Exemplar 24: Prison visit booking
Published 1 June 2013
© Crown copyright 2013
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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gds-transformation-programme-2013-to-2015/exemplar-24-prison-visit-booking
The project aimed to process 1.5 million online prison visit bookings every year.
Department responsible
| Department | Permanent secretary | Digital leader |
|---|---|---|
| HM Prison Service | Ursula Brennan | Matthew Coats |
Status
The service is live and being used in 95 Category B prisons, including Youth and Women’s.
Watch a short film about the live service, filmed July 2014:
Watch a description of the exemplar:
Exemplar 24: Prison visit booking - Background
Successes
The service was standardised across pilot prisons.
User research was done for male Category B and below, Youth, Women’s, High Security Estate (Category A) and Contracted Out prisons.
The live performance dashboard was released.
The service passed its live Digital by Default Service Standard assessment.
The live service was released.
100,000 prison visit bookings submitted since the release of the public beta.
Challenges
Developing a standard process for booking visits across all prisons.
Integrating the new service with existing online booking systems.
Next
Continuously improve live service based on user feedback.
Improve response times through full integration with existing booking systems.
Live service performance
Digital take-up
Bookings made using the digital service.
Completion rate
Proportion of users who start and complete their application using the digital service.
Digital strategy statement
From the ‘Ministry of Justice digital strategy’ – December 2012:
…our single biggest transactional service, which at the moment is a phone- or email-based, manual data entry system.
Scope of exemplar
Different prisons book visits in different ways. It is mostly done by phone or email and often requires family members to spend a long time getting through on the phone. A digital channel will cut administrative costs to the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) and make the process easier for families — encouraging more to visit — and more efficient for professional visitors.
Digital inclusion
GDS has mapped the exemplars against the digital inclusion scale to help show where these services may be difficult for some people to use. See the rating for Prison Visit booking.
Delivery Status
Discovery
Completed: Discovery — July 2013.
Read about the discovery phase.
Alpha
Completed: Start alpha build — October 2013.
Completed: User research of alpha product with 4 prisons — December 2013 to April 2014.
Beta
Completed: Start beta development — May 2014.
Completed: Beta release to all public male Category B and below, Youth and Women’s prisons in England and Wales — June 2014.
Live
Completed: Service goes live (depending on Service Standard assessment) — September 2014.
Anticipated volume
1.5m visits per year
Service link
See the prison visits service.
Service performance
See how the prison visits service is performing.
For further information about this project please visit our blog or contact us.