Anyone else seeing this or have any awareness of where we go from here? Because we are not the firm lodging the application, historically the probate registry has refused direct contact.
Could even be an improvement, of course, which would be welcome.
It seems odd that all trust corporation cases would be stopped. My understanding is applications are stopped where further information or documents are required, not simply because a certain type of application is being dealt with by a specific team. I would double check to see if the probate registry is requesting further information or documents.
Regarding timescales, grants that have been stopped take an average of 20 weeks: Grant of Probate delays continue, why? | Kings Court Trust. That does not include any delay between issue and transfer to Royal Mail for postage nor does it include postage time.
The Probate Department website suggests the turnaround times do not take into account the time it takes HMCTS to upload the documents onto their system. However, I do not think that is correct as the Family Court Statistics Quarterly refers to different turnaround times for submission to issue in comparison to document receipt to issue.
I work for a Trust Corporation, and the majority of our grant applications are stopped and handed off to a specialist team! I don’t know why the Probate Court suddenly need a specialist team to deal with our applications, as we have been doing this for decades without any problems.
The stops are nothing to do with needing further information or documents - the comments on the online portal simply state something along the lines of “trust corp - hand off”.
The Probate Court’s response to our complaints state that they have taken on new staff to help deal with the delays, but it is very clear to us that they are not training those staff to deal with applications by Trust Corporations!
