In a post on the Inside HMCTS blog entitled Modernising courts and tribunals: what we’ve achieved and learned, Nick Goodwin, Chief Executive of HMCTS, reflects – with some institutional self-congratulation – on the formal completion at the end of March 2025 of the Courts and Tribunals Reform project, which was launched in 2016 with the aim of digitising and modernising all court processes and developing an online court.

“Over the last few years, while preserving the fundamentals of our justice system for all those who use and need it, we’ve transformed lots of the technical infrastructure and systems we use to administer courts and tribunals. … This quiet revolution has moved us from paper to digital, combined local knowledge with national resilience, stabilised and secured our systems, and set us up for the 21st century.”

He goes on to list some of the programme’s main achievements, while acknowledging that

“completing a programme of this scale in a large operational environment has proved challenging. Originally due to conclude in 2022, the programme has taken longer which incurred more cost and we haven’t been able to deliver everything envisaged at the outset.”

This is something of an understatement. While some of the challenges have been unexpected – the covid-19 pandemic found the courts surprisingly underprepared for the rapid development of online hearing technology – some of them have been simply mismanaged, such as the sell-off of court buildings in order to help fund the development, and experiments with flexible operating hours (FOH) to make better use of the ones that remained (but without making sure there were judges and lawyers available to deal with the work) – all of which left the system unable to cope with the massive backlogs that the pandemic then made much worse.

So what began as a four-year project costing well under £1 bn then morphed into a six (possibly even seven) year project, with a price ticket touching £1.2 bn, and has now lasted almost nine years and cost £1.5 bn. And much of the planned work still hasn’t been done, even now, having been iteratively declared ‘out of scope’.

We are where we are, one might say. Nothing is perfect and the best is the enemy of the good. But how did we get here?

False dawns

One of the most astonishing things about the Reform programme is not that it took several years longer than expected or that it cost far more than was initially budgeted – such overruns are almost routine for big government IT contracts. No, the surprising thing is that it only began in 2016.

This quiet revolution, as Godwin calls it, in the processes of litigation – essentially replacing all physical and paper processes with computerised processes – could happily have begun 30 years earlier, in 1986, by which time most businesses were using computers. That was when Sir Henry Brooke (Brooke LJ), in contributing evidence to the Civil Justice Review looking at the modernisation of civil court processes, suggested that a judge should be responsible for overseeing and putting into effect ideas for harnessing modern technology to ensure its implementation.

If not then, the revolution could certainly have begun ten years later, in 1996, when Lord Woolf, who had been tasked with the modernisation of the civil court procedural rules, called for the introduction of modern IT into our civil processes. By that time email and the internet were already in wide public use.

Or it could have begun thirteen years later in 2009, when Sir Rupert Jackson again called for IT modernisation, or in 2013, when Sir Michael Briggs did so again, as part of the much-needed modernisation of civil justice.

But no. As the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett of Maldon remarked in 2018, at all these moments ‘the attention of Government was elsewhere’. He listed all these false dawns in a lecture (The Age of Reform, given as the Sir Henry Brooke Annual Lecture 2018) expressing the hope that the HMCTS Reform programme – which was eventually launched in 2016, with initial funding of £700m promised by then Lord Chancellor Michael Gove MP in November 2015 (though a rather less generously funded version of it had already been announced by his predecessor, Chris Grayling MP, in March 2014) – would at last deliver what had been called for in one form or another for the previous 30 years. By the time of that lecture, the project was already two years into its initial four-year spree – later extended by another two years, and only now completed after further delays almost nine years after its launch (and eleven after Chris Grayling’s original announcement).

But then the other astonishing thing is that, even as so late a starter, the Courts and Tribunals Service of England and Wales was, in the global sense, an ‘early adopter’. Apart from the Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT) in Canada, and the odd commercial arbitration or ODR system in Dubai or Singapore, there was at the time no other legal system in the world that was managing the majority of its court processes digitally or online.

That soon began to change, as became apparent when we all assembled later that year for the International Forum on Online Courts in December 2018, organised by the Society for Computers and Law, and heard from jurisdictions around the world about how they, too, were now trying to modernise their courts.

The biggest boost to online dispute resolution, first canvassed in a report in February 2015 by the Civil Justice Council of England and Wales, came with the Covid-19 lockdown in early 2020, which boosted the use of video conferencing technology to conduct remote online hearings at a time when physical hearings had become impossible. (This was a global development, monitored via the Remote Courts website.) Until then, the judiciary had favoured something called Skype for Business – no one had heard of Zoom, let alone Teams. That soon changed: as with other aspects of technology, the tech has moved faster than the people managing the development of IT systems.

