Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to the oral contribution of the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Justice before the Justice Select Committee on 1 March 2022, HC 869, Q168, what the cost to the public purse has been of changes to the Common Platform requested by the Crown Prosecution Service since its introduction.

HMCTS are developing with CPS a “common platform” as a case management system in the criminal courts for use by both organisations. This is being delivered using an agile methodology, developing and testing functionality incrementally, within the wider HMCTS Reform programme.

The HMCTS 2020-21 annual accounts included an £18.35 million impairment of common platform assets in relation to elements of the functionality designed for use by the CPS that are not re-usable. The write-off of costs incurred was a result of various causes. The initial pilot tested the pre-charge functionality for CPS, which included building interfaces to link back into legacy systems. After a successful pilot, the programme reviewed the delivery approach and concluded that greater certainty was needed of CPS requirements prior to development, including the design for Digital Case File (a joint CPS and Police initiative), and that all the CPS functionality should be launched together, to reduce the complexity of interaction with the existing systems. This meant that elements of functionality previously developed were no longer required.  These should not be characterised as “changes requested by the Crown Prosecution Service”, but rather as joint decisions in the evolution of the programme.

The HMCTS 2021-22 annual accounts included a £4.2 million impairment of common platform assets. This arose from the decision by the Crime Programme Board (which includes membership from across the criminal justice system, including HMCTS and CPS), which was ministerially endorsed,  that CPS will retain their current case management system and interface into common platform, in order to best deliver the benefits of the Reform programme, and would not decommission their case management system as was originally intended. This required a write-off of costs incurred to implement CPS case management on the common platform, which no longer related to a useable asset. However, this reduced risks for both HMCTS and CPS following the pandemic, with the overall programme implementation costs reducing as a result of this decision, by approximately £8 million, as the cost of developing interfaces was lower than that of the originally-planned solution.