and legislative time, civil justice is the equal of criminal justice. It is not political in the same way, but operationally it is a huge priority. We are far from where I want us to be on civil justice, as I am sure we are going to get into the details of. The system faces huge challenges. We have inherited huge challenges right across the civil justice system. I am not attempting to sugar-coat that in any way. The timeliness of resolutions, the backlog, the quality of the court estate and recruitment are all challenging areas. In terms of the policy resource and legislative time, whether it is in terms of online procedure rules and trying to modernise the system to get faster processing of cases, and whether it is in terms of new court buildings in our civil courts in Blackpool, Newcastle or the City of London, we are prioritising civil justice precisely because we recognise, although it may not be a political priority in terms of grabbing the headlines, for the majority of people who interact with it, it is important that we deliver a first-class service. My ambition—it is an ambition—is for interactions with civil justice to be similar to the way in which consumers interact with commercial entities or indeed the way in which people interact with the very best of our public services. Take the Passport Office, for example. You can apply for your passport online and pick it up a week or two later. If we can get to that sort of quality of service and delivery in the civil justice space, that would be a huge marker of success.

Last month we heard evidence from the Master of the Rolls and the deputy head of Civil Justice. We will come on later to some of the specific concerns that they had in that session. Are you clear as to whose responsibility the management of civil justice is between you and the senior members of the judiciary? Where do the boundaries lay between you?

First of all, in my position of Minister of State, my respect for the constitutional balance and dividing lines between our responsibility is sacrosanct. I was with the Master of the Rolls only last week visiting Bromley County Court, which we might touch on in later questions. We meet regularly. We have met in his capacity as chair of the Online Procedure Rule Committee. We meet to discuss wider issues around the performance of the civil justice system. You will know that he is hugely ambitious in relation to modernisation and digitisation. I share those ambitions. When it comes to areas that are the preserve of the judiciary, such as setting those procedural rules or listing these sorts of questions, Ministers quite properly stay in their lane, as do I. When we are dealing with the realms of politics, policy decisions about the allocation of money, how we prioritise civil justice vis-à-vis other parts of the justice system, those policy questions are rightly for politicians. All I can say is that all my interactions with the Master of the Rolls and his judicial colleagues have been incredibly constructive. We share many, if not all, of the same ambitions. We are very much working on the same page. As I said, it was a great pleasure and privilege to be able to visit the county court in Bromley with him because we are asking the same sorts of questions.

Indeed, we got some very interesting and very positive responses from him. We have also had, in written evidence, well over 130 responses now, many of them from court users, which have not been quite as positive, on the whole. A significant proportion have been highly critical of the service as it is currently provided. We will get into the weeds in a little while, but, overall, are you satisfied with the performance of the county court? Where do you see the main problems being?

If I were handing out a report, I would say there was room for improvement. I cannot be satisfied when it is taking, on average, over 125 weeks in London and the south-east to dispose of multi-track cases. I cannot be satisfied and say that there is not room for improvement in circumstances where the average time for dealing with a small claim in London and the south-east, which is the region with the greatest challenges, is 67 weeks. I would not be doing my job if I sat here and said, “All is well”. There are huge challenges. Notwithstanding the immense and much‑valued contribution of our judiciary, who work incredibly hard, and the staff who work to support them, many of whom I had the opportunity to meet on my visit last week and on previous occasions—they are doing incredibly hard work, and working incredibly hard—the reality is the performance of the county courts has not truly recovered since the covid pandemic. We are not where we want to be. We are not where we want to be in terms of timeliness. We are not where we want to be in terms of the modern digitised service that we should aspire to deliver. We have made big strides. There have been significant successes, not least with the digitisation of online money and damages claims and the forthcoming plans to digitise possession claims. These are significant strides forward, but it is nowhere near enough. As you know, there are around 1.7 million county court claims a year, the vast majority of which do not ever come to trial; only 3% come to full hearing. As I am sure the Master of the Rolls told you—I agree with him—we want to be in a position where the vast majority of those claims are dealt with in the digital space through a modern service fit for a modern economy and modern society.

We will come on to talk about the court reform programme in a little while, if we may. Can I just go back a stage? You mentioned the time taken for cases to reach trial. You quoted the current 78-week figure for fast multi-track cases. You mentioned covid, and that is perfectly fair. If you look over the last 10 years, it now takes an average—it has gone down slightly—of 50 weeks between a small claim being issued and going to trial. That compares to 32 weeks 10 years ago. We said 78 weeks for fast multi-track cases compared with 53 and a half 10 years ago. That is a very substantial increase. Notwithstanding that covid was an important landmark within that 10-year period, you cannot be satisfied with that. There must be a plan for getting those figures down dramatically.

That is why I said there is room for improvement. You are absolutely right. I discuss with my officials, “What does good look like? What are we aiming for?” You are absolutely right. That 30-week turnaround for small claims is exactly where we should be aspiring to be. You are right: we are not there. We are not there at the moment. That is precisely why I am being completely candid. There is huge room for improvement. covid was a major setback. We have not recovered from that. That is where we ought to be. As you rightly point out, there may be all sorts of factors that are nothing to do with the performance of the courts themselves that lead to cases taking as long as they do. Much of that can be driven by the conduct and choices of the parties and how they are choosing to run the case. When things take longer to run, it can be the case that there are more opportunities for settlement along the way. There are certain things that are outside the court’s control, but you are right: we are looking at average times. The system and operational constraints, such as capacity constraints, a lack of rooms or an insufficiency of judicial capacity, are within our control. We have levers that we should be deploying and can deploy in order to drive down those times. The other point, as I said, that I want to underscore is the regional variation. There are parts of the country that are better-performing. We are much closer to the sort of timeliness that you refer to in Wales, for example, where the average time taken to dispose of a small claim is close to 35 weeks. That is where we want to be. As I said, the performance in London and the south-east is much worse. We are trying—this is important—to address that lag and deliver better performance. For example, one of the things that has come about since covid is the virtual region. We all know from all our workplaces—I saw it when I was at the Bar—how digital technology and videoconferencing has changed the way we work. It is also changing the way that the courts work. We have a virtual region where spare capacity, if you like, in parts of the country where the caseload is lower, is able to pick up some of the caseload from busier regions such as London and the south-east. That is having a real impact in bearing down on those backlogs. The use of blitz courts is similar. Over the summer, where there is capacity, we will seek to run certain types of cases and really get through those lists. We are not sitting back—I know that my colleagues along this bench would agree with me—throwing up our hands and saying that we think that an average timeliness of 50-odd weeks for small claims is okay. I am not okay with that.

You said that the time taken might leave the opportunity for settlement. That is a very much a glass-half-full response. Could it not also be the case—we have heard this from practitioners—that people settle perhaps for less than their case is worth because they cannot afford to wait a year for something to come to trial? Are you worried that delay can affect the outcome of cases and not just be an evil in itself?

