Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether his Department has invited (a) barristers and (b) solicitors to (i) access test cases and (ii) test other aspects of the Common Platform system.

Whenever new functionality is developed for Common Platform, it goes through several stages of testing. For significant changes, we ensure the functionality is tested by the main groups of users who are most impacted by the system, and rigorously test it in early adopter courts to ensure it is suitable for use in a live court environment.

A handful of solicitors were invited to test the new functionality for the digitalisation of the Pre-Trial Preparation and Better Case Management forms late last year. The feedback provided gave valuable insight into the usability of the forms by practitioners.

Now that we are planning the next phase of implementation, where barristers are a critical user group, we are enhancing their role in our implementation approach. In addition to the existing opportunities they have to provide their input on design, we plan on providing opportunities for barristers to join sessions to test the system and we will be issuing further communications to raise awareness on that approach soon.

We will be undertaking user acceptance testing with defence advocates, including barristers, as we did in November 2022 before moving the Preparation for Effective Trials and Better Case Management forms to a digital format.