Justice Committee 

Oral evidence: Work of the Ministry of Justice, HC 599

Tuesday 5 March 2024

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 5 March 2024.

Watch the meeting 

Members present: Sir Robert Neill (Chair); Tahir Ali; James Daly; Rachel Hopkins; Dr Kieran Mullan; Edward Timpson.

Questions 1 - 116

Witnesses

I: Antonia Romeo, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Justice; James McEwen, Chief Operating Officer, Ministry of Justice; Amy Rees, Director General Chief Executive, HM Prison and Probation Service; Nick Goodwin, Chief Executive, HM Courts and Tribunals Service.

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Antonia Romeo, James McEwen, Amy Rees and Nick Goodwin.

Chair: Welcome to this session of the Justice Committee. Welcome to the Permanent Secretary and her senior officials. We are grateful to see you all and will come to you very shortly, but we have to do the usual declarations of interest. I am a non-practising barrister and former consultant to a law firm.

Edward Timpson: I am a barrister with a current practising certificate but not taking on any direct court work. I am a former Solicitor General, a former chair of CAFCASS, and a former chair of the national Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel. My brother is chair of the Prison Reform Trust. I have recently taken on a role giving informal advice to Ministers on family justice.

Chair: Mr Daly, beat that.

James Daly: I cannot beat that. I am a practising solicitor and partner in a firm of solicitors.

Q1                Chair: I do not think that anybody else will have any. Welcome, Permanent Secretary. Would you like to introduce yourself? We know your officials, but I will ask them to introduce themselves as well for the record.

Antonia Romeo: I am Antonia Romeo, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice and principal accounting officer.

Nick Goodwin: My name is Nick Goodwin. I am the chief executive officer of His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service.

Amy Rees: I am Amy Rees. I am the CEO of HMPPS.

James McEwen: I am James McEwen. I am the chief operating officer of the Ministry.

Q2                Chair: Thank you all very much for coming to help us. Can we start with the money, Ms Romeo? Looking at the supplementary estimates that we have just had provided for 2023-24, and then tracking back, what we see is that the Department sought to increase the resource element—the departmental expenditure limit, for want of a better word, or DEL—by £521 million. As I read it, that includes £190 million being switched from capital to resource. What were the resource pressures? What were the day-to-day spending pressures that caused you to have to do that?

Antonia Romeo: The first thing is that, as you have already noted, the reserve claim was only £253 million, because, of the £521 million, the £190 million that you mentioned was the net switch from capital to resource. It was disappointing to have to have a reserve claim this year, because we seek to avoid having one, and had not had one for a few years—in fact, not since the pandemic. We had already absorbed a large number of pressures in year, including £766 million for inflation and other pay pressures during the efficiency and spending review. We had also absorbed an additional £150 million of costs on—£155 million for prison officer pay, £50 million for Operation Safeguard and £17 million of judicial pay. So we had absorbed a significant amount from the increases.

We had some additional unforeseen expenditure—as you will know, reserve claims have to be unforeseen and unabsorbable—and those included the cost of living payments that went to staff, which was £89 million. We had an income shortfall in fees and fines of £92 million. We had judicial pay and pension costs, particularly in the special educational needs and disability tribunal following the Southby case. We had the Harpur Trust impacts from the Supreme Court judgment. We then had some pre-agreed elements, including the turnaround grant, which was £11 million, and some shared outcomes fund spending that we had also pre-agreed.

Q3                Chair: Had any financial implications of the McCloud judgment, as it has sometimes been referred to, already worked their way through the system?

Antonia Romeo: There were none within this year that we could not absorb, but James might want to add to that.

James McEwen: There are some judicial pension costs associated with Southby.

Antonia Romeo: What about McCloud?

James McEwen: There are some pensions costs in that line as well.

Q4                Chair: What about for future years? Do you anticipate further outflows?

James McEwen: We are working all that through now and talking to the Treasury to make sure that is fully funded.

Q5                Chair: So there are contingents, but the likelihood is that, one way or another, there are going to be pressures that are going to need to be funded somehow going forward.

James McEwen: That is exactly right.

Q6                Chair: You told me about the shortfall in the fee income, etc., which is helpful. Can I just have a look at the other side of the coin? There is also an increase in the supplementary estimate of the resource AME, the annually managed expenditure, of £215 million. That is 45%, which is an extraordinarily high level, Permanent Secretary, is it not? What gave rise to a 45% increase in the RAME?