Delays across all jurisdictions affect the behaviour of litigants. There might well be cases that are not even being brought because people think, “I just cannot be bothered. I have an enforceable right and a valid claim, but I am going to have to enter a system that is still in part paper-based and it is going to take the best part of a year and a half. It is not worth my while. I will take the hit and I will move on in my business dealings.” There may be all sorts of behaviours that are being shaped negatively, we might say, as a consequence of the backlogs in the county court and indeed in other jurisdictions too. That is a very fair point to make. As I said right at the start, we recognise the interaction between the performance of our civil courts and the economy. In the same way that a well-performing civil justice system can be a real boon and the foundation of a thriving economy, the opposite is also true. For example, the Federation of Small Businesses has estimated that these long delays are costing the economy in the region of £10 billion. Those actors whose time is being taken up by cases that are stuck in the county court are not doing other productive things in the economy. I am alive to that. It is why this is so important. It is why it is a priority for this Department. It is why, as I said, we are deploying just the sort of levers you would expect us to deploy. Again, let me give you another example. I have mentioned the virtual region and the blitz courts. Judicial capacity is a major constraint on being able to bear down on timeliness. We know that London and the south-east has particular challenges. That is why we are conducting a targeted recruitment drive specifically for that region at the moment. Before we might have had national recruitment campaigns and then seen whether we had enough in each region. We recognise where the particular pinch points are. That is where our recruitment is focused at the moment because we know that is where we need extra capacity. The Department is taking a proactive approach to this.

Can you explain why covid is still having an impact especially as regards to small claims? I was practising right up until the time that the general election was called. I know how disruptive covid was. I can understand that cases that were stuck in the system during covid would be impacted, but why is covid still having an impact on cases that have originated recently? For how long will covid continue to have an impact on our backlogs?

We are dealing with a complex system. When one considers both the volume of cases and the variety of cases that come into the county court, a disruptive event—it was not a one-day event but something that endured for some time—feeds into and endures within the system. Once backlogs build up, unless one bears down and gets it back to previous historic demand levels, that creates pressure. In that time and since we have come out of the pandemic, demand has also risen. I know we are going to come on to discuss reform, but the implementation of the modernisation programme also had a disruptive effect. Again, you have a higher volume of cases coming into the system; you have a reform programme that has been successful in part but is nowhere near meeting the ambition that was hoped for it. You have legacy systems for certain types of cases, which are getting older and older. You have the ongoing capacity constraints. It all builds up. I am not sitting here blaming the current situation purely on covid. In addition to that, there has been chronic underinvestment in our justice system over the last 14 years. When you add those two things together, in addition to growing demand, it creates very real challenges. You see that right across the system and the physical estate. I do not know whether anybody wants to add anything to what I have just said, but that is an explanation for why covid is one causal factor, amongst several, for why we are in the situation we are in.

I do not know whether anybody else wants to come in. Otherwise, I will answer that. Does anyone want to give any specific reflections on performance in the Welsh courts?

No, it is not at all, really. It is broadly the same service. In places such as Wales, you have—how can I put it?—a more settled judicial cadre and staff cadre. Attrition is lower; staff have been there longer; there is greater availability of judges. All that adds up to better performance, which is in contrast to what we have in London and the south-east.

I will make some observations. If others want to come in, feel free. Again, we recognise that there is room for improvement in communication with the court. It is important to say that in aspects of the county courts’ work, particularly where that end-to-end digitisation has been carried out, the user feedback that we have as a Department is very positive. There are different ports of call, if you like. There is the Civil National Business Centre, depending on where one’s case has got to in the system. Where a case has been transferred to a local county court for hearing, there are interactions with that court, whether by phone or email. Performance will vary from court to court. I certainly accept, from the correspondence that comes from constituents to me as Minister for Courts, that there is a frustration that the service that they might expect in a consumer context is not always what they receive in this context. That being said, when I was visiting Bromley, for example, the staff there work incredibly hard to answer people’s emails, to pick up the phone and to signpost them to where they need to go. There is mixed performance across the piece. There is more that we can do and are doing to centralise some of those communications processes through the Civil National Business Centre in order to drive improvement. Again, that is an area where there was the integration of two business centres into one. We recognise that there was initially a downturn in performance, but we have seen a real improvement over the last 12 months. Where we look to understand what drove that improvement, we can seek to embed that best practice right across the system. I do not know whether other people want to come in on that.

If I may just add a point to illustrate that, 80% of the emails that come through to the Civil National Business Centre are chasing updates on their cases. You can see how it is a vicious cycle. If you have a backlog, you get more chaser emails, which then takes more time to answer. As the Minister said, in the long term, reform will allow users to see updates on their case. You will not have to dial in. You will be able to log on and see the status of your case.

Can I just come back on that? Let me start by saying that I share your frustration.

I share the public’s frustration and—they will not say so—colleagues’ frustration, I suspect, that we are nowhere near where we would like to be. It is also important to differentiate between different work streams within the county court realm. Where digital services for online civil money claims and damages claims have been fully reformed, that process is pretty seamless. In fact, I tested it myself. I did not issue a claim, but I took the liberty of going on to the online portal and looking at what the user experience would be if I were to issue a singular online claim. I recommend that people do it because it is exactly the sort of user experience that I aspire to see for all of our work streams. In the areas where the reform programme was executed in its totality, end to end, so not just the issuing of the claim but the digitisation of case progress as well, we get pretty high satisfaction rates and good feedback. You are absolutely right, however, that in other areas of work, particularly where we are still operating from the legacy system, so where the reform did not complete the full scope of work that was intended, we have a frustrating situation where one can issue a claim through a digital application, but then you have this process whereby court staff are having to print it out. When I went to Bromley, I saw an awful lot of paper. In today’s day and age, where technology is light-touch and is enabling flexibility and efficiency in all sorts of ways, it was a shame to see. That being said, one of the lessons we have learned from reform is, rather than biting off more than we can chew, we can build on the progress that we have achieved in online money claims and damages claims and effect end-to-end digitisation in areas that take up a lot of county court work. The next piece of work will be around possession claims. That is important because the Government have their Renters’ Rights Bill coming through Parliament. That is going to be a big and important piece of legislation with consequent litigation that will come off the back of that with the expansion of new rights. That is an important area of work. We are seeking to effect this end-to-end digitisation there. There is then a third category, which is even more frustrating, of areas such as boundary disputes, injunctions and enforcement applications, where we are still entirely on paper. I am not sitting here pretending that we have got to where we want to get to yet. Reform was a good start. It had some successes. It was not as successful as it should have been. There is more to do, but it is a good foundation. When we talk about some of the frustrations at the paper-based or paper-heavy nature of the system, it is important to distinguish between the bits that are working pretty well and the bits where there is a lot more work to do.

