Policy paper

Ministry of Justice Digital Strategy 2025

Published 8 April 2022

Applies to England and Wales

Foreword

At the Ministry of Justice, we have seen how digital services have transformed our users’ experiences and their journeys profoundly. Since the pandemic there has been a remarkable increase in the use of technology across all of our services, from remote parole and court hearings, to virtual prison visits, and a significant increase in virtual and hybrid meetings. I am therefore delighted that over the next three years, the Ministry of Justice will be building on these successes through continued investment in our digital and technology services.

This strategy sets out our ambition to change the user experience of justice by providing simpler, faster and better services for everyone. Every part of our organisation has already been transformed by the rapidly changing landscape of new technologies. By delivering this change, we will strengthen the wider justice system, helping us to deliver on the MOJ’s goals: reducing reoffending, providing swift access to justice and protecting the public.

With strong digital services as our foundation we can continue with the work we’ve already started. Seeing all of the data we gather as an asset will help us make decisions that are better informed and offer measurable outcomes. We know that being able to manage and respond rapidly to change is an absolute necessity. As an organisation, we must continually develop our capacity to be flexible and to respond effectively when faced with new challenges. This means moving away from services designed around existing, complex processes towards services that are designed with the user at their heart.

Our work will be carried out by teams that have the multi-disciplinary skills we need to deliver effectively, whether they be digital, policy or operational. By being focused on our users’ needs, we can bring together people from all our professions to deliver a world class justice system that works for everyone.

There will be many challenges, but I am absolutely confident that by working together and keeping our focus on the people we serve, we will be able to deliver.

Jo Farrar, Second Permanent Secretary, MoJ and CEO, HMPPS

Introduction

When setting out our strategy for the next three years, it is clear that we are not starting from a blank page. Operating within the Justice system means that we work in an extremely complex environment running a number of nationally important services. Across the Ministry of Justice, we maintain more than 800 live services and 95,000 devices. We support prisoners and members of the public as well as 86,000 internal colleagues operating across 13 organisations and 1,000 sites. We play an important role in enabling over £1.5bn in legal aid to be paid each year, issuing over 500,000 Lasting Powers of Attorney, and supporting over 4 million in-person and remote court cases every year.

We face many of the same challenges as other large complex organisations, whether commercial or providers of public services. We have technical debt, including poorly understood monolithic legacy systems; we don’t have the luxury of unlimited funding, people or capacity to change; and we have to deliver within complex legal policies and frameworks.

We have a multitude of roles to play in the delivery of this strategy. We have to be a safe pair of hands to keep our existing services running. We have to be fixers, continually improving the performance and security of our many services. We have to be disrupters, challenging the status quo and creating services that better meet the needs of our users. And we have to be creators, generating fundamental shifts in the way in which we deliver, govern and fund services.

The challenge is both immense and invigorating, and the opportunities vast. I am proud and excited to have the opportunity to lead a hugely talented team in the delivery of this strategy and ultimately play a part in delivering simpler, faster and better justice services.

Gina Gill, Chief Digital and Information Officer, MoJ

Strategic Themes

An essential part of our strategy is to avoid overstretching and instead sharpen our focus on finishing key initiatives that will serve as springboards for faster evolution of our organisation as a whole. Therefore, we have identified three strategic themes that will enable us to move forward. We will concentrate on initiatives within some of our agencies more specifically, as well as cross-cutting work on our core infrastructure and end user computing services. The aim is to set the model and the pace for fuller organisational change beyond 2025.

We must become a more flexible organisation

We need to build flexibility into our systems so we can respond quickly and easily to change. As policies change and as our organisation tries to move, our large, complex systems present challenges and hinder change at pace. This leads to frustration for users who often have to try and manage their way through unintuitive, outdated systems and for the department with improvements or new processes taking too long to implement. We need to reduce that complexity and increase the pace at which we can implement change.

We must be driven by data

We need to make the best possible use of our data to ensure that decision making is based on sound insight. For our users this could mean very different things, from making the right safety data available to prison officers, to providing analysts with the long-term rich data sets they need to see trends in court data. Above all, we want to look at the full system, developing deep insight into the impact of our interventions and services. Our digital, data and analysis teams will work in partnership to transform the use of data across the whole Justice system. Our digital teams will play a key role in making data available, extracting it from legacy systems, email inboxes and filing cabinets, and building simple digital services and platforms that offer easy access and use.

We must be led by users

We need to build our services around the people who use them, reducing complexity and focusing on what matters. By working together in multidisciplinary teams made of policy, operational and digital colleagues, we will ensure that all our services are truly user led, efficient and nimble. Together we will develop policy, processes and digital services that meet the needs of our users.

What we will be delivering

Our aim is to ensure that we have a clear, well-understood set of goals that we can pursue. As we start to complete the different phases of work, we will learn and iterate to ensure that we are delivering what our users need.

Deliver simple, clear, fast services for probation colleagues

 Outcomes we want to achieve

• Probation practitioners have the digital tools they need to support the right interventions
• Probation practitioners quickly and accurately provide recommendations at sentencing
• Improved judiciary confidence in the probation service

 Delivered through services that

• Improve the accuracy and timeliness of risk assessments for people on probation
• Enable access to higher quality and more appropriate rehabilitative interventions
• Provide more robust, evidence-based sentence recommendations to support rehabilitative activity
• Automate administrative tasks so colleagues can do the hard work to rehabilitate people
• Reduce reliance on our legacy systems

Deliver digital prison services that replace legacy systems and support rehabilitation

 Outcomes we want to achieve

• Safe, fair and decent prisons
• Improved experiences for prison staff
• Increased educational & rehabilitation opportunities for prisoners

