Probate - how long?

Eddie2023

That is shocking 

deewillow

@Emjam - thats good to hear of one being processed from August already. I also submitted 2nd week of August. Can I ask please did you hear anything from Probate offices between the 'received your documents' status and them granting probate? Did you ever have an email to say that it was actively being reviewed/in progress? I would say my mums was a pretty simple one, no IHT to pay and had letter from HMRC a while back confirming they had passed the summary info form to probate. Wasn't sure if you were kept update along the way or not? Thanks and sending speedy wishes to those still waiting

StrugglingExecutor

Joining this thread......

I completed the online application on Monday 23 October. 

The website took my payment and I received an email confirmation of payment. However the screen then reverted back to 'pay and submit application'. Basically it looks like they have taken my money but not submitted my application online.

I called them on Thursday and my payment ref number is now married up to the Case ID number. The status on the main page has been changed (by the payment department) and now says SENT in green but when you click on the case ID for more information it still says 'pay and submit application'.

After calling them, I've followed their advice and have today sent the original Will & copy death certificate via Tracked Mail (with a coversheet I've drafted myself).   I even had to ask them what documents to send (and look online for the address to send them to).

I assume I should have had an email through giving me the postal address etc, but all I have is screens with the information I've described above.

Basically I'm totally blind to my own application.  At least that gives me a licence to keep ringing them.

jarv81178

Tattycat6 said:

Probate granted today.  25 weeks since I applied.  13 weeks since I answered their one query.

Congratulations!

I received my interim payment last week... hoping to get the rest before christmas from my solicitor

Eddie2023

Data for Sept has been released and wait times are marginally worse than Aug. We're at 10 wks and I've just got through on the chat but they won't tell me anything because we used a solicitor. Probably at the back of the queue now for being a trouble maker and not waiting 16 wks through our solicitor !

SnowMan

At very early stages but this is my timeline so far for an estate where the inheritance tax forms IHT400 and IHT421 are required but no inheritance tax is payable. I'm applying for probate as named executor

Day 1 (4th Nov 2023): IHT400 and IHT421 posted to HMRC special delivery

Day 3 (6th Nov) : IHT400 and IHT421 arrived at HMRC and mail signed for

Day 24 (27th Nov): Letter from HMRC sent to me to say they had emailed IHT421 to HMCTS probate

Day 28 (1st Dec): Above letter from HMRC received

Day 28 (1st Dec): Probate application submitted online to the probate registry (HMCTS probate)

Day 29: (2nd Dec): Will and codicils sent special delivery to Harlow document scanning centre

Day 31: (4th Dec): Will and codicils arrived at Harlow and signed for

Day 38 (11th Dec): Email from HMCTS probate to say they have received the documents (will and codicils)

SnowMan

October average probate timescales are due out from HMCTS on Thursday.

In the meantime I was looking again at the September figures, and had an attempt at working out the Probate Registry backlog.

They don't provide this figure but you can estimate it by subtracting the number of grants of probate granted since April 2020 from the number of grants applied for from April 2020. This is on the assumption that every application eventually leads to a grant. And then adding this difference to the number of cases in the system at April 2020 gives you the outstanding cases.

I very roughly estimate there were 30,000 submitted applications around April 2020 awaiting a grant and that might be the steady state when things are operating vaguely reasonably but still not very well. But at the moment there might be 100,000 cases in the system. So the backlog is in the region of 70,000 cases.

It all seems to correlate well with the proportionate big increase in average times to obtain probate.

Note the sudden increase in average times in April 2023 might have been because they pushed resource to deal with some of the older outstanding cases. And it's not clear if they are still disproportionately working on those older cases.

The relative volume of cases in the system at any time is a good indication of how long it will take on average to obtain probate about 4 months later (given that is about how long probate is taking on average at the moment). And so it's not looking good going forward given the backlog has been increasing. At least in September for the first time in a long while there were more grants than submissions and so the backlog slightly decreased.

Incidentally the ICAEW said here the backlog was 8,000 mid year. But that is a clearly misleading figure and must be based on the number of cases on some arbitrary definition that have passed a certain duration without the grant being issued. But the real backlog is nearer 70,000 I would suggest.    

SnowMan

The October 2023 HMCTS statistics of probate application numbers and average waits for grant are out today

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/hmcts-management-information-october-2023

Here is some of that data of average wait times in table format. Slight improvement in wait times overall compared with September. Digital stopped timescales are the only category which has bucked the trend and mean time has increased

SnowMan

And here are the mean wait times since 2020 shown in chart form

SnowMan

For the second month running more grants were issued than were submitted. This is my chart estimating how many probate applications are in the system i.e. they have been submitted but await the grant. This would indicate that we would expect the average wait times to come down a bit in the next 3 months. It's going to take a long time to clear the backlog though and meaningfully reduce wait times to sensible waits.