This is true.

In terms of the experience that you are describing from your constituents, solicitors and the legal practitioners who interact with the courts every day, these are things that were areas where there is room for improvement. These are exactly the sorts of areas where we are seeking to drive improvement in performance. There has been a significant improvement in performance at the Northampton business centre over the last year. The data bears it out, but I am not going to pretend that that means that every phone call is being picked up in a timely way. What I do know—I saw it somewhere; I have not identified it again in my papers—is that when the merger with the Salford business centre took place there was significant disruption. This was before my time. The waiting times for phone calls averaged above 40 minutes. No one is going to sit here and say that is good. What I am pleased to say is that, with real effort on the part of colleagues next to me and those who work for HMCTS, those calls are now being answered within three minutes. That is a vast improvement. Does that mean there are not still instances where people are ringing up their local county court to find out the status of their case and where it has got to and they are reaching a voicemail? I am sure that is happening. These are things that we want to iron out and improve because that is not the service that people expect. I do understand that, but I also want to recognise where improvements have been achieved, particularly in the last year.

It is a combination. Some are on paper; some are via the new system. It plays into the wider digitalisation, really.

Eventually, yes. Some claimants and litigants also want to deal with us on paper. We always have this paper function. As the Minister says, yes, we are striving towards further digitalisation. We accept there is a degree of unfinished business arising from HMCTS reform. Could I just say a bit about the telephones? The centralisation of telephones into the Civil National Business Centre is a relatively new thing. We only completed it in February of this year. They receive about 150,000 calls every month. Prior to this, calls were handled in individual county courts, but I would not say that service was any better. The reason why I say that is they were very unsophisticated telephone systems. There was very little management information. There was very little advanced telephony, which told us how many people were waiting or how long they had been waiting for. We do not really have a suitable comparator. I am hoping the court users will see and recognise this one day. Post-centralisation, we are seeing a vast improvement in the telephone system from call waiting times to abandonment rates. Those improvements are being brought about by the new technology in the Civil National Business Centre, which is improving our telephone service. At the same time, I accept that the performance over the last 18 months has not been what we would have wanted it to be.

If I may add another point about paper, at the other end of the spectrum is the issue of service. This is a good example of the Ministry of Justice, Ministers and the judiciary working together. The Civil Procedure Rule Committee is looking at the issue of service at the moment. Service is done on paper; you get it through the post. That committee is looking at pulling together a consultation on whether that can be done via email, which is a mode of communication that most parties must use, while putting in safeguards for those who perhaps do not use it. It is an issue at both ends: both the judgments being posted out and the service at the start. We are looking at where we can move away from the paper system.

I will ask colleagues to comment on the specific training that members of staff are provided with. Again, I want to acknowledge the role played by security staff and court ushers in assisting people at court and signposting them to where they need to go. We all know that going to court is a very intimidating experience by its nature, particularly if you have never experienced it before or if there is something fairly huge at stake for the individual. In those circumstances, court staff and court ushers, especially those who I have met, do a really good job. In addition to that, there is the legal support, to which we might come at some point, that the Government are investing in to provide people with assistance at court, particularly in areas such as possession claims, where again there is a lot on the line for people. I will ask others to comment on the specific training that staff get, but there is no doubt that all those actors within the court staff, in my experience and from all my interactions, provide a really important service to the public when they attend court.

Within HMCTS, we have a series of training programmes for all staff. We call it the human face of justice. Our staff are often the first point of call when people come in. Often, these people are in very difficult emotional situations. They do not know where the hearing room is. I am based in the Manchester Civil Justice Centre. It has 13 floors and 47 courts. People are coming through the door for adoption cases or money claim cases. These are ordinary members of the public. They do not know their way around off by heart. They need help. We have staff on every single floor. They are all trained to speak with the public and to give as much as they can. It is about empathy and compassion. It is about understanding the circumstances in which people come through the court doors and ensuring that we give the best service we can to every single person.

I will say something by way of introduction. Again, I have only been in this role since December. It is absolutely vital that under this Government, and indeed any Government, I imagine, that ensuring that people literally have access to justice is paramount. Ensuring physical access to court services is very important. Maybe Daniel is about to touch on this, but the majority of the court estate was constructed in the 1970s and 1980s before the more enlightened time of the Disability Discrimination Act when we understood fully our obligations to make this most important of public spaces accessible to all. The starting point in a lot of these buildings is not good. You just gave a description of an individual who had to go past bins, back entrances or what-have-you. This happens, and it is not okay. Our obligation, like any public service or any service, is to make reasonable adjustments to adapt our spaces such that they are accessible to absolutely everyone. One of the things I want to assure you—you will not be surprised—is that all our newer court buildings, such as Reading, central London and Blackpool, are all state of the art and fully accessible. In the meantime, the investment in our capital budget—we might come to this in a moment, and this Government are making additional investment over and above what the previous Government put into our buildings—is directed to precisely that, not just maintaining the buildings but ensuring they are fully accessible. Daniel, you wanted to give some specifics.

Yes. I do not have the actual number to hand, but there are very few buildings that are completely inaccessible. How we normally deal with this is by bringing those who cannot access the front entrance through an alternative entrance. That might be the staff entrance. The judge would also consider an application for a remote hearing. We might even move the hearing to another court, with the acceptance of the parties, if it were impossible to access. There are very few where it is completely inaccessible.

We can do that.

I just want to come back to some of the earlier questions that were asked. We had a meeting with practitioners and other stakeholders yesterday. Their general view was that things were better before centralisation. They even wondered whether it was an issue of policy or resources that telephone calls were not answered and emails were not responded to. One person gave the example that when an email is sent, you get an email back saying, “A response will be given within 10 weeks”. I know we are going to be talking about fixed recoverable costs later on, but, if we are talking about communication between courts and practitioners, one major complaint that was made was that there used to be a time when the court used to ring the lawyer to say whether the trial was still proceeding. That does not happen anymore. We are getting more cases taken out of the list. When it comes to fixed recoverable costs, once you have sent out the brief to counsel, you have to pay for the brief; you incur costs. There was a concern about too many adjournments taking place because there is not sufficient communication between the court and the practitioners. It really is a big issue that calls are not answered and emails are not responded to. That could solve so many problems where people want to know what is happening with their cases. Could you say a bit more about that? How can that be made better? How can we reduce the number of adjournments that are taking place? This is not only not giving people access to justice; it is multiplying the costs that are incurred.

