Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what discussions took place between officials in his Department, the Home Office and STERIA before the decision to privatise Ministry of Justice shared services was taken.

Prior to entering these detailed discussions with Shared Services Connected Limited (a joint venture between STERIA and the Cabinet Office) all options were fully evaluated. A business case was developed to evaluate the two Independent Shared Service Centre (ISSC) options, alongside the option to remain a standalone organisation.

The business case was informed by proposals from both ISSC framework providers, which included SSCL. In order to complete these proposals, both providers learned about the existing MoJ Shared Services organisation through visits to our sites and through the information that was provided to them about:

· How Shared Services fitted in to the MoJ organisation.

· What services they provided and who their customers were.

· How many transactions were processed in a typical day.

· Who their partners were and what systems they used.

· The projects that were currently underway.

The evaluation criteria in the business case included people impact, services delivery, cost and IT. Overall the SSCL proposal was the strongest, in part due to the investment that they were already making in a new IT platform and the fact that the costs of this could be shared across multiple government departments.

The Ministry of Justice is now entering into detailed discussions with Shared Services Connected Limited (SSCL) regarding the future delivery of their back office services, with the intention of awarding a contract in August 2014.

The Home Office have also been considering their options at the same time as the Ministry of Justice but the two departments have completed their evaluations as separate and independent exercises. The Home Office have reached the same conclusion and assessed SSCL to be its preferred option. The two departments have started contract negotiations at the same time but each will have a separate contract with SSCL. It's intended that MoJ and Home Office follow the same process going forward and will make changes within the same timescales.

Both of these evaluations followed the publication of the Government's Next Generation Shared Services Strategy in December 2012 and a rigorous procurement exercise completed by Cabinet Office to select the providers of the two Independent Shared Service Centres.