Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether he has made an estimate of the number of potential job losses as a result of the Common Platform.

Common Platform has been designed to provide the ability to view and share information across all stakeholder groups and provides a single location for the sharing of case information and notifying parties when new case material is available for them to view. It incorporates functionality to assist HMCTS staff in meeting the expectation that most decisions can be recorded at the time of hearing. This live ‘in-court’ recording of the outcomes of the court proceedings and the sharing of those outcomes with stakeholders such as the police are intended to protect the public and enable those authorities to respond immediately where for example a breach of an order occurs, or further offences are committed.

As part of the business case for the reform programme HMCTS conducted data gathering exercises in 2019 and 2020, where staff allocated their time by activity.  The impact of the changes introduced by the Crime Programme (including the Common Platform) on the amount of time required to perform activities was then estimated by staff with experience of performing the relevant roles and understood the likely impact of the changes. These estimates were used to estimate time savings and efficiencies. Now that the Common Platform is in use, we are working with staff to validate the estimates made and ensure the actual impact on roles is understood.

The impact of the Reform programme on permanent Civil Servants across all jurisdictions will be mitigated by managing and reducing the flexible resources in our workforce, and not recruiting to vacancies where possible. Few redundancies are anticipated, and we will redeploy permanent Civil Servants where possible and support our temporary employees to find roles with us as their contracts end. It has always been our intention to invest and support our workforce as part of the overall reform programme – this means continuing to develop our people and ensuring they have the skills they need to provide the best service possible. We will ensure that everyone has personal and professional support though organisational change.