As a general reflection on what you have just said, there is no doubt that there are serious inefficiencies in the system. There is a lack of two-way communication. The parties are unable to convey messages to the court and, equally, the court is unable to communicate with the parties. Clearly, where there are barriers to that, that creates huge inefficiencies and the frustrations that you have described. We have to work within the realms of what is possible. Within the fiscal realities, which are necessarily constrained—again, I am sure we are going to come on to that—how can we run the best system possible? That is the challenge. That is the challenge for me, as I take the reins, and for colleagues here. We have talked about centralisation and the improvements that we have seen within the business centre. That is not to be over-optimistic. This is just to recognise improvement where it happens. The data bears this out. We have to understand what led to that improvement and what we can do to address the sorts of impediments you are describing. Clearly, it is leading to a less efficient and less productive system, which in the most acute cases can lead to real barriers to accessing justice. If people are so frustrated that they walk away or miss their hearing, that is very serious indeed. I have no doubt that both staff and the judiciary operating within the system do their level best to make things work as well as they can. When it comes to questions of case management, efforts are being made, increasingly now with use of online virtual hearings, to respond to those requests nimbly. If that call is not getting through in the first place or if people are waiting endlessly and taking time out of the working day to do that, that is the sort of impact on productivity and growth that I am talking about. Those are precisely the operational challenges that we need to rise to meet. I am not denying them; I am recognising them. This is exactly the sort of improvement that we want to drive further. I do not know whether my operational colleagues want to comment.

The single biggest change that we can make to improve the way people communicate with the court is through increased digitalisation. The MyHMCTS service is available for legal professionals. It is open to 100,000 solicitors at 6,000 firms. It allows people to use a dashboard to track an individual case or manage many cases at an organisational level. The need to call or email the court is no longer there because you are in charge of the progression of the case. The information is transparent. You can upload and send documents in relation to another party sending documents. We are thinking about what the right thing to do is, whether it is centralisation or decentralisation back into courts. The answer actually lies in more digitalisation through the civil courts, more transparency and more power for users to manage their cases and see what is going on.

We do not necessarily have a budget. We have made a bid for further modernisation as part of the overall spending review process. Let me give you an example of that. I recognise that you went to Northampton. Of the 1.3 million or 1.4 million money claims going into Northampton, the vast majority—75%—are sent by bulk issuers. A small number of large companies are issuing claims on behalf of a wide number of organisations across the country. They send that data to us electronically. Even though it is a legacy system, it is still sent electronically. About 6% of those cases are defended. That is the paper. It adds up to a lot. It is still 100,000 cases. That is a lot of paper, if you are stacking it up. That is the next place to go. What would it cost? We estimate that it would cost somewhere between £6 million and £8 million to complete that. That would get us to a position in the civil courts of around 90% of cases being digital and being able to be accessed digitally. We are so close with reform. Building it out into a world-class digital service for all is right within our grasp. This is not a huge amount of investment, but these are difficult times.

Would it be helpful just to come back on the fixed recoverable costs point? You are correct. When the original FRC scheme was extended in October 2023, under the original rules in part 45, the advocacy fee was only recoverable if a case was adjourned within 24 hours of hearing. It did not take account of barristers or solicitors prepping beforehand. The Ministry of Justice worked with the Bar Council on revisions to those rules for April 2024, which allowed proportions of the advocate fee to be claimed for periods of time back. I am afraid I do not have those to hand. It will be in Practice Direction 45, table 10. The point of that was to recognise that a barrister might have started some work three days before the hearing has started. If the case settles at the last minute or there is an adjournment, it is right that they have the ability to recover a proportion of their costs based on that work. That was done in unison with the Bar Council. It was a really good point to recognise.

That is totally fair. I am talking about adjournments. Somebody said yesterday that some cases were adjourned and taken out of the list three times. That should not be happening.

Could I just make one final point about centralisation? The centralisation of county court work is not necessarily a new thing. For example, the Northampton business centre, as we used to call it, has existed for over 25 years. We also had a business centre in Salford that dealt with money claims in 2012. The concept of centralisation, which we do to build resilience, consistency and levels of expertise, is not a novel thing. As we have already said, one of the challenges of the last few years has been that we closed Salford and merged it with Northampton. That caused a degree of disruption. The stats from 2023 speak for themselves about the level of disruption. I just want to say to the Committee that centralisation is not something new. It has been part of the county courts for many years.

The point that is being made is that it is slightly worrying if practitioners—I have no reason to doubt what they say—are saying that the service is worse because you used to at least be able to ring somebody in a local court, find out whether the case was still in the list and get a response in that way. Now, whether you are trying to do it by telephone, email or in person, there is a communication barrier here. That could be for a variety of reasons. It is something that you should at least take on board because that is what we are being told very clearly by people who use it every day.

I can see how important telephones are. We collect a number of stats about telephones and contact, which we do not publish. In order to assist the Committee with its work, we could perhaps arrange for a publication of some of these telephone stats to assist you and hopefully prove to you and the users that the telephone service has improved.

We have mentioned Northampton a lot. As you say, we visited there. In fact, when the Master of the Rolls gave evidence, he told us there were three hot spots of inefficiency in the county court: the Civil National Business Centre in Northampton; the Central London County Court; and the lack of salaried district judges in London. You can respond to that general analysis if you want, but certainly our experience from being there is that the staff were working incredibly hard. A lot of them were doing very repetitive tasks, which were not terribly fulfilling. They were finding workarounds, using Microsoft Office systems, which they had simply brought in commercially, in order to avoid constantly printing out or scanning in documents endlessly. They were still sending 2,000 paper files a week by DX to local courts. You already mentioned processing 10,000 paper claims a month. This is the 77% of cases that are not front-to-back digitised. It is a sorry sight, I have to say. We felt a lot of sympathy for the staff who are having to work under those conditions and for the court users who are dealing with that situation. You mentioned a figure of £6 million to £8 million. Surely you must have a plan for curing those. There are not many other walks of modern life where digitisation would not play more of a part. If you think about almost all the commercial relations that individuals have or even our own practice of using IT and things of that kind, the court service appears to be a long way behind.

There are two strands to this. First, we are continuing all of the work we have done with digitalisation. The Minister spoke about that earlier in terms of both the wider county court and the work we are doing on the possession service at the moment to support the Government’s renters’ rights reforms. We are currently developing a digital service for possession, reusing a lot of the work that we have done through reform. In the civil courts, it is about moving into more complex cases. We think we can do it. It will take some time. We do have a plan. We need a little bit of investment to be able to do that. That is what will get the civil courts into a much better position in terms of user satisfaction and in terms of it working much faster and delivering better outcomes for citizens and businesses. If we look at our reformed systems, they are three times faster and we see much more engagement from defendant parties as well in terms of admitting the claim or part-admitting the claim. There is more engagement than we see in the other service tracks at a much earlier stage. It is always the right thing for civil justice to have both parties engaged in it. While I have the floor, I just wanted to come back on a couple of other points. Earlier in the hearing, you asked about recovery from the pandemic and how long that will take. It is demonstrable that timeliness changed once the pandemic started. From 2000 to 2019, it is more or less 30 weeks every year. From 2019, it changes up to 50 weeks. We have seen some inroads into that. There has been a decrease of four weeks for small claims this year. One of the biggest factors is the small claims mediation service and the wide increase in that. About 35% of all small claims allocated to track are now being referred into mediation. That is going to make a significant difference because we can still utilise the judicial capacity that we have, get those cases out of the system and bring that waiting time down. For the general user, the wider set of people going through mediation, 80% of cases are being resolved in under 20 weeks. That is what a much better service looks like: justice being delivered for people with small claims in under 20 weeks.