Antonia Romeo: A large amount—£41 million—of it is impairments. It is a technical adjustment. It is an asset revaluation based on the way that we value prisons and courts, which we can go into in more detail. We had £92 million for litigation. I cannot go into detail because it might prejudice our position in that litigation, but we make a provision if it is more likely than not that we are going to need to make a payment in the future. £83 million was other provisions, which includes things like legal aid and outstanding casework.

Q7                Chair: Without going into the detail, it can include any types of claims for litigation brought against the Ministry or its agencies.

Antonia Romeo: Yes, exactly. It is for the whole group, if we anticipate that we might need the money.

Chair: It could be claims against the Courts Service, the Prison Service or whatever.

Antonia Romeo: Yes, exactly.

Q8                Chair: I say that so people understand that that is what we are talking about. Are the impairments in relation to prisons and courts related to the value of estate property?

Antonia Romeo: Yes. Essentially, we have to evaluate them in a certain way that can exclude some costs that, in reality, are what the value would be when you are building the prison, for example. For example, some site costs would not be included. We have to account for the difference between those two things. It could go up as well as down, but that amount is an impairment. It is a technical adjustment and does not relate to mismanagement or loss or anything like that. It is a technical line.

Q9                Chair: Those technical adjustments occur every year, one way or another. There will always be a line around that when you come and give evidence to us. There is always a provision for litigation, because there is always litigation of one sort or another going on. That still does not explain why there is the exceptional 45% increase in resource DEL, given that you have those things that are common. They may be a bit more this year than in previous years, but what else is driving it?

Antonia Romeo: I will bring in James in a minute, but the lion’s share of this £216 million was the £92 million for litigation provisions. As it happens, we had a particularly significant year on litigation that we had to provide for.

Q10            Chair: What was it the year before? Can you remember? Can you help me, just so that we get a sense of why it was so significantly different?

Antonia Romeo: James, do you have that?

James McEwen: I will look now.

Antonia Romeo: Perhaps we could keep going while James looks for that.

Q11            Chair: We will come back to that, but I would just be interested to know whether it was particularly unusual in terms of a spike, for want of a better word.

I noticed something else when looking at the other supplementary estimates. Essentially, the explanation that we had from the Department was that these relate to provisions and impairments that are centrally held, which is fairly standard. I noticed that the Crown Prosecution Service wrote off, by way of an impairment, some £10 million in relation to changes to the scope of Common Platform. We know that the changes to scope have been quite well publicised. How much of this increase in the resource AME is due to any write-offs or impairments in relation to MoJ or HMCTS, such as the elements of the Common Platform changes and rescoping?

Nick Goodwin: This year, other than the part that you picked up on in terms of the cost that was written off, because we did not fully integrate Common Platform and the CPS, no further costs have been written off in relation to reform, other than £860,000 in respect of adoption proceedings. You will recall that, when we were last here, we changed the scope of reform and took adoption out of scope. We had incurred that money and, therefore, that is written off.

Antonia Romeo: You will remember that, a year or two ago, we incurred a fruitless payment because of some work that the CPS had been doing to develop their case management system. That meant that the work that we had been doing ended up being fruitless. This is, as it were, the flip side of that, which is that the CPS have now had to write something off, because work has happened on Common Platform that has meant that that ended up being fruitless.

Q12            Chair: I notice that we had some announcements very recently about further changes to scope and roll-out of Common Platform, so some things are not going to happen in the timeframe that was perhaps originally envisaged. Is there any fruitless expenditure that we anticipate falling into next year as a result of those changes?

Nick Goodwin: As we put the accounts down for next year, we will disclose any write-offs from Common Platform as a result of the very recent changes that I wrote to the Committee about. They are not disclosed yet in this report that we are looking at.

Q13            Chair: Since you are on top of the management information, I wondered if you could give us a sense of what pressures that might give you going forward for next year.

Nick Goodwin: I expect that to be around £5.5 million.

Chair: Thanks very much. That is helpful.

Antonia Romeo: James is ready to come back.