By that time, the HMCTS Reform programme had already launched online case management in the criminal courts, in the form of the Digital Case System in the Crown Court; online filing via CE File in the civil courts (following a successful pilot in the Business and Property Courts); and online portals for divorce petitions and probate applications. But not everything went smoothly.

Bumps in the road

For crime, the long term plan had always been for the DCS to be absorbed into and replaced by the Common Platform, to provide a seamless conveyor belt to be used by the police, Crown Prosecution Service, courts, legal professionals and probation which would give each of them access only to material relevant for their purposes. That hasn’t happened, and the DCS has had to be retained alongside the Common Platform.

The main complaint about CE File was the cost, to members of the media and the public, of performing searches and obtaining copies of the sort of documents that, under CPR r 5.4C, they were entitled under normal rules of open justice. Those costs were later adjusted downward, but they are still far from negligible. Another big problem is that it does not produce machine-readable documentation. The system is already antiquated by current standards and due to be replaced.

The online divorce portal did turn out to be quite popular, and hugely reduced the number of applications rejected by reason of error which had used to occur with the old paper form; but the system itself was not foolproof. A glitch in the programme allowed parties to apply for a divorce as soon as a year after the date of their marriage, instead of after a year and a day, as required by section 3 of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973. In 79 such cases, heard together, the court had to make an order confirming the finality of the divorces after holding that the error made them voidable but not necessarily void: see Lord Chancellor v 79 Divorced Couples [2024] EWHC 3211 (Fam); [2025] WLR(D) 25. In another case, a solicitor inadvertently applied for a divorce to be finalised in the wrong client’s case, and was refused an order to rejoin what the law had, with automated finality, divided: see Williams v Williams [2024] EWHC 733 (Fam); [2024] 2 FLR 655.

The online probate application portal was another victim of its own success, with numerous complaints of delay in processing the applications once filed. It turned out that HMCTS had not had capacity to deliver comprehensive training when the Probate Service was first digitised, staff did not understand the digital process, and the online process was taking longer than the old paper one.

Physical courts have continued to be a problem, too. Early in the Reform programme, a lot of older, smaller, more local courts were sold off, often at an undervalue, ostensibly to help pay for the programme. (According to the Law Society, between 2010 and 2019, over half the courts across England and Wales were closed.) That reduced the visibility of local justice and hampered access for public observers and the media, giving rise to an open justice deficit. Their replacement took the form of larger court centres in major cities, but it was expected that many smaller, simpler claims would be resolved online.

That was the intention of Lord Briggs’ vision for the online court. But this, too, fell short of its original ambitions, described in some detail by Joshua Rozenberg in a book published in 2017, The Online Court: will IT work? (Now available via TLEF.) What is now basically just an online court dealing with small money claims had originally been called the Online Solutions Court and was intended to deal with a much wider range of disputes, with a three-stage approach. The first stage would have involved a triage process inviting the user to supply details of the problem and, by steering them through a series of questions, provide an initial diagnosis of the problem and enable them to submit an online claim form. The second stage would involve an attempt to resolve the problem through mediation or settlement, using case officers, or court administrators exercising judicial functions under judicial supervision, to assist parties to manage their claim and to facilitate settlement. Only if that failed would the case be sent on to the third stage for a full judicial determination.

This vision, also described in some detail by the then Master of the Rolls, Sir Terence Etherton in a 2017 lecture entitled The Civil Court of the Future, has never materialised. It was central to the original vision of the Reform programme, talked up by the judiciary in a series of lectures, while reassuring the legal professions that they would still be needed for the more complex and, dare one say, interesting cases. Nevertheless, there were warnings about ‘Justice on the cheap’. (That was already being achieved through legal aid cuts.)

Another notable disappointment has been the collection and management of justice system data. This was the subject of a comprehensive report led by Dr Natalie Byrom for The Legal Education Foundation in 2019, Digital Justice: HMCTS data strategy and delivering access to justice. This made numerous recommendations about how HMCTS should collect data about litigants and use it to improve and target resources. HMCTS struggled to meet the recommendations, as its response updates indicated. We can only hope that with most of the development completed, more attention can be focused on this aspect. The latest HMCTS annual report (2023-24) puts it thus:

“The merging of legacy and reform data has presented a significant challenge, particularly during the early stages of reform development when cases can transfer between systems. We need to be able to identify and remove duplicate records as well as ensuring we select the most up to date details from the right systems for each individual record. We successfully completed this for several HMCTS services, including the criminal courts and public family law, but more work remains to be done to complete this in other jurisdictions.”

So has it all been worth it?

