Central Courts IT System

Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Keen of Elie]

I rather fear that the noble Lord’s inquiry has taken sail. The position is that the issue that arose recently had nothing whatever to do with the development of the common platform system for the Ministry of Justice, which is still in its testing phase. It was entirely unaffected by the issue that arose, which was in fact attributable to the corruption of a routing server that has now been replaced.

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, the Answer repeated by the Minister is welcome, but expressions of frustration and an apology are, frankly, not enough. The reported consequences of this IT failure include: the adjournment and collapse of criminal trials; lawyers and litigants unable to access court documents; probation workers unable to provide courts with pre-sentence information; and even the farce of courts asking driving offenders to check their own DVLA records for past offences. The chair of the Criminal Bar Association, Chris Henley QC, describes the system as being “on its knees”.

We appreciate that the MoJ needs time to understand these failures, but they come at a time when the department is rightly further digitalising courts and tribunals to increase efficiency and save time and money. Will the Minister promise us an urgent, full and detailed inquiry to cover what has gone wrong, any failures of contract management within the MoJ, other weaknesses in the IT system, what updating and replacement is necessary and what it will all cost?

[Lord Keen of Elie]

My Lords, the reported effects narrated by the noble Lord are not accurate; let us be clear about that. There is no evidence of any cases being adjourned in either courts or tribunals with respect to this issue. In addition, it is not true that defendants have had to do their own DVLA checks. Furthermore, the probation service was affected by the outage but no offender appointments were missed, and the service reverted to paper processes where necessary. The IT systems are back up and working as of this morning with respect to the probation service. There was no impact on the Prison Service, which is in fact dependent on entirely separate computer system.

The cause of the outage was identified as a routing server that had become corrupted, and that has been replaced. It fell within one of our contractors’ systems and, as I indicated earlier, we are going to be speaking to our contractors with regard to that matter. At this stage we do not intend to institute the sort of inquiry that the noble Lord alluded to.