James McEwen: At the supplementary last year, we had a budget of £633 million for resource AME. That compares to £697 million for this supplementary estimate. The reason why it is AME is because of its inherent volatility. By definition, these are volatile areas of spend, so it is quite hard to get a really taut and realistic estimate. Last year, of the £633 million, our outturn was only £102 million, which was due to a large volume of litigation, and it is very difficult to anticipate what year litigation might fall into. We tend to make sure that we do not breach control totally by accident and give ourselves some comfort on that total.

As Antonia explained, our AME budget is all around the value of future liabilities and changes in provisions. There is no economic fiscal expenditure associated with that. Some of the changes are to do with impairment, which is on the property side. That would be volatile at the moment, because we have lots of assets under construction. As we bring them into use, that triggers the revaluation that Antonia was talking about.

A really good example is a new prison. As it is an asset under construction, we capitalise certain spend. As soon as it is in use, we have to revalue it. The book value will change, using an accounting methodology known as the direct replacement costs. That means that some of the input costs to build the prison are excluded in that calculation, which creates a book value change. That is called an impairment for the purposes of the accounts and the supps.

Q14            Chair: Ms Rees, from the Prison Service point of view, I take it that the impairment will be around the value of new prisons. What about the total extra costs in terms of prison officers’ pay and other matters? There was an award that was given that the Government rightly honoured in full.

Amy Rees: The Permanent Secretary has already said that we have had about an extra £150 million for pay. In terms of how it happens, we try to make a prediction of how much we think the pay is going to be. As you know, it is an independent pay review body, so if it comes in slightly above that, we then have separate pressure.

Q15            Chair: Do you identify any other potential pressures in the Prison Service in relation to resource or capital—AME or DEL?

Amy Rees: Our two largest pressures are always around pay and any changes in year to pay—we also had the cost of living payment last year, which affected probation staff—and capacity. Safeguard was mentioned. We have another bucket of costs around running ourselves at a very high level of capacity occupancy at the moment.

Q16            Chair: I take it that provision has not yet been planned, but will have to be planned for the staffing arrangements for the new prisons when they come through. Do you have projected costs around that yet?

Amy Rees: We know the unit cost of our prisons, but some of our new prisons will be under contract, so it is slightly different. They determine their pay rates for their staff, but we have secured all of that with HMT. When we do our business case, we know that there will be a resource cost to running those prisons as well, so that is built in.

Q17            Chair: Are you able to give any ballpark figure of what we are potentially looking at?

Amy Rees: It will really vary from site to site and will depend on whether we are going to run it ourselves or via a contract, and how much that is.

Q18            Chair: When are you likely to know that?

Amy Rees: We have not announced some contract awards yet, because we are still in a commercial process.

Q19            Chair: I understand that, but what is the timeframe for doing it? If you are starting to build them, you will want to have it ready to get them staffed up.

Amy Rees: The next one to open is Millsike, which we expect to be announced probably in the next six months or so.

Antonia Romeo: Millsike will open in this SR period, so the money, as Amy has said, has already been secured. We will be bidding for money in the next SR for whatever comes on stream.

Q20            Dr Mullan: Most of our focus today is on things that are in the report, but I just wanted to pick up on the discussion that we had last time you were here, Ms Romeo, about what is absent in the report. You might remember that last year I raised the point that, while it talks a lot about access to justice and the victim’s experience, it did not talk about whether you are delivering justice in a more tangible way. You said at that meeting that you would go away and have a think about it.

It is the same again this year. There is a complete absence of anything about the quality of justice. There is stuff in there about access to justice and speed of justice, but it assumes that, when you get to court, you get justice. Did you manage to do any thinking on that? If you have not, why not? Do you think that it is an absence? I certainly do, but you may think differently.

Antonia Romeo: I will say a couple of things and then ask Nick to come in. The answer is that we did consider it. In fact, I wrote to the Committee after we appeared last year on some of the work that we were doing on that, so Nick can update on that.

The other thing is just by way of a reminder, and I know that we had this conversation last year. We got into a conversation, did we not, about process versus substance? I really hope and believe that some of the work that we have been doing to continue to develop the data dashboards, albeit it is measuring timeliness—I understand that that is not the same as asking victims how they felt about the outcome, which I know is the focus of your question. None the less, I think capturing timeliness and victim attrition is a really good way of demonstrating whether victims were content with the process. A victim who walks away from the process during the process is, by definition, almost certainly not content.

All the work that we have been doing to develop that and to develop the data also contributes to the point that you have raised. If I may, I will pass to Nick.

