The new Ministry of Justice has a lot of IT on its plate and much of it appears to be running later and later, reports Rupert White


Lord Falconer's plans for penal reform could be more difficult to implement than he thinks if government IT projects are to be relied on to help them through, as a key project is likely to be even later than feared, the Gazette has learned.



In August last year, we broke the story that the IT project joining up the criminal justice system (CJS), C-NOMIS, run by the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), was at least six months late. In May this year, we revealed that the courts' Electronic Filing and Document Management (EFDM) project had been mothballed until 2009. It now seems that 2009 will see a slew of legal IT and courts modernisation announcements, as C-NOMIS is now not likely to finish until then either, at least a year behind schedule.



One of the central tenets of C-NOMIS is a joined-up view of offender risk assessment. Two proposed changes to penal policy announced at the inception of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) are yet more measures to reduce prison numbers that partly rely on risk assessment of prisoners, both to protect the public and those with whom re-offenders might be incarcerated. Lord Falconer proposed in a NOMS background paper on policy reform in May that 'in appropriate cases non-dangerous prisoners can be given a fixed-term, punitive recall to prison for 28 days' and that 'suspended sentence orders are used for the more serious offences, as we originally intended'.



But C-NOMIS, now moved from the Home Office into the new MoJ, is far from ready. Last year in June the system, which plugs prisons and probation databases together as well as various risk assessment systems (though not ViSOR, the violent and sex offenders' register), was supposed to be installed in HMP Albany on the Isle of Wight, then in two other jails on the island: Parkhurst and Camp Hill.



It was supposed to roll out across the UK this year. One year on and the system is still only 'live' at HMP Albany. The MoJ has told the Gazette that Parkhurst and Camp Hill will go live 'imminently'. But this will not even be a full test of the system, as only the prisons side of the system is being used - the probation side will not be ready until next year.



Growing frustration

Few in the CJS would doubt how useful, in theory, a joined-up view of offender management would be. Alex Allan, permanent secretary to the MoJ and Mike Manisty, head of C-NOMIS, both gave speeches two weeks ago at a government IT conference in London saying how vital IT is to reforming the CJS. Mr Manisty seemed proud though frustrated, both by the time taken so far to deliver so little and by the difficulty with plugging anything together with the government's secure intranet (the GSI).



Two key problems with making C-NOMIS work, it seems, are the number of different identities people have if they are 'in' the system and the network itself. Mr Manisty was scathing about the GSI in the way only a civil servant with long experience of such things can be.



'We can't even get the basics right,' he said. 'We don't even have a common directory, we don't have a common method of authentication. The whole thing is actually very badly thought through.'



He said the CJS spends £30 million on a data network that cannot even supply enough bandwidth to each user of voice over Internet protocol, let alone video conferencing. He then said he had calculated that if he gave everyone in the system a standard home broadband network, and set aside some cash for security, he could deliver the system for £20 million, 'and that is giving them about 20 times more capacity'. 'If we could resolve that problem,' he added, 'we would revolutionise the way we work.'



Mr Allan, by contrast, in his earlier speech, seemed to be speaking from a different world. Though he acknowledged the successes embodied by the Crown Prosecution Service with its COMPASS case management system, and the XHIBIT system for judges in Crown Courts, he also seemed to think that having 16,000 users of the much-touted but much-ignored Secure eMail signified a success. The government has tried to push the legal profession and the hundreds of thousands of CJS potential users to use it for years, and the profession has stayed away in droves. The reality is that Whitehall has doubled its use since this time last year.



Further delays

But behind this is perhaps a more disturbing picture of justice IT. As reported, EFDM has been bumped to 2009 because it is now under the aegis of the new IT contractors to what was the Department for Constitutional Affairs, LogicaCMG and Atos Origin, and there is a lot for these firms to take over. Thus, it has been reprioritised. The handover to Logica and Atos has, the Gazette has been told, caused delays in projects.



The contracts with the original DCA IT contractors, Fujitsu, EDS, STL, Accenture, Cable & Wireless and Liberata, were replaced partly to give more simplicity to managing a very large number of projects. C-NOMIS, however, is run by a group of contractors headed up by EDS, and has been brought over from the Home Office intact. There is no intention to change the IT contractors, the Gazette has been told.



So the MoJ will have profound effects on justice IT, though it has told the Gazette that there is 'no new money' in the pipes. As a prime example, by the creation of the MoJ the result sought by the reduction of IT contractors last year has, at a stroke, been overturned.