News story

Fair for the Future parole project: delivering on Osborn

A project has been set up to understand the impact of the Supreme Court judgment in the case of Osborn, Booth and Reilly.

A project has been established in order to understand the impact of the judgment and what changes will be needed. The judgment will result in far more oral hearings being granted across the whole caseload referred to the Board, and therefore a review of the case management of all cases is already underway.

The existing processes will not be able to accommodate the increase in work and therefore, the design and development, piloting and implementation of a new model is required. This work will supersede some of the work that began under the end-to-end review programme.

The judgment was not only limited to Indeterminate Sentence Prisoner (ISP) cases but is relevant for any case referred to the Parole Board. Therefore the project will need to look at how the Parole Board manages all of its caseload.

The objective of the project is to design and implement an efficient case management model which enables the Board to accommodate the increase in oral hearings within agreed resources, allows members to continue to make fair and right decisions, supported effectively by the Secretariat and is flexible and robust enough to meet the challenges of future changes in legislation and policy with greater resilience.

Published 1 November 2013