Q21            Dr Mullan: Just before you move on, it wouldn’t be for me to dictate that the only way that you can do this is the survey—you gave your views on the survey—but, as a member of the public, if you were to sit and read that annual report, however you want to choose to describe it, there is, again, no discussion of what probably most taxpayers think is a key outcome for you, which is delivering justice for victims. I am not being prescriptive about how you do that, but it does not even talk about it. There is more in the report about climate change than there is about how victims feel about justice. It has the potential to reflect thinking in the Department.

Antonia Romeo: I welcome the point. I completely agree that it is absolutely essential, and what you are asking me is, without being prescriptive, in next year’s annual report and accounts—

Dr Mullan: You articulate something.

Antonia Romeo: —whether something can be articulated, and I very much agree with that. If it would be helpful, can I ask Nick to say a little bit about what we have done?

Nick Goodwin: It is just worth saying that, in respect of the courts, their function is to provide access to justice. We have published some more information over the course of the last period about that. In relation to our reform programme, we committed to doing some access to justice assessments. In November last year, we published the first four of those, and there will be two more coming in the autumn. Effectively, they outline how people experience our reformed services, and whether that has any impact on people of different groups being able to access services.

They are now publicly available. Broadly speaking, they show that, by and large, our reformed services do not adversely impact most groups, with a couple of exceptions. In fact, many groups find their access to justice enhanced by the ability to conduct proceedings either more quickly, because the process is better, or virtually, for example.

There are a couple of areas that we are watching very closely. We will probably touch on probate later, and we may touch on divorce. In those areas, we have picked up that certain minority ethnic groups find those services more difficult to operate than others, and that is largely for reasons of foreign naming conventions and so forth getting in the way. Where we are picking up these issues, we are then fine-tuning the design of our services to meet them.

I should also just say that we have been doing quite a lot to gather information. We have gathered quite a lot of information and surveyed 600,000 people who have been in contact with the courts and our reformed services over the last period, and that gives us a much richer view of what is going on. Again, it is largely a good news story.

Q22            Dr Mullan: Not to diminish that really excellent work, which is very important, as Ms Romeo picked up, my concern is that you could have a system that is really well accessed and people think that it is a fantastic experience, but they still do not think that it delivers justice in terms of the outcomes that are delivered for perpetrators. It is great stuff, but my point is really not about that.

Antonia Romeo: I will just flag something that we are doing, of which the Committee will be well aware, which is the introduction of the Victims and Prisoners Bill. It is a very important contribution to that, because of the number of things that it does to enshrine the victims code. It is aimed at improving the experience of victims in the criminal justice system. It is another example of lots of work being done, but I take your point that the response to it in the annual report is also going to be helpful.

Q23            Chair: The MoJ is an unprotected Department. It has been pretty much throughout my time in the House, or at any rate since we had the idea of protected or unprotected Departments. Who knows what tomorrow will bring in terms of pressures for spending reductions anywhere within the Budget and so on. What contingency arrangements have you made to try to identify areas where you might have to cope with additional pressures on your budgets?

Antonia Romeo: I strongly suspect that we will have to cope with additional pressures, because we are not only, as you say, an unprotected Department, but also a Department on which the demand is increasing, not decreasing, because of flows into the system.

I should say that, on some particular areas, which we might come on to, we have already been fortunate in working with the Treasury to identify some extra money that might help on certain things. You might have seen that the justice system as a whole has been awarded £170 million over the next two years as part of the productivity plan. That was new money announced yesterday, so there are some specific things. It is about digitising packs for juries, and more automation in some things that we can do in support for probation. There are some particular areas where we have had additional money through these mechanisms.

We have to look all the time at our budget, and these involve really difficult choices. We are doing that at the moment in the context of the allocations for next year, 2024-25. We are currently in the process of allocations. It is worth noting that 41% of our cost base is staffing, 9% is property, 13% is contracts and 17% is legal aid.

There are large areas of funding that are not discretionary. If you are running a system such as a prison system or a court system, although you want to make it as productive as possible, there is a certain cost attached to that. There are areas of discretionary spend, but those are areas with some of the most important spending—for example, money on rehabilitation and reducing reoffending, or money to support for victims such as ISVAs and IDVAs and all of that work.

