prj_16023 - HMCTS Third Party Courts Data Licence

The principle of open justice is crucial. His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) is committed to supporting greater transparency of courts and tribunals data. We are seeking to engage with potential applicants for the new courts and tribunals non-exclusive third party data licence which will grant successful licence applicants permission to undertake computational analysis of information published by the Court and Tribunal Hearings Service (CaTH) (www.court-tribunal-hearings.service.gov.uk ↗).

The information available under this licence will in time encompass all hearing lists for all courts and tribunals administered by HMCTS and registers of outcomes from the criminal courts. Other information may be made available in the future. The information will be available to successful licence applicants in a standard, machine-readable form through CaTH’s application programming interface (API).

The purpose of this market engagement is to understand the views of potential applicants for the licence on topics including:

1. Other information that HMCTS should seek to prioritise and publish via CaTH;
2. The implications of HMCTS’s proposed retention terms for data provided under the licence;
3. Potential data re-use purposes
4. Restrictions on the use of the data
5. Security measures that licensees will have to have in place
6. Restrictions on where globally data can be processed

We are interested in hearing from a range of organisations and individuals, including, but not limited to: journalists and the accredited news media; lawtech firms and legal publishers; research institutes and compliance or data analytics firms.

The findings from this market engagement will help to inform the development of the licence and its payment model.

This session will not cover the detail of the application process for a licence. We are aiming to share this detail in April 2026.

Event Details

HMCTS invites interested organisations to attend a virtual market engagement event on 04th March 2026 which will be delivered via MS Teams and take place 10:00 – 11:30 (UK).

Agenda:

• Introduction and purpose of the market engagement
• An overview of the licence
• What data would be shared under the licence and onwards re-use
• Implications of proposed retention terms
• Pricing Model
• Next steps for further engagement

Key questions to explore:

• For what purpose would you seek to computationally re-use courts and tribunals listing and registers of outcomes data?
• What functionality/capability/information would you like from the CaTH service beyond what is currently available?
• What barriers (barring exemptions under data protection law) would HMCTS’s proposed retention terms place in being able to perform computational analysis for your proposed use case?
• Would HMCTS’s proposed and future pricing model place unreasonable barriers that would prevent you/your organisation being able to reasonably afford a licence?

Interested parties are required to complete the following actions:

1. Register for an account through the MoJ Sourcing Portal at ministryofjusticecommercial.bravosolution.co.uk ↗
2. Navigate to the left side menu and click on 'PQQs Open to All Suppliers' > find and click on ‘PQQ_567 - HMCTS Third Party Courts Data Licence - Market Engagement’ - for the avoidance of doubt this is not an actual PQQ but just a space on our sourcing system to coordinate market engagement activities. There are no mandatory actions to take.
3. Interested parties must express an interest by clicking 'Express interest' and will then be able to view the detail relating to market engagement in the ‘My Response’ tab.

The event will be recorded and made available for the duration of the engagement activity. Legal disclaimer: this recording is for private, authorised viewing only and may not be redistributed.

The session will have the opportunity for Q&A on submission, with questions answered following the session in writing, these will be published in the attachments tab on the MoJ Sourcing Portal.

Following the event, HMCTS will distribute a questionnaire to attendees to gain further information and insight to the topics covered in the session.

The ‘PQQ_567 - HMCTS Third Party Courts Data Licence - Market Engagement’ area will be the forum used to communicate future events or communications in relation to the market engagement activity. The Engagement deadline in this notice reflects the closing date for questionnaire submission by Suppliers following the session.

Contract dates and transparency notice details are not reflective of licence dates.