 Delivered through services that

• Standardise processes to increase efficiency and allow prison staff to focus on rehabilitation & providing care for those in prison
• Provide the right data at the right time to improve risk assessment & management
• Support prisoners to feel more in control of their lives, by empowering them to take charge of their own administrative and other tasks

Create simplified and more reliable access to legal aid services

 Outcomes we want to achieve

• Improved access to legal aid services
• Improved user experience for legal aid providers, applicants and colleagues
• Reduced risk and cost of change

 Delivered through services that

• Make it easier for applicants to access legal aid, by making it simpler for providers to submit applications on their behalf
• Implement the recommendations of CLAIR (Criminal Legal Aid Independent Review)
• Automate processes where possible to allow caseworkers to focus on more complex work
• Simplify our technology estate, reducing the number of systems doing the same thing in multiple places

Build a Modern Lasting Power of Attorney

 Outcomes we want to achieve

• Citizens have better support to make decisions
• Improved protection for adults who are at risk
• Better value for money

 Delivered through services that

• Enable citizens to register, make and use a Lasting Power of Attorney digitally
• Automate processes to allow colleagues to focus on complex work
• Are more robust and simpler to maintain by removing reliance on all legacy systems

Provide straightforward and sensitive access to compensation

 Outcomes we want to achieve

• Reduced risk of re-traumatisation
• Reduced reliance on legacy technology
• Improved colleague experience

 Delivered through services that

• Support the implementation of the Parliamentary Scheme review
• Enable citizens to apply for compensation in a simpler, faster and less traumatic manner
• Automate processes to allow colleagues to focus on complex work and better support users of the service
• Improve the speed of decision making without reducing quality

Secure, de-risk and make visible the health of our top 45 business critical systems

 Outcomes we want to achieve

• Reduced level of technical debt
• Services that are more reliable, resilient and secure
• Improved flexibility to respond to change

 Delivered through services that

• Discovering - better understanding our legacy technology and creating clear future plans
• Stabilising - increasing our ability to identify, respond to and prevent both operational and security risks
• Enhancing - investing in new software, technology and modern contracts to replace legacy
• Transforming - transforming processes and systems

Design, deliver and maintain sustainable core technology services and an exceptional workplace technology experience

 Outcomes we want to achieve

• Improved in-house capability to deliver brilliant core and workplace technology services
• Reduced reliance on outdated legacy contracts
• Improved colleague experience
• Improved productivity
• Reduced environmental impact
• Better value for money

 Delivered through services that

• Enable us to better understand and manage our estate, user experience and performance
• We have the appropriate skills, capability and knowledge to continually improve
• Are delivered through modern, flexible contracts
• Ensure our colleagues have up to date devices, office software and collaboration tools
• Are commodity and platform based where appropriate
• Have automated updates, patching and deployment where possible
• Have simple, automated monitoring and support
• Simplify and improve the security of our network
• Reduce our reliance on legacy technology - by replacing and decommissioning services and equipment that are outdated and not supported

Build strong digital & technology capability

 Outcomes we want to achieve

• Stronger in-house digital capability to enable the delivery of high quality services
• Increased digital and user-centred maturity of the organisation

 Delivered through services that

• Building strong multidisciplinary product and service teams
• Creating opportunities to retrain and upskill - providing new routes into digital
• Continually improving our tools, processes and ways of working
• Helping the MoJ to better understand digital ways of working
• Respectfully challenging the status quo

Build proportionate functional standards

 Outcomes we want to achieve

• Successful delivery of our strategy
• Simpler, faster, and better services

 Delivered through services that

• Rigorous prioritisation
• Improved tracking and measurement of delivery
• Strong but proportionate enterprise, data and security capability
• Better management of our suppliers
• Strong financial management
• Processes and tools that enable us to meet government standards and best practice and that support and enable delivery

Modernise and Upgrade Courts and Tribunals services (HMCTS Reform Strategy)

 Outcomes we want to achieve

• More and better ways to access justice for all those who need it
• Quicker and simpler processes for professional and public court users alike
• A workforce that is as effective as it can possibly be
• Reduced reliance on legacy technology

 Delivered through services that

• Are accessible and built around user needs
• Have stripped out paper, unnecessary hearings, forms, and duplication
• Automate activities and the flow of data between justice agencies, while collecting better insight data which will enable better decision-making

The HMCTS Reform Programme was started in 2016, to improve digital and technology services across the courts and tribunal system. As it moves into the next phase, the focus will be on upgrading legacy systems and building new digital services.

Measuring Success

For any strategy to be successful, we need to measure it. We need to know that we are making the right decisions, and putting our resources towards what will make the most significant difference to our users. This means embedding these themes in all decision-making, prioritisation and resourcing processes, and continually tracking our progress.

Flexible Organisation

We will evidence a reduced reliance on legacy systems and contracts that restrict our ability to be flexible and responsive. We will move more of our services to the cloud to create both resilience and flexibility. Our key business critical services will be more secure and resilient, we will be able to make changes faster and more safely, and unplanned downtime will be reduced.

Driven by Data

We will show that we have made key data available for decision making. All of our new services will be built with APIs as standard, we will unlock data from our monolithic legacy systems and we will move information from paper to digital sources. We will also demonstrate that we are able to make better decisions about our digital services through better tooling and data.

Led by Users

We will demonstrate that our services are built with the user at their heart through high levels of uptake of those services and great user satisfaction scores. Our services will be secure, reliable and accessible giving users the comfort that their data is safe. We will show that our services have made processes simpler and faster for our users.

Changing the user experience of justice - simpler, faster & better for everyone

This is our strategy for the next three years. We’ve been given the mandate and support we need to really change how we are building and operating the digital services that the justice system relies on. Our aim is to set out clearly and comprehensively what we want to focus on, and why we think it will deliver transformative change across the justice system.