It is very difficult, in a budget like ours, to find places to go, but I just want to re-emphasise that we are doing everything that we can to become more productive and more efficient. A good example of that is that, while Amy—and she might want to say more about this—has recruited almost an additional 5,000 staff to the frontline to support prisons and probation, she is, as a result of the efficiency and reform process, taking £37 million out of HMPPS headquarters overall through becoming more productive. We are doing everything that we can to be as productive as possible and to make every pound of taxpayers’ money work. There is a lot that we have to do with that money.

Q24            Chair: At the end of the day, you can save X amount through productivity, but you are not only an unprotected Department but also a downstream Department, as you say, so you cannot control the flows of demand on to you.

Antonia Romeo: That is exactly right.

Chair: Essentially, you are having to do more with less.

Amy Rees: Just to add a bit to the One HMPPS programme, which we might talk about a bit later in another context, what the Permanent Secretary said is exactly right. One of the areas where I have no discretion and will not change any spending is frontline staff. In order to protect frontline staff and make sure that we are doing everything that we can to protect and support them, we have decided to resize headquarters, which is where the money is coming out.

Q25            Edward Timpson: Can we focus for a few moments on the 41% of the cost base—which is clearly a large part of making your productivity pay dividends—that is staff, and in particular on their experience as MoJ staff, wherever they happen to be?

Before we look at that more generally, can I ask about the one-off cost of living payment that was made to civil servants, including in probation, which was touched on before? Just for clarity, Prison Service staff were not given that £1,500 one-off cost. Could you explain why? You mentioned something about contracts and how their employment is co-ordinated, but what is the reason?

Amy Rees: The contracts would be separate arrangements, so for anyone who delivers our services under contract, their pay will be decided by their own employer rather than by us. The reason that our own staff who we directly employ in prisons did not get it is that they are under the Prison Service Pay Review Body, so that is decided totally separately by an independent group. We implemented those pay awards, and it was an award of 7% for that year. It is just a separate remit group, decided independently by the pay review body.

Q26            Edward Timpson: So you followed, essentially, what the pay review body had recommended.

Antonia Romeo: As Amy said, most staff, including probation, are governed by the civil service pay remit. That was the pay remit that set the award for most civil servants, but then, in addition, decided to give this one-off non-consolidated payment, which is separate. You normally expect pay review bodies to bear in mind things like cost of living when they are making their awards. As it happens, the PSPRB award was greater than the award for civil servants as a whole. As Amy said, that was implemented in full, which we tend to do, because of the no-strike arrangement. On the civil service pay remit, we follow what everyone else is doing.

Q27            Edward Timpson: Looking at the experiences of staff and how you get feedback on how they are faring under the auspices of the Department, there is a civil service survey done every year. You will be aware of it. Part of what the key indicators looked at is response rates. If we home in on prison and youth custody staff, they had a response rate in the survey for 2022 of just 28%, which was very low compared with the average across the civil service, including the MoJ. In the annual report, the reason for that was described as being due to “technical barriers, resourcing pressures, and negative sentiment from recognised trade unions”.

What are those negative sentiments? What do they relate to? How is the Department addressing those concerns raised by trade unions in relation to that?

Amy Rees: First of all, I just want to say a couple of things. Our overall response rate was 41%, and probation was above 60%, which is a really good response rate for a big, geographically dispersed ops organisation.

Antonia Romeo: “Overall” being HMPPS.

Amy Rees: Coming directly to your question about the Prison Service, the Prison Officers’ Association has a mandate. It believes that it is too general and not specific enough for prison staff. It advises its members not to fill in the survey on the basis that it does not think that it relates specifically enough to life in prison and is more generalist for the civil service. We continue to engage in dialogue with the POA about that, and we continue to encourage our staff and the POA to change their stance and to fill in the civil service survey. As you say, it is a good measure and we want to do our best for staff, but, without having the data and the response rate, it is quite difficult to do that.

Q28            Edward Timpson: I don’t know whether it is a good measure. I just know that there is a survey. For how many years has this been an issue?

Amy Rees: It has been for several years—quite a while.

Edward Timpson: But it is still unresolved.

Amy Rees: It is still unresolved. That is right.

Q29            Rachel Hopkins: What are you doing instead if they are refusing to complete the survey?

