Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to improve the IT systems used by the Probation Service and its partners to save time and enable practitioners to make better decisions.

The Ministry of Justice is improving its IT systems to address capacity challenges within HM Prison and Probation Service. These will save practitioners and Probation Service partners time, by reducing administrative burdens and by supporting delivery of the Independent Sentencing Review recommendations. We are focusing on:

A) Putting foundations in place, including replacing the existing legacy systems with a single, integrated digital service for probation officers that will put all the tools they need in one place and reduce the need to shift between systems and repeat tasks;

B) Addressing data quality and integration issues, by putting in place a single data source for the probation service, to reduce time taken to search for and access data, including data from other agencies; and

C) Piloting new uses of technology, such as AI to eliminate manual processes (voice transcription to automate writing up notes), and deploying two-way smartphone communications with offenders (e.g., automated reminders and offender check-ins).