Criminals and defendants were set free without electronic tags because of glitches with a new court IT system, a report has revealed, amid concerns for a reform programme which may have run out of money.
The National Audit Office (NAO) has been investigating the £1.3 billion overhaul at HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS), assessing the expected benefits of changes intended to modernise the justice sector.
In a report published on Thursday, the NAO - a watchdog for Whitehall spending - found 35 convicted offenders and defendants were not fitted with electronic tags in September last year, in errors blamed on the new Common Platform IT system which has been introduced into courts in England and Wales.
The NAO said the Common Platform had failed to send more than 3,000 “important notifications” to other bodies between June 2021 and August 2022, when the new system “could not cope with the volume of notifications”.
Investigations found 367 of the faults could have “affected justice outcomes” and that “criminal justice processes were disrupted in 23 per cent of these cases”.
The report added that “35 people were not fitted with electronic monitoring tags when they should have been”.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) insisted: “We quickly fixed the error and no offences were reported by the 35 defendants who were temporarily untagged.”
The NAO report sets out how expected savings from the justice reforms, which started in 2016, have been reduced by 13 per cent to £2 billion, amid higher than expected costs and pressures from the pandemic. The savings are forecast to start being felt in 2025 – a year later than planned.
In December last year, there was only £120 million of the £1.3 billion budget left to spend, and the auditor concluded: “It is not clear whether HMCTS can achieve its expected benefits with its remaining funding.
“HMCTS did not clearly specify the detailed scope and functionality of individual projects at the outset and it is not clear that it has a comprehensive view of the outstanding work needed to complete the programme.
“It is therefore unclear whether HMCTS can deliver outstanding functions and services with the remaining funding.”
The report highlights that £22.5 million was wasted on an abandoned attempt to include Crown Prosecution Service computer systems in the Common Platform project.
The IT system – intended to provide integrated case management – is now in operation in 76 per cent of criminal courts.
But the NAO found the national rollout had been rushed, at a time when HMCTS “had only partly evaluated one early adopter site”.
Court staff have taken industrial action over the IT system, complaining bitterly that it heaps extra pressure on court clerks and is riddled with problems. The auditor said Common Platform “has created inefficiencies in courts, caused stress for court staff and undermined trust in the quality of court records”.
HMCTS has been working to address staff concerns and fix problems, including providing live online support for court staff as they learn to use the system. But the NAO said it “has not been clear about how it tracks and responds to feedback, nor when users may expect system improvements”.
Shadow Justice Minister Alex Cunningham said court reforms “are in tatters”, and suggested Labour in power “would fix this mess, speed up justice and avoid catastrophic errors that lead to dangerous criminals going unmonitored.”
An HMCTS spokesperson said: “We are modernising our services and replacing out-of-date systems so they are fit for the 21st Century and the digital services we have introduced have been used successfully over two million times.
“We are implementing the NAO’s recommendations – some of which are already in place - to improve our new digital services and will continue to listen and respond to feedback from court users as we roll them out further.”