Amy Rees: We do a lot. We have multiple engagements with the unions. We enjoy a really productive relationship with the POA. Of course, we do not agree on everything but we do have good relationships with them, and the same goes for the probation trade unions. I also have direct staff engagement groups. I have both a probation one and a prison one. We also have various representatives, and the area executive directors from the seven regions in the country have their own direct relationship as well.

We also have all the formal mechanisms for raising disputes and dealing with them, both formally and informally, as you would expect. That relationship is a good, productive one. We do differ on our stance on the civil service survey.

Q30            Rachel Hopkins: Do prison officer staff have a direct opportunity to answer the questions that are pertinent but might not be in the civil service survey? What are the questions that their trade union representatives want to be asked, so that staff can respond through that direct link, not necessarily through their representatives?

Amy Rees: I totally understand the question. I do not think that the POA’s point is that there are these five specific questions that they would like to ask. Their point is that the whole survey is generalist and more applicable to a generalist civil servant. It is not designed for the very specific operational environment where we have shift workers, for example.

Antonia Romeo: Could I say something about the survey as a whole and MoJ? This year, we had a record response rate across MoJ, with 47,000 people filling in the survey. When 47,000 people are filling in the survey, you know that what it tells you is going to be relevant and important as to how people feel about working in the organisation.

This year, our engagement rate overall, or the index figure, went up to 61%, which is a 1-percentage-point rise on the previous year. I just want to say thank you to all the staff who filled it in, and to all staff for what they are doing. We stayed the same and went up in all the key themes, possibly apart from pay, although we also went up in pay this year. To go up by 1 percentage point is just a massive tribute to the purpose-led nature of the work that we do and the staff we have. What I am referring to is the latest survey, which is 2023 data, so the 1 percentage point is ahead of what is in the annual report and accounts, which was the previous year.

I always read the free text comments that people return. There were 32,000 this year, and reading those gives you a really good indication of what people are concerned about. I then pick my three things that I am focusing on and personally want to make a push on across the Department, and the whole of the top team—all directors and above—in the Ministry of Justice have their three things that they are focusing on. My three things last year were pay, career development, and learning and development.

We went up by 3 percentage points in terms of whether people feel satisfied with their pay. I have to say that it is still at a very low level of around 28%. Nonetheless, there was an improvement. There was a 2-percentage-point improvement in whether people feel that they can develop their careers in the Ministry of Justice, and a 4-percentage-point improvement in whether people feel that they can get access to the right learning and development opportunities.

That was for the previous year’s 30,000 free text comments. This year, I have just read the ones from the most recent survey, and I am happy to tell the Committee my three priorities. The key point about this is that I really believe that the staff need to feel that the leadership really understands what they are concerned about, and then that we are spending our senior bandwidth time focusing on the things that will make them feel motivated to work in the Ministry because of the importance of the work that we do and of delivering for the citizen.

Q31            Edward Timpson: Is staff turnover something that comes up?

Antonia Romeo: I focus on staff turnover quite a lot. As you will see from the annual report and accounts, it is an issue but it is improving overall. It has gone up in some areas but is flat or has gone down in a number of areas in the Department.

Q32            Edward Timpson: Specifically in relation to that, could I turn to HMCTS? Maybe Mr Goodwin will want to come in on this. The civil service average on staff turnover is 11.9%. We would expect anything around 10% in an organisation. That is not unusual. It was noticeable in HMCTS that it was at 16%. It would be helpful to understand the reasons that people are giving at their exit interviews for leaving HMCTS. What are you doing to try to remedy where there is perhaps a pattern that is unpalatable to the Department, where you think that you could have better retention?

Nick Goodwin: The headline figure of 16% applies to all staff. Within HMCTS, we have had a slightly odd staffing profile over the last few years, which is the result of a few issues. We took on more staff during covid and to help us recover the backlogs, for example. That means that we have a higher number of agency staff in HMCTS during the period that we are talking about than we would usually have, and that is because we have anticipated that, as we reform our services and become more efficient, we would lose some staff. Therefore, it made sense to take people on as agency staff to reduce costs down the line. Also, when we were looking to recruit staff to help us run tech and so forth during covid, it made sense to get them in quickly as agency workers. If we look at the permanent members of staff within HMCTS, that turnover rate is much lower, at 12.7%, which is closer to what we would want.

