Court Survey – Telephone Contact Centre

Posted on29 May 2026

Background

HMCTS have centralised telephone enquires into the County Court to a single team based in Leicester. We are aware of two issues with this centralised approach:

Wait times for calls to be answered can often be excessive. Whilst HMCTS believe that wait times are around 20 minutes, the reality is that at busy times the wait can often be an hour.
The help that can be provided by the centralised call staff is limited as they have no physical presence at any court hearing centre. They are also unable to pass calls directly through to the Court and unable to help with delayed cases. Often the response given by the call centre staff is to email the Court, even if previous emails to the Court have gone unanswered.

Consultation on WhatApp

To address the issue of waiting times, HMCTS are looking at introducing a new communication channel by allowing court users to use Whatsapp to communicate with the centralised contact centre.

This project is in early stages and HMCTS have invited users to respond to this survey to discuss the use of WhatsApp:

HMCTS Civil Contact WhatsApp proof of concept. – Fill in form

The survey is open to 5 June 2026.

Considerations

The obvious concern is that this proposal doesn`t assist with the underlying issue of the limited utility of the contact centre.

In addition, there is a series of well-know compliance issues in using WhatsApp to communicate client information. These include:

Data residency and sovereignty concerns: messages processed via WhatsApp's infrastructure may not meet the data handling requirements applicable to legal matters;
Lack of auditability: WhatsApp does not natively provide the kind of audit trails required in a regulated legal environment, making supervisory oversight and e-disclosure obligations difficult to satisfy;
Client confidentiality risk: sharing client or matter-related information via a consumer messaging platform creates real risk of inadvertent disclosure or data breach;
Record-keeping obligations: regulated firms are required to retain communications relating to client matters, and WhatsApp does not lend itself to compliant archiving without significant additional infrastructure;
End-to-end encryption and third-party data access: whilst encryption can be a benefit, it also prevents firms from monitoring communications in the way required by their regulatory obligations.

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