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Client
HM Courts & Tribunal Service
Domain
Justice & Security
Service
Service Design
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Moving 80% of appeals online through human-centred digital design in the public sector

The Immigration and Asylum Tribunal helps people appeal against decisions made by the Home Office denying them the ‘right to remain’. These are often some of the most vulnerable people in society, who speak little English and have very low trust in government.

The challenge

The existing process of appeals was slow, frustrating and expensive. Transform needed to reimagine the appeals process and replace outdated legacy systems with one, efficient, digital service.

The solution

  • Intensive discovery  where we examined a complex web of judicial rules, operational behaviours, legacy technology, user communities and life-changing decisions to create a design map of challenges and opportunities.
  • Building a community of practice with users and stakeholders, through co-design and validation workshops.
  • Storytelling to generate empathy and balance value with the business, making leaps of faith towards more radical, future facing ways of working possible. Judicial rules were changed, powers were developed to help expedite service delivery and external government departments changed their policy.
  • Integrated architecture working within legacy constraints and delivering future-fit pragmatic solutions.
  • Design and build prototype service journeys, which Transform tested and iterated to take our service to Public Beta within 18 months.

The results

  • 28% of cases no longer require physical hearings and are resolved earlier.
  • Digital uptake is at 80% of all appeals submitted, which means 7,200 appeals could be resolved this way.

The Tribunals Service changed its rules and systems, negotiated with other government agencies and are applying our design methods to work through local operational changes.

The IAC project is the stand out project by a country mile. You’ve achieved so much in such a short space of time… I’m not just blowing smoke here, you’re held up by judges great and small as the exemplar project. You’ve done a great thing Deputy Director Tribunals HMCTS

Learn more

Our work for HM Courts and Tribunal Services extends beyond this project. If you’re interested in hearing more about our wider experience, please get in touch.