It is also important to know that we have, quite intentionally, tried to change that balance of staff over the last period. We are allowing agency staff to become permanent staff, and we have more permanent staff because it gives us greater stability and there is less training and so forth. The numbers tell some of that story when you disaggregate agency staff and permanent staff.

Nevertheless, we have a turnover of permanent staff in this year of 12.7%. We also have a great many staff who have stayed with us for 40, 50 or 60 years, which is absolutely fantastic. Some turnover is fine and to be expected.

As Antonia said, we are focusing on trying to increase people’s engagement level. Our engagement scores have stayed remarkably steady and have improved throughout the last few years. That is pretty remarkable, given the amount of hard work that people have to do in terms of dealing with covid and in the light of reforms. It is not a bad picture, but we do need to be focusing on people’s learning and development, as Antonia said, and we are doing that within HMCTS, with a particular focus on really important cohorts of staff such as legal advisers, who we have discussed here before.

In terms of why they are leaving, we do exit surveys. There is some unhappiness with pay, which is reflected in those exit surveys: 45% of those leaving report pay. They may be leaving to other Government Departments, by the way, and it is worth noting that we lose many of our staff to HMRC, DWP and others.

Q33            Edward Timpson: Do you get them coming in the other direction?

Nick Goodwin: We do get them coming in the other way. I am not sure if DWP colleagues will watch this, but quite a lot leave and wish that they had stayed. That is the nature of life in the public sector.

Q34            Edward Timpson: What I am trying to understand is what sits behind what you would want to present as a credible workforce plan within the Department. I accept that covid caused some havoc—you had to try to keep abreast of some very rapid changes and to increase staff, often on a temporary basis, to fill the gaps that opened up—in the 2023 figures, in terms of efficiency savings in the workforce, there were 668 exit packages, at a cost of £28 million. At the same time, as it happens, there was an increase in spending on temporary labour of £28 million.

Taking on board Mr Goodwin’s point about HMCTS trying to make a more permanent workforce and not rely on agency staff, how is the workforce plan going to try to address some of that movement around the workforce that is not providing you the savings that you are looking for?

Antonia Romeo: I might bring in Amy in a minute, because the majority of the MoJ exit packages relate to HMPPS. In terms of overall money in the contingent workforce, in an organisation of our size, as you would expect, we need to run a balanced approach. We use contingent labour when we are boosting a particular area and do not expect to need all of those staff over the long term, or when we have to buy in specialist skills that we do not think are going to be as easily available on a permanent basis or in such a cost-effective way.

Good examples would be that Nick, as he said, has increased his number of contingent workers during the reform programme, because part of the way of getting the benefits out is that not all of those staff will be there at the end. On Amy’s side, she will have a number of contingent workers who are involved in things like the prison build programme and the supply side, because some of those will be specialists. Also, on things like IT and digital functions, we find that, in some cases, it is better value for money to buy in the expertise that we need through contingent labour than through permanent staff, partly because of specific projects and partly because of the way in which the pay scales work.

Amy Rees: Just as the Permanent Secretary said, of the 640 efficiency exits, the vast majority, 572, sat with me. All of those are medical inefficiencies. In other words, it is when we have taken an evaluation of the person and decided that they are just not fit and that there would be no reasonable service. You can imagine that that is quite a lot higher in my workforce, given the nature of the work. If people have certain medical conditions, they are unable to continue as a full prison officer or akin.

Q35            Edward Timpson: Is that part of trying to improve productivity vis-à-vis headcount, so that you know that each individual is really giving you the most that they can in providing the service that you are required to provide?

Antonia Romeo: Are you referring to exits or the choice between contingent workers and permanent staff?

Edward Timpson: In terms of an overall workforce plan, how do you measure productivity against the number of staff you have and how do you make decisions about who to keep and who to move on?

Amy Rees: In terms of my exits, it would not be about productivity. It would be about the organisational need to give full and effective service, but it would be very much about whether we think that there is a reasonable prospect of the individual coming back and giving us full service.

We care about the person and, if we think there is a realistic prospect of them coming back and giving us good service, we will bring them back. If we think that that is not realistic—for example, damaged knees mean that you cannot do C&R—we might offer them alternative employment, or they might exit the service. We have an organisational need, so we need to have the correct number of people who can do full C&R, but individual cases are very much about the individual’s needs and whether we can bring them back to full employment.

Edward Timpson: We could have a long conversation about occupational therapy and all sorts of things, but I will leave that for another day.