Announcing its completion has drawn attention, yet again, to the shortcomings of the Reform programme. The chief executive’s blog post about the ‘quiet revolution’ had barely been published before reports emerged of the fact that, despite all the digitisation (or digitalisation as some insist on calling it), most cases in the county court are still managed on paper. ‘I am very disappointed that we are going to reach the end of Reform with only 23% of cases beginning and ending with digital, and all the rest ending up on paper,’ said the head of civil justice, Sir Geoffrey Vos MR, giving evidence to the Commons Justice Committee’s current investigation into the Work of the County Court.

Massive delays are still occurring because of the inefficiency of the centralised processing unit at the Civil National Business Centre in Northampton, which Vos described as ‘almost a paper warehouse’. Once they emerge from there, cases can be listed and dealt with quite quickly in other parts of the country. Moreover, ‘the data that is kept is generally inadequate’, said Vos, and ‘it takes no account of the type of case’. Cases are processed by a patchwork of four overlapping systems, including a very old fashioned system called CaseMan, which Vos said ‘has been there for literally donkey’s years and simply cannot interact with the other digital system’.

In short, said Vos, it was a long way from the original vision of a ‘single digital system across the entirety of the courts and tribunals’ they were promised. ‘As the reform programme continued in civil, they took more and more things out of scope, thereby really hollowing out the facility of what it was doing.’

So much for civil justice, said Vos. ‘Family—which I am not talking about—seems to be conducted largely in a digital system at the moment. It has problems that you may hear about, but they are probably not insuperable.’

Giving evidence to the same committee at a later date, the courts minister Sarah Sackman KC MP admitted the  reform programme ‘has been successful in part but is nowhere near meeting the ambition that was hoped for it’.

One of the other members of the committee, Tessa Munt MP, also a lawyer, said:

“You talk about end-to-end digitisation. When we went up to Northampton, I am pretty certain I heard that people were digitising stuff so that everything is electronic, but when they go to the next bit and send it to the court, they end up having to put everything down on paper again. This is mad. It is a total waste of time. You have people standing by a scanner literally putting pieces of paper into it.”

Sackman conceded that ‘It was not as successful as it should have been. There is more to do, but it is a good foundation.’

Admittedly the committee’s investigation was focused on the county court, which is where the vast majority of civil claims are dealt with. But the picture that emerges is, sadly, one of a job only half done, and after spending twice the money originally budgeted for it. No wonder the revolution has been so ‘quiet’.

Looking ahead

There are signs of hope. Although the official journey of the Reform programme, extended and somewhat over budget, has now reached its adjusted destination, the process of modernisation continues. Giving the keynote speech at the International Forum on Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) held at Greenwich University on 30 April 2025, Vos MR outlined his vision of the future in the form of The Digital Justice System — an engine for resolving disputes.

He rejected the idea that this would be some “vast costly digital infrastructure to resolve everyone’s business, financial and consumer disputes online in one place at gov.uk”. Instead, he described the aim of a more agile system that “builds on all the existing provisions for pre-action dispute resolution that is already available”. As he explained:

“There are ombuds portals in numerous sectors, mostly financed by industry or financial organisations . There are mediation portals and arbitration portals. There is the Official Injury Portal dealing with hundreds of thousands of personal injury claims each year. And there are online legal advice platforms such as Advicenow, ACAS and the Citizens Advice Bureau. The problem is that these provisions are not properly connected in a way that allows individuals to find the right advice and the right dispute resolution mechanism quickly and efficiently.”

The intention was to fit the pieces of this vast engine together to make “one smooth operating system”. That was where the rules or guidance to be provided by the new Online Procedure Rules Committee (the OPRC) came in. By developing rules and procedures, it would gradually build up a mechanism to enable people to diagnose and resolve all sorts of minor disputes which it would be costly and inefficient to litigate, but which would otherwise cause misery and economic harm.

AI would be instrumental in providing the diagnosis and direction for the problem solving within the Digital Justice System, but it would not replace lawyers, he said. It could even help judges, for whom updated guidance had recently been published. Moreover, this could be an area in which Britain was in the lead:

“I am not aware of other jurisdictions that are trying to bring coherence to the pre-action, mediation and ombuds space in quite the way that I envisage happening, through the OPRC, here. Many jurisdictions are, however, trying to allow legal claims to be brought and progressed to a greater or lesser extent online. I think we are in a peculiarly advantageous position here in England and Wales, because we already have so many online pre-action platforms providing mediation and dispute resolution in civil, family and tribunals cases.”

What is striking about this is how similar it sounds to the original vision for the Online Court espoused by Briggs et al, back in 2013, which should have been part of the Reform programme. If so, perhaps Reform is not yet over, but will continue under a different name (and perhaps also budget). Watch this space.

Featured image: HMCTS blog.