It was mentioned yesterday that you could be waiting nine months or even up to a year to get a cost and case management conference listed for the case to get started. Are we going to be able to get to a stage where that will be much reduced?

I do not know where that was.

With multi-track cases, you have a cost management hearing and a case management conference, and then directions are made telling the parties what they need to do to progress the case. Parties can be waiting nine months for the case to be listed to have such a conference, sometimes even longer. The effect of that, as was mentioned earlier, is that sometimes claimants just give up or they say, “I am going to settle this case for a lesser sum because I cannot put up with the delay of the claim progressing.”

I meant in different parts of the country. What we have seen is that there are different capacity constraints in different parts of the country. Generally, as a broad rule, in the north things go through quicker; in the south things are taking longer for a number of different reasons. On the multi-track point, it is very rare that users give up on a multi-track case given the values that are at stake.

They will settle for a lesser sum.

That is the nature of civil justice. A huge function of civil justice is it is an arena in which parties are encouraged under their own endeavours and under the endeavours of the judiciary to find a way to settle and arbitrate as the case moves through proceedings. If we are looking at multi-track cases, we know that just under half resolve within 21 weeks. That is how quick the settlement comes. We know that around about 85% are settling in under 70 weeks. We then have this small number—just because they are a small number does not mean they do not deserve a better service—where it takes between 77 and 109 weeks. The Minister has spoken very passionately about that before. It is not good enough and it needs to change. Those are the areas of the service where we need to continue working with the judiciary to find new ways of reducing that number. One of those is virtual regions. Do we have enough capacity in the overall system? Yes. It is about matching where the demand is in the system to where the capacity is so we can use judges available in the north to hear cases from the south and get waiting times on an even keel no matter where you are in the country.

Just very quickly, I am all for settlement. I am all for early settlement. Cases should be settled before they get to a hearing. What should not happen is that somebody decides to accept a lesser sum—less than what their case is worth—just because the delay is excessive. That is something that we need to avoid.

I agree.

Can I throw out one quick further question? You mentioned bulk issuing. Who are the main users of that? What proportion of cases is it? You said 1.3 million cases are going out of Northampton.

Generally about 75% of money claims come to us via secure data transfer. There are probably about six large companies issuing most of those claims.

Do you know who they are?

Yes. It is companies such as Overdales, formerly known as Lowells—the Lowells Group now sits under the banner of Overdales—and Mortimer Clarke. Those are really the two biggest ones. There is also DWF Group. They are responsible for about 90% of the enforcement work that comes off the back end of default judgments. Of those money claims, around 65% go to default judgment within 28 days.

We visited the Central London county court last year, and we were really impressed with how hard the staff worked and how diligently they just got on with their jobs. We did see lots of paper files. The place was overflowing with paper files. We have already discussed this but when a case is transferred from the High Court to the Central London county court, it is taken off the digital system. Why do we have a workable digital filing system in the High Court but not the county court? Are we going to get that sorted?

Again, I am happy to bring in others, but, as we have acknowledged, the digitisation is only part complete. That is the distinction that I was drawing earlier. There are areas where we have that end-to-end digitisation. Coming back to the earlier point about the communications around the progress of a case, when a family member is making a journey and you want to know where they are or where their flight has reached, you can track that on a dashboard. In an ideal world, that is precisely where we would be in a digitised system. That is where digitisation and AI tools can potentially take us. I agree that it is frustrating that you can initiate a case or issue a claim in a digital space, with all the uploading the files, but that then has to come off that system because we do not yet have the capacity to support that in the digital space all the way through and build on to that the tools that would allow you to track that. Coming back to Jason’s earlier point about what the challenge is and the solution looks like, the solution is within reach. The technology is out there, and we have done it. We have proof of concepts with the online money claims space and the damages space. It is what we are going to be able to do in the space of possession claims after the first piece of work since the Labour Government have been in charge. You will have a much more frictionless system. You asked the question why, and it is the right question. It is because the digitisation is incomplete. There is one other point that I wanted to pick up on, if I may. We mentioned default judgments and the fact that the vast majority of cases within the county court sphere are not being defended. We talk about the benefits of digitisation being in addressing the sorts of challenges that the Committee has been making, rightly, to us around communication, timeliness and inefficiencies. However, it also leads to an increase in defendant participation. In money claims, where you have end-to-end digitisation, the engagement of defenders is around 43%, as compared with 11% in non-reform systems. You talk about access to justice and people participating in their own cases. It increases significantly if you operate within a digital system. The rate of settlement also increases. It is not just efficiencies for users. It frees up judicial time so that judges are spending their time doing the thing they do best and operating on those very difficult and more complex claims that require judicial resolution. It is not just that it all happens much more speedily. It is three times faster than the non-reform systems. It is that it has all these other benefits for justice as well. To this point about starting online in the legacy systems and then coming back down to paper, I share your frustration. That is why we are developing a plan. It is why we are bidding in the spending review precisely to get the allocation to enable us to continue with this work. Possession claims are going to happen. It is exciting that we are working with the Master of the Rolls and the Online Procedure Rule Committee. We have empowered them—I have signed the statutory instrument—to develop the rules that are going to govern that space. This is a very important area of litigation. We can commit to that, and I would like to commit to much more so that we can alleviate precisely the challenge you are describing.

Just on the point about the Central London County Court and the two judicial systems, you are right. In the High Court you have CE-File, which covers 12 different jurisdictions. In the county court we have a plethora of different systems. Some of the challenge is that local practice at the High Court is to transfer claims down to the Central London county court. There are about 500,000 of those cases. That creates problems when you have to move from CE-File to a different system. One of the questions that need to be posed as part of this—conversations are happening—is around the different limits of the High Court and the county court. For example, claims can only be issued in the High Court if they are over £100,000 for a normal contract claim; for a PI claim, it is £50,000. Those limits have not really changed since the 1990s in some instances. One of the questions would be about getting the claims in the right place in the first instance. Saving on that re-keying work would deliver quite a lot of efficiencies not only to the user but to the court system. That is one of the examples where you can use the court rules to ensure you get efficiency throughout.

