Ministry opens bids for agreement of up to eight years in length and covering the replacement of an ageing system used to send over 50 million sensitive messages each year

The Ministry of Justice is seeking a supplier to fulfil a £30m-plus contract to deliver a new and upgraded email platform to replace a 20-year-old tool supporting nearly half a million people across the justice system.

In 2026, the MoJ intends to implement the Cross Justice Secure Mail system, replacing the incumbent Criminal Justice Secure eMail platform – both of which are known as CJSM.

More than 10,000 organisations, 12,000 domains and about 478,000 individual users throughout the four countries of the UK are connected to the existing infrastructure – which is used to send an annual total of over 50 million messages. Content sent via the platform is classified at Official level.

According to a newly published contract notice: “CJSM has been in operation for over 20 years and enables Official information to be communicated between assured organisations, both in the public and private sector, such as the Crown Prosecution Service, victim support organisations, the police, probation, legal representatives, private prisons, and others.”

The MoJ is now “seeking a supplier to design, build and transition – including data migration – from the existing [system]… and to manage and maintain the Cross Justice Secure Mail as a new system”, the notice adds.

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The ministry has set out a range of requirements for the new CJSM, including “a cloud gateway for connecting organisations using Office 365 and G Suite” as well as “hosted webmail for organisations who cannot connect via the SMTP relay/cloud gateway”.

The incoming platform should enable discrete organisations to implement their own administrative processes for managing staff connections to the platform, while also offering overarching assurance procedures for verifying new and existing users.

Other stipulations set out by the MoJ include: “an accessible and useable directory of registered users; service resilience, including a disaster recovery solution; a dedicated service desk accessible to all users of the service; ability to connect to other government solutions such as GOV.UK Notify; an online training facility; multi-factor authentication for portal users; a dedicated CJSM Helpdesk; an information website; government/police user access to the CJSM directory via single sign on; continuous improvement in response to external service environment and market developments; [and] an option for secure online document storage facility during the life of the service”.

To deliver, implement and maintain a system offering all this functionality, the ministry’s preferred supplier will be appointed to a contract of an initial six-year term, plus two potential extensions of 12 months each. Spending via the deal is expected to total £31.2m, once VAT is included.

Opening bids for the agreement are open until 13 December, after which up to five prospective providers are expected to be asked to participate in further competition. The MoJ expects to enter into a contract with the chosen bidder in late 2025.