22/02/2023
Police Oracle
The National Audit Office’s (NAO) latest report on the government’s court reform programme, published today, paints a mixed picture.
The programme, which has costs £1.3bn is nearing its end. However, despite increasing its budget to reduce the risk of missing deadlines, His Majesty’s Court and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) does not expect to be able to deliver the programme to its current timetable and scope.
Progress
Since the NAO’s last report in 2019, HMCTS has continued to make progress delivering its reforms. These include rolling out video hearings quickly in response to the pandemic, more online services and introducing new digital systems to courts. But the NAO found that a number of problems occurred, mainly because of the pandemic and projects being more complex than HMCTS expected.
Common platform
The new digital case management system, “common platform”, was delayed, even though the project started in 2012. The project aims to reduce inefficiencies across the criminal justice system, for example, by reducing the duplication of tasks associated with paper-based working. The project focuses on using online systems for cases, from around the point of deciding whether to charge a suspect to the conclusion of a court case.
The eventual roll-out of the project has hit a number of problems. The first phase of the rollout has taken much longer than planned, following performance issues which meant that HMCTS had to pause it between August 2021 and March 2022 while it addressed system performance issues including several major incidents which affected the live running and stability of the service. Even after rollout restarted, some problems remained. Between March and October 2022, HMCTS recorded 231 critical incidents affecting users nationally. HMCTS found out that the system had failed to send 3,011 (1%) important notifications to partner agencies between June 2021 and August 2022 because the system could not cope with the volume of notifications. HMCTS reviewed all 3,011 of these cases and investigated in more depth the 367 of these failures which it considered could have affected justice outcomes. It found that criminal justice processes were disrupted in 23% of these cases. For example, in 35 cases an individual was not fitted with an electronic monitoring tag when they should have been. Up to last November, less than two thirds (62%) of new cases entered on courts’ systems were entered on common platform and the platform was live in just over three quarters (76%) of criminal courts). This means that 55 criminal courts do not yet have the platform.
Unsurprisingly, the unreliability of common platform has made it unpopular with staff, causing stress and sometimes interfering with the smooth running of live court cases.
The NAO criticised the fact that HMCTS only partly evaluated one early adopter site and had not completed robust technical testing before going ahead with the rollout. Introducing the new platform before it was ready created extra burdens for courts when they were already under pressure from a significant backlog of cases which had been exacerbated by the need to close courts for some months in the initial lockdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Budget
The expected savings from the programme continue to fall but are still substantial. The programme’s expected lifetime savings are now £2 billion, £310 million (13%) less than in 2019. Expected annual savings are now £17 million (7%) lower at £220 million and forecast to start a year later, in 2025-26. Further changes currently being considered by HMCTS are likely to involve more expenditure and will therefore reduce the overall savings further. The NAO is also not confident that the HMCTS has a full understanding of the impact of the court reform programme on savings, saying it lack some of the routine data needed to undertake a reliable cost benefit analysis.