Do HMCTS staff have the digital tools and the training to deliver an effective service at the moment, or is that still a work in progress?

I will say something specific about central London. Central London is like no other county court. Yes, it is a business property court, but it has links to and proximity with the High Court. It has a greater proportion of multi-track cases and a larger number of circuit judges. It does specialist work. It is a really unique operation. If you were to talk to the staff in Central London county court and maybe even in other county courts, they have to use multiple systems, whether it is digital or paper. That causes a degree of inefficiency and frustration. The point is accepted. The other point that I wanted to make about training—this is not peculiar to the county court—is that it is very difficult to run court operations in central London. Let me illustrate with the Central London county court. There are about 80 members of staff there. Approximately 30 of them are agency staff. That is not by design. That is not something we have chosen to do. Given the nature of recruitment, retention and, to be brutally frank, our pay scales in central London, we cannot compete with the likes of DWP or HMRC. That causes a degree of staff turnover and attrition. It runs at about 23% in central London. For every 100 members of staff, 23 will leave. That brings about particular challenges in terms of staff training and levels of expertise. Again, this comes back to the point about why we centralise certain things. Why do we centralise in places such as Northampton, Stoke-on-Trent, Leicester and so on? Part of that is because we get better levels of recruitment and retention. As I said, it is not peculiar to the county court. We see this in the zone 1 ground courts as well. Understandably, very few of our staff live in zone 1. There is a cost to travel in and so on. All of that together shows the particular challenge in the Central London county court. Before I finish speaking, I want to pay tribute to the staff there. This is the point that the Master of the Rolls has recognised about the recent improvements. I think it was described as Dunkirk spirit or something. The staff really do have difficulties working with some of the systems and they face some unique challenges. We have seen vast improvements in central London. We are not the finished article, but we have seen vast improvements in central London over the course of the last year. I am hopeful that they will continue.

That is what we call the attrition rate. If we recruit 100 staff, 23 will leave over the course of a year.

The Association of HM District Judges said that there are “too few staff” to support the work of the courts. Lord Justice Colin Birss said it is a “constant frustration” that people are leaving HMCTS to go to other parts of the public sector that pay better. It is an issue. That probably explains why we have particular problems in London and the south-east, given the cost of accommodation, the cost of living and so forth. What is being done to address that?

In terms of the resources provided to the county court, the overall staff allocation, which is about 2,800 members of staff, has been broadly unchanged for a decade. The money is there, but the frustration that the judges are expressing is about that turnover, about the recruitment and retention challenge. We get people in; we train them up; they depart; and we start all over again. That speaks to the levels of expertise and training. We are in discussions with the Treasury and MoJ over pay scales in HMCTS. The salaries speak for themselves, really. We do not currently compete with the Home Office, DWP or HMRC.

If I can just move on to judges, the Lady Chief Justice and the Master of the Rolls have both raised concerns about over-reliance on fee-paid judges and said that having fee-paid judges creates a less smooth disposition of justice. Do you agree with that?

I want to start, as I have done previously, by paying tribute to the judges who work across our justice system and particularly in the county court. I had the pleasure of sitting down with members of the bench at Bromley last week. We had a really good constructive discussion. They do an incredible job. They touched on the same theme that you have just raised, which is particularly acute in London and the south-east. The judicial capacity constraint is real, which does lead to an over-reliance on fee-paid judges. It is important to say that the use of fee-paid judges and deputy DJs is creating the pipeline for salaried judges of the future. This is where practitioners earn their spurs, if you like. It is where they gain experience, decide whether that is the career path they want to take and build experience and enthusiasm for the role. I do not want, in any way, to denigrate the role of the fee-paid judge because it is important. It is a resource that we can deploy flexibly where it is needed. There is no doubt that the ideal position is to have salaried judges who can build up that expertise, who are able to take on a complex and varied caseload and who can see cases through to their conclusion, from case management hearing through to full trial. That is why we have increased the salaried district bench. It has increased almost 15% since 2018. We have 50-plus more salaried judges than we had in 2018, which represents progress. There is no doubt that, particularly in those parts of the country where the backlogs are more significant, we need to recruit more salaried judges to take up those positions in order to help us get through the volume of work that is coming through. That is why we are carrying out a dedicated targeted recruitment exercise in London and the south-east as we speak. When it comes to judicial capacity, the other thing to say is that we recognise that judging is, like for so many of our public servants and members of staff, a vocation. Many of these practitioners would earn more money if they had stayed in private practice, but they do it because they recognise both the rewarding nature of the job and that it is a public service. One of the things that I have heard from speaking to members of the judiciary and the county court bench is that they love what they do. They are passionate about what they do. It is not so much a question of pay. They too have issues with the conditions in which they are working: the buildings are often in poor condition; and they have to deal with the challenges of a largely paper-based system, which has inefficiencies. All that can be demoralising when they want to serve the public and do a really good job of their work. We recognise that. Again, when we talk about the improvement plans and the ambition that we have around digitisation, all that is relevant to the question you are asking me about how we recruit and retain our salaried judges and help improve the conditions in which they are working.

Thank you very much for that. That corresponds directly with what we were told yesterday about trying to persuade somebody who is in practice to leave and become a salaried judge. It is a vocation. They might end up being paid less as a salaried judge than they were earning in practice, but, as you say, it is the vocational element that attracts them. It was also mentioned that very often we have crumbling court buildings or temporary heating systems that do not work very well. That can be a put-off for judges wanting to make that transition. Hopefully in time we will get the court buildings repaired and we will not have those problems anymore.

I am sorry to interrupt you, but, just on that, there are no quick fixes here. We are making additional investment in the court estate. I should add that one of the judges last week made the points that you and I have just exchanged, but then he concluded by saying, “I do the best job in the world. I love it, and I would not change it for the world.” That is not something that we should take for granted. That should not allow us to be complacent about any of the challenges we have been talking about. In contrast to the picture that Daniel painted around the challenges around retention, I have also met a number of members of staff who had been working in that particular county court. In fact, most of the team leaders that I met had been within HMCTS for over 30 years. People do love the work. They value the work, and they find it rewarding. Again, that does not mean we can take them for granted. It does not mean that we should not be ambitious about improving the conditions in which they work. I am hugely ambitious for them. However, I can only report back what was said to me. The work is rewarding, and they love it.

I have one more question on the recruitment of judges. It is really pleasing to hear that you are going through a recruitment process. It was mentioned yesterday that in the past there have been recruitment exercises, but before that exercise is completed a stop is made to the recruitment process because of a lack of money. Can you give some assurance that, in future, when there is an exercise of recruitment, it will proceed to the end to ensure we get those judges recruited?

