Following a decision that was made earlier this year to retain the existing Digital Case System technology used in Crown Courts, the ministry’s annual financial statements reveal a significant loss

The Ministry of Justice recorded a multimillion-pound loss in the 2023/24 fiscal year after opting to scrap elements of the Common Platform IT programme.

During the final weeks of that year, the ministry revealed that it would be retaining the existing Digital Case System used to support Crown Court hearings. The plan had originally been to replace this with a tailored application created as part of the wider £300m Common Platform rollout.

But the existing program was retained in order “to protect operational performance of the criminal courts”, HM Courts and Tribunals Service chief executive Nick Goodwin said at the time.

The newly published MoJ annual report and accounts for FY24 reveal that the decision to scrap the plans to switch IT systems led to a financial loss of over £5m for the ministry.

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“HMCTS took a decision to retain an existing digital case management system used in Crown Courts rather than replace it by enhancing the functionality within the common platform,” the report said. “As a result, related development work on the common platform was stopped, leading to a constructive loss of £5.6 million.”

This was the largest of seven losses in excess of £300,000 recorded during the year.

The DCS tool that remains in use for Crown Court hearings is used to by the HMCTS, the Crown Prosecution Service, judges, and legal representatives to store and access material related to cases.

The decision to retain the existing platform was welcomed at the time by Fran Heathcote, general secretary of the PCS union.

“We welcome the news that HMCTS plans to retain DCS because, as case management systems go, it’s popular with our members and others in the legal profession because it works,” she said. “Common Platform is vastly overspent and remains unfit for purpose. This announcement by HMCTS would seem to be a tacit acceptance of both.”

In 2022 PCS led months of strikes in protest over issue related to the rollout of Common Platform. The dispute was concluded in March 2023 with the HMCTS’s acquiescing to various demands, including safeguarding 450 jobs until at least this year.