Giving the morning keynote at this week’s PublicTechnology Live conference, Kamal Bal told attendees about how the ministry is working to improve services by better supporting both users and colleagues
The digital chief of the Ministry of Justice has stressed the importance of the department’s services treating users with sensitivity and support.
Giving a keynote presentation this week (pictured above) at PublicTechnology Live in London, digital director Kamal Bal told attendees that the services developed by the ministry are informed by the experiences and needs of users – who often “come to interact with us [when] they’re a position of absolute vulnerability”.
“They’re at a real moment of need,” he added. “And that is a common thread that sits across everything we do and it is, therefore, so key that, when they’re interacting with us, they feel supported by the experience that they’re interacting with, but they also have trust in it as well.”
“You can focus on the user by focusing on your colleagues. The needs of both are really important.”
To enable these supportive services, Bal said that development of digital and data platforms is underpinned by “four tenets”: human-centred design; data-driven decision making; cross-agency collaboration; and continuous improvement.
To support the tenet of human-centred design, the MoJ has a particular focus on delivering services in a trauma-informed way.
Bal told PublicTechnology Live that the trauma-informed approach “really drives a lot of what we do” across the MoJ’s different types of service user and the agencies that serve them – which includes HM Prison and Probation Service, HM Courts and Tribunals Service, the Legal Aid Agency, the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, and the Office of the Public Guardian, which oversees the administration of the lasting power of attorney regime.
The MoJ digital chief said: “If you’ve been a victim of a violent crime, you’ve lived through the trauma of being a victim of that violent crime. You’ve then gone and reported it to the police and had to go through that journey again. Maybe you then get into a conversation with the Crown Prosecution Service and, again, you are presenting the same information. Then someone tells you about this compensation scheme, and you’re going through it again. We are just making people relive that trauma – but we are now consciously seeking to create experience to get ahead of that and avoid the need to do that. We put a lot of focus on user research, and we have a lot of people out and about in the field talking to people, to understand: what is the outcome people are seeking?”
Supporting staff
Improving the outcomes for service users is often supported and amplified by making similar improvements for public-service staff, according to Bal. Having spent much of his prior career in the consumer world – including stints at Marks and Spencer, Avon, and Pizza Hut – the MoJ digital director arrived in government in 2023 with a track record of taking an “obsessive focus on the customer” and their experience.
“When multi-channel retailing came – and the ‘click and collect’ experience, in particular, at Marks and Spencer – that really highlighted to me that you can create a great customer experience by improving a colleague experience. You’d be amazed at how much work goes on behind the scenes at an M&S store, for example, to make it slick when a customer comes in. And that’s really influenced me because, for a long time, I was very much [about] always focusing on the customer. Actually, you can focus on the customer – or the user, in our case – by focusing on your colleagues. The needs of both are really important.”
96,460
Total MoJ workforce, as of start of 2025
£14.6bn
Ministry’s total spending in 2023-24, according to NAO
35
Number of executive agencies and other arm’s-length bodies that work with the ministry
87,726
Prison population across more than 100 prisons, as of mid-2024
4.1 million
Court cases and tribunals processed in 2023-24
The MoJ has government’s largest workforce, with almost 100,000 such colleagues across the central ministry and its arm’s-length bodies. Bal cites the example of how digital can provide improvements for prison officers and other staff – and, by extension, help better support prisoners.
“We know, categorically, that if we want to create safe prison working environments, and if we want to help rehabilitate prisoners, it’s all about frontline officers being able to build relationships with them,” he said. “It’s all about being able to spend more time with people and less time on admin.”
For some years, this admin has been largely centred on the complex and unwieldy National Offender Management Information System. This legacy platform requires time-consuming inputs of information such as prisoners’ financial credits, disciplinary issues and alerts, and formal adjudications – data which staff cannot then see collated in one place.
“We’re seeking to transform that and we’ve created the Digital Prison Service… which is now rolling out,” Bal said. “All those key things that staff need to know are now there together in front of them, and that is saving hours a week… if someone going to meet or have a conversation with [a prisoner], or if they need to try and decide something, all that information is front and centre, and is there for them.”
The digital chief added that, in delivering this service, there has also a “lovely undercurrent… of an intentional focus on replacing legacy” technology systems.
“I’ve been here two years and my quick observation is that there is no silver bullet to doing this, and there is no magical thing that means that, in six months, you’re going to be able to go from legacy to something new,” he said. “You have to set an intentional course of action…. My team set off on this journey about four years ago, and we’ve probably got about another two to three years to go to get this complete. But we’ve been resolute in our focus.”
