As one criminal justice IT project hits further delays, Lord Justice Neuberger still preaches the benefits of court technology - but admits the government has made its share of mistakes, reports Rupert White


The government gets a raw deal because accountability means revealing IT mishaps that companies can legitimately 'brush under the carpet', the judge in charge of court modernisation said last week at the Criminal Justice Management conference in London.

But at least one trumpeted new project is even later than the government has previously revealed, the Gazette has learned.



Speaking at the conference, Lord Justice Neuberger said that he was 'not sure that over the past ten years money on government legal IT projects has always been spent wisely', laying a portion of the blame on government 'making its own bespoke systems, to try to start from scratch, rather than buying things that are readily available and adapting them'.



This, he said, 'leads to greater likelihood of failure and, even if they're a success, it leads to greater expense and greater delay'.



Though there is now finally a move away from this approach, the judge said, he named the yet-to-be launched 'judicial portal' as an example of a system that 'in hindsight it would have been better to go straight to see what the market could provide, rather than developing a product with which we're having problems and delays'.



But the government gets a bad press, he said, because - unlike the private sector - it must answer for its mistakes. The judicial database, the Link system and XHIBIT are examples of government IT successes, he said, alongside an electronic legal library for judges which he called 'quite exceptional'.



Lord Justice Neuberger also said he wanted to see XHIBIT, which currently carries hearing information, do more and perhaps 'link into the police system, the probation service, the prison service'.



However, one related criminal justice IT project faces further delays. When the Home Office confessed that it had yet to start the first trial of the National Offender Management Service's IT system, C-NOMIS, at Albany prison in August (see 2006 Gazette, 17 August, 5), it stated that the system would be delayed by seven weeks. But John Powls, programme director for C-NOMIS, told a small seminar at the conference that C-NOMIS is far more delayed than that.



The start date for the C-NOMIS pilot at HMP Albany is now the beginning of December, some five months after the intended start of July. Mr Powls said the pilot is 'slightly behind where we thought we would be', claiming C-NOMIS is only 'two to three months behind'. But the Home Office confirmed in August that the start date had originally been July.



This means the first 'live' systems will not be started until April or May next year, Mr Powls said. The projected completion time of C-NOMIS was also finally given out as the end of 2008.