Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will provide full breakdown of the costs of (a) developing and (b) operating the Common Platform.

The HMCTS Reform programme is being funded and delivered in line with the final edition of its business case which was agreed with HM Treasury in early 2021. The programme impacts all areas of HMCTS work and it is not possible to identify the complete cost of Common Platform in isolation, given the many interdependent and shared components of the programme that are used both by Common Platform and by other reformed services.

The final business case put the total cost of the reform programme as £1,291m (in 2020/21 prices). Within this total the costs explicitly attributable to implementing the Common Platform are £308m. As of June 2022, total spend to date on implementing the Common Platform was £276.4m. The final business case estimates the total net value of recurring annual benefits from the reform programme at £229m (in 2020/21 prices), with £96m of recurring annual net benefits explicitly attributable to Common Platform and other associated reformed services in the criminal courts.

The business case was accompanied by a full cost benefit analysis, from which the above cost and benefit estimates were obtained. This analysis fully conformed to the Treasury’s “Green Book” and was subject to scrutiny and validation by the Government Major Projects Portfolio in February 2021. The Common Platform will also provide a number of non-financial benefits, in speeding up processes and improving data collected on criminal justice.