Martin Partington: Spotlight on the Justice System

There are currently six projects associated with the Family Justice system.

1.Online divorce

This project aims to deliver a transformed national end-to-end digital service for individuals and their legal representatives to make an application to legally end their marriage or civil partnership and resolve associated financial issues.

The first stage – supporting applications for uncontested divorce, and allowing digital upload of marriage certificates – was rolled out nationally from 30 April 2018. By mid-September 2018, over 13,500 on-line applications had been received. Fewer than 1% of applications have contained errors that meant they needed to be resubmitted, compared to over 40% of the old paper forms.

The Government is now testing an online system, to be used by legal representatives, for Financial Remedy consent orders.

2 Online probate for personal applicants

This project aims to provide a digital, user-designed application form and a new case management system to actively manage probate applications. The project will create a simpler, digital process for users, as well as reducing the cost and time spent processing applications. To date the service has received 3,862 applications with just over 3,194 grants of probate having been issued.

3 Family public law

This project will make the family public law process more efficient, ensuring the court, parties and their representatives have access to the right information, at the right time, to help decide the best outcomes for children involved in public law cases.

In particular, it will allow evidence to be submitted and shared electronically and cases can be managed much more securely and effectively.

It will also allow orders to be written and produced in real time in court (in many cases), meaning that everyone leaves with immediate clarity on what has been agreed.

The first parts of the new system to be developed are now being tested.

4.Adoption

Following the first stage of the work on family public law, there is a project to digitise the adoption process for both public and private law cases, again developing systems to manage these cases more securely and effectively. Once all the parts are complete, they will fit together so that cases can move seamlessly from one to another.

The plan is for this work to start imminently and to run alongside the public law service development.

5. Court of Protection

This project will be to enable people using the Court of Protection to initiate and manage their cases online. This work will begin in Spring 2019.

6. Private Family Law

Later, the project will move to develop and implement systems and processes to enable private family law litigants to initiate and manage their cases online – again, fitting together seamlessly. This work is expected to begin in Summer 2019.