What I can say is that any recruitment exercise that is carried out has to be, first, within budget and, secondly, commensurate and targeted at the need that is there. At the moment, our current district judge exercise, which we launched in November, is for 80 vacancies in London and the south-east only. That targeted and location-based approach is a new way of doing things. We will have to see how successful it is because we know, again, there are cost of living pressures and pressures of other sorts in that region. You are right. Any recruitment exercise has to be consistent, but it also has to be commensurate with the need that needs to be met. I also cannot meet a need that is not within budget because we have to have a balanced budget. We are advertising for those 80 vacancies because those are the 80 vacancies that we need to fill. We would not be doing so if we did not think we could fulfil that demand.

You have the budget for those 80 vacancies.

I am confident. We would not be advertising for 80 vacancies if we did not have the budget to meet 80 salaried roles in that location.

Can I just add two points that might be of benefit to the Committee? We understand the challenges. We have commissioned the Senior Salaries Review Body to commence a major review of pay to understand whether that is a barrier, particularly, as you say, in the south‑east and London. As the Minister said, these individuals quite frequently will be leaving very lucrative legal careers. Looking at the non-pay aspect, we have asked a Cambridge academic to conduct a piece of work that looks at motivations for individual judges to apply. Some of that research will allow us to target campaigns, target some of that additional work and focus on areas that appeal to people that we might have otherwise been missing.

We have talked quite a lot about the reform programme. Tessa has some questions on where it goes next. When we had the Master of the Rolls in front of us, he said it was a terrible shame that, after nine years and £1 billion spent, we have still only achieved, effectively, a quarter of what the target was in relation to that. Do you agree with that? We now have a lot of incomplete systems and a lot of dual-running. In some cases, that is making the task harder.

The reform programme and its operation has just come to a conclusion. The design of that operation, its execution, its funding and the decisions made around it were before my time.

I accept that. You are free to criticise it as you wish.

I am sure that those who conceived of it shared many of the same ambitions that I have for our civil justice system and would have wanted it to reach far further into the system, given the efforts and the input that they made. We have a duty to learn the lessons about why the programme fell short of its very laudable ambitions. It is important to recognise the successes and the foundation that it has laid. We would be in a very different place if reform had not been initiated at all. One of those lessons was the underestimation of the complexity of what it would take to digitise so many different types of work end to end in the system. That is part of the reason why large parts of the work were left incomplete and taken out of scope. One of the lessons is the need to complete smaller parts of the puzzle end to end, show that we can do it and deliver for all the users and participants within that area of the system end to end. I do not want to gloss over the failure to realise the full ambition of the reform programme. At the same time, the £60 million-odd investment in the digitisation of the civil justice system and the strides forward that were made in online money claims and in damages claims have been significant. They show how it can be done. Now we have done those things, we can take the best bits of them and put those to work when we are effecting the digitisation of possessions claims, for example, as a first step and in anything else that we might want to do. I recognise that it fell well short, but it has given us a foundation. Now I am in the hot seat, my job is to make sure we build on that foundation, learn the lessons of what went wrong with the delivery of the programme and make sure we do not repeat those lessons. Technology is developing and innovating fast all around us. I was in Chicago last week leading a delegation of our law tech companies. Some of the technology will blow your mind. We would not have been sitting here talking about law tech and AI in quite the same way when reform was initiated. What we perhaps thought of as digitisation took a quite different form. It is about building on the foundations of what reform has shown us we can do as a proof of concept, not biting off more than we can chew and remaining ambitious while taking from new technologies, particularly in the area of AI and generative AI.

I was going to ask this later but, as you have raised it, do you have any plans to use AI to improve efficiency in the county court?

We have a number of plans. Within the Ministry of Justice, we have established a Justice AI Unit, which is looking at different areas of work where we can pilot potential reforms. These pilots need to show that they are safe and robust, because they have to be safe and robust and accurate to operate in the justice space, and we must demand the highest standards of accuracy. The sorts of things we are looking at are the transcription of oral decisions, translation services and data-driven listing. AI can help us be more efficient in terms of the decisions that happen in that space. We are also looking at providing support to judges. We have talked about how we support our judges to do what they do best. We think AI can help—this is going to be tested by the Justice AI Unit—with developing clear case chronologies or summarising evidence. These are the sorts of things that would save judges time to free them up to do what they do best. This is exactly the space where we are being proactive. In conclusion, on the specific question about reform, I recognise assessment of the Master of the Rolls, but I also want to recognise the successes and how we can build on those. We are not just standing still; we are always looking to innovate and be ambitious for our civil justice system.

That is right.

I can answer the last question very easily. It is anticipating the changes that will be introduced by the Renters’ Rights Bill. That is exactly as it should be.

The fact that the funding source comes from MHCLG reflects the fact that we are a single Government and we are seeking to realise the ambitions of that piece of legislation. The extension of renters’ rights and the balance that that piece of legislation strikes between renters and landlords is only as tangible as the extent to which those rights are enforceable in the real world. The principal lesson from the reform programme, as I said, is about not trying to do lots of things at the same time, hitting obstacles along the way and therefore not being able to complete processes end to end. The work on the identification of possession claims is happening in close conjunction with the Master of the Rolls and the Online Procedure Rule Committee, which has now been given the powers to develop the rules that should govern those possession claims. It is about identifying a discrete but important area of work where we know we have both the funding in place and the capacity within the system, including the policy resource—that is why I mentioned the rules—to develop and execute the thing from end to end. We are not trying to do possession claims, other more complex claims and other types of debt claims all at once. The lesson that we have learned is that that is something that Governments struggle with. We have identified a really very dynamic area where the Government have set out an ambitious piece of legislative reform. We want to make sure our county courts are delivering on this piece of the puzzle. The principal lesson—again, if there are other lessons that other people want to come in on, please do—is the fact that we have identified this discrete area and we have the funding and operational capacity to deliver it end to end within this Parliament, so that those renters’ rights that are written on paper can be vindicated in reality.

I just have a couple of extra points, really quickly. We are going to build it on the same technical platform as we have across the rest of the county court. We are reusing 12 of the common components. Each one of these common components allows us to put together a digital service. People can pay a fee in the same way; we can take documents and bundle them up in the same way. We have those design patterns. When we put them together, somewhat like a digital Lego set, it means we can build these new services much quicker. The biggest lesson learned from our experience with civil is to design against complexity and to try to keep it simple. If the rules are complex, as Steve mentioned before, is there a way we can make it simpler? Can we work with the Online Procedure Rule Committee to find much simpler ways of designing the process rather than trying to design very complex things into digital systems? As the Minister said, we have also learned to do it end to end. Do not do bits of services; do it end to end. People like it better. You get much more feedback. Test, test, test. We need to make sure it works, get it right and then get it out to all the users. In a nutshell, those are the lessons that we have learned.

Yes.

The other side got there a couple of weeks earlier. Part of our development team did a session in the Lords a couple of weeks ago giving them all the background and showing them how the system will work. We would absolutely be delighted to do something similar.

Are you asking whether we are testing the product, whether we are testing the actual system?

Yes. When I say, “Test, test, test,” I do not mean developers just testing that the code is good and sound; I am talking about testing with real end users, with landlords, tenants, staff and judges, and them saying, “Yes, this has got it right. I understand the language. I understand the questions. I know exactly what I am doing”.

Yes, it will. It will not involve every single member of the county court staff, but they will be a small proportion of the user group that will be testing the user requirements and making sure each of the screens work. It is a case of going through each of the screens, making sure all the questions are the right questions, that they are lawful and that judges and members of the public, both landlords and tenants, understand. It is a laborious process, but that is what the testing process is. It is about going through it stage by stage and making sure each part of it works.

Yes.

It was descoped.

You are right that enforcement is key because that is ultimately what you are after. If you are a claimant and you secure an order, whether it is for a money charge, possession or whatever, it is only worth the paper it is written on if it is capable of enforcement. As you will be well aware, there are all sorts of different enforcement methods. Ultimately, what is appropriate and proportionate in the case is up to the discretion of the judge making the order. There is a recognition that county court bailiffs do important but by its nature very difficult work. They face unique challenges in doing that. There are certain things that are already happening that are making some of that work easier. Specifically, the introduction of automated payment systems, which enable the meeting and discharging of orders, is decreasing some of the demand on bailiffs. By making the payment system automated and easier for people to comply with, there is less for bailiffs to do. There are other things that we can do to support the challenging work that bailiffs often have to do. For example, the use of body cameras is being tested and explored. That protects both parties in that scenario and helps to make sure people are engaging in an appropriate way. This is something that I have discussed with representatives from the ECB. I now cannot remember what the “C” stands for.

It is “Conduct”.

Yes, the Enforcement Conduct Board. I have met with the ECB. It is a body that cover 96% of enforcement officials. They do brilliant work in terms of regulating the conduct of bailiffs across the piece, not just county court bailiffs but other private actors as well. It has been suggested that putting the ECB on a statutory footing would elevate their status and ensure that all practitioners in this space came under their auspices and were subject to a code of conduct. My Department is looking very closely at that. Some of this is about technology; some of it is about regulation and system design. You are absolutely right to reference that end of the piece. We started talking about issuing claims and service, but enforcement is really important. I want the Committee to be aware that I am looking very closely at this.

We have already discussed fixed recoverable costs and early resolution of cases. Can I just ask a couple of questions on that? I understand that the rationale behind fixed recoverable costs is to reduce and bring certainty to costs. What impact has the expansion of the fixed recoverable costs regime had on access to justice? We talked about delays. Have delays undermined the effectiveness of fixed recoverable costs?

My own view and the view of the Department is that the extension of the fixed recoverable costs regime has been beneficial. That is why we have extended it. The effect has been to make costs more proportionate. It has given parties, individuals and particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, that otherwise may not have been able to litigate their case certainty by being able to understand upfront what their liabilities may be. The evidence suggests that it has also helped to encourage settlement and thereby reduce the burden on the court. There is a systems benefit, but there is also the benefit to SMEs and others of more modest means to have that certainty, upon entering the litigation space, about what their cost liability may be, should they have to pay those costs. We have seen the benefit of that. It is why we have extended it.

The Civil Procedure Rule Committee considered whether to conduct an interim review in June and decided to push that back to October because not enough evidence had gone through the system at that time. There has been a public commitment by the committee to do a full review in October 2026 and to consider uprating with inflation and a couple of specific areas, such as the impact on vulnerable people, which I know was a concern particularly for the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers.

On the issue of early settlement, members of the Select Committee visited the Civil National Business Centre in Northampton. We were really impressed with the small claims mediation service and the number of settlements that were achieved further to that. What plans are there to expand that service and to integrate mediation to the civil justice system generally?

That is a great question. You are absolutely right to highlight the amazing results that we are seeing from having altered the choice architecture and made it a requirement that anybody issuing a small claim has to mediate. A settlement rate of 40%, given the volume of cases, is staggering and we want to build on that. We can see what the results are. We are looking very carefully at how we can expand and embed that within other aspects of the county court’s work and potentially within some of the other tracks. We have only just done this. It is relatively new, but the results are astounding. They are exactly where we want to be, first, in terms of reducing conflict and, secondly, in terms of reducing the demand pressures on the system. It is good news all round. We probably want a little bit more time to evaluate that, but then we will look to explore how we can expand it potentially into other areas where we should be encouraging mediation. I look at this across the civil justice piece. There may be conversations when I come back to Committee next time—who knows?—about the new Employment Rights Bill. Again, there will be a big expansion of rights and a huge emphasis on how we can expand and invest in mediation in another area of great societal conflict. We should be looking for every opportunity not just to find efficiencies but to build in alternative dispute resolution. I am really glad you highlighted that as the final question because it is an area of real success and one that bodes really well for the future of the civil justice system.

Just to add to that, it has been a real success in terms of being able to put the capacity in place and then having people responding to that and referring cases into it. Looking at the data, there is still more evaluation that we need to do to understand how the settlement rate drops off and its relationship to the type and value of case. In broad terms, as the value of a case goes up, the probability of settlement starts to reduce. You need to balance all these factors.

Not to disagree with you, Jason, but even if you do not get a settlement, a narrowing of the issues of itself has value.

This is the integration into the civil justice system. That is how you make mediation not just a one-off chance for the parties to resolve the case but actually part of the system. You narrow down the issues and then carry that across into the substantive system itself.

There is one final thing that the Committee needs to be aware of. In the recent Churchill judgment, the Court of Appeal fundamentally made quite significant changes about the ability of courts to order dispute resolution. There is a piece to look at the impact of that judgment on users and then it will be for Government to consider whether there is a response.

We clearly could continue. I am sorry to cut both the witnesses and the members of the Committee off, but we are going to have to stop there. I just want to say thank you. It is good that we have ended on a fairly positive note. In all the concerns and criticisms that you have heard, I hope you have also appreciated our great respect for what the staff of HMCTS are doing. Thank you very much for your time this afternoon. We are adjourning now. We will sit again on 29 April, when we will be looking at miscarriages of justice and particularly what is happening around the Criminal Cases Review Commission. It would be very helpful if there were an interim chair in place by that time, which is within your purview, Minister.

I think there may be. There is progress in that regard. It is not for me to make that announcement today, but there is certainly progress in that regard. Who knows? You may have an interim chair by the time of your Committee.

Let us end on that also positive note. Thank you.