Q36            Chair: The Department and its agencies hold quite a lot of management information. What is the Ministry’s and the agencies’ policy on publishing management information?

Antonia Romeo: Publication of each information set is done on a case-by-case basis. The preferred route is to use accredited official statistics or national statistics. We also hold a lot of internal management information, which is not quality-checked to the same level and the same rigour that you would expect of an official statistic. We have a whole raft of information, some of which we publish and think it is important.

When we do publish it, as well as having put it through appropriate quality assurance, we tend to do so alongside a narrative that sets out the limitations and strengths of the data and so on. As you would expect in a big operational Department, we also have a lot of operational management information, most of which is not published.

Q37            Chair: The Office for Statistics Regulation makes the point that you do about the operational data being in raw form, but says that they are published to meet the public interest in transparent information, but with, if you like, a health check on the quality. Do you achieve that same approach—publishing whenever possible, in the interests of transparency, but with the warning that they are not checked in the same way that the MI would be?

Antonia Romeo: I will hand over to Nick in a second, because that is a good example of where we do exactly that. We want to be transparent. Decisions on what to publish and in what form are a matter for Ministers, but, where possible, to achieve transparency and where something can be rigorously assured in the timeframe, we would look to publish at an appropriate time. We have a number of things that we publish quarterly, and we publish some things annually, etc., so we tend to try to make it coherent. HMCTS management information is a good example.

Nick Goodwin: One of the things that you need if you are going to publish data is for the data to be reliable. Quite a lot of what we have been investing in with our reform agenda has allowed us to really improve the quality of our data. Alongside that, there is a greater thirst for our data, particularly on, for example, how we were getting along with reducing the case load during the pandemic. That led to us publishing new management information at that point. Antonia said that it does not quite have the full ONS seal, but it was done working with the ONS.

We have recently enhanced that further. We are trying to publish more information that gives a wider view of our system—not just numbers that people cannot understand, but things like satisfaction rates and so forth. We are pushing in that direction. People always want more information, but it is quite important that it is of a quality.

Q38            Chair: The Office for Statistics Regulation says: “MI lags are usually small, and data are generally released frequently. For example, they can be released daily or weekly, but can also be released at longer intervals, such as monthly or quarterly.” There is a bit of flex in that.

In relation to the probate service, I think that I am right in saying that the management information on the number of cases completed is published with about a six-week lag. Is there any reason why it is six weeks as opposed to some shorter period?

Nick Goodwin: We now publish information on probate on a monthly basis. As I said, it has recently been enhanced so that it has satisfaction rates in relation to customer contact and so forth. That information is really important if you are deeply interested in probate, which you may be if you are, say, a charity. The thing to recognise is that, between the publication of individual statistics, there is absolutely nothing stopping a proper grown-up conversation between my colleagues running the probate service and those who are interested, so that we can provide them with insight that will help them to understand the likely flow of bequests coming to their particular charity, for example, and that happens. We do try to provide information that is of use to people wherever possible.

Q39            Chair: We are doing an inquiry into the probate service, as you know, and one of the concerns raised with us is by the charities, which do have an interest, because a lot of their income comes from bequests left in people’s estates. Their concern is that the lack of complete and timely information makes it difficult for them to make robust financial forecasts, because they have staff and expenditure for their charitable purposes, but they are sometimes in difficulty with that because they do not know where the incomes are. What discussions have you had specifically with the charity sector around this?

Nick Goodwin: There are good discussions going on with the charity sector, and also with the specialist legal practitioners who are interested in probate, and they happen regularly. I know that those conversations have happened, where we have tried to provide information that allows exactly for that forecasting.

Q40            Chair: Are they satisfied yet? I do not think that they are, are they? Are you continuing those discussions? It is a legitimate concern that they have.

Nick Goodwin: I am sure that they would always like more and better. I am very happy to give them the best information that we can. We feel that they are satisfied. We had good conversations with practitioners recently on how we are turning around the service in probate and about our call answering time and so forth. We thought that that was a constructive conversation.

Q41            Chair: In the course of those constructive conversations, have you made any progress on ensuring that, when you publish details of how many cases are outstanding and what the backlog may be, that includes cases that are declared dormant and are not being progressed by HMCTS? That is an issue that has been raised in some of the evidence to our inquiry, and including that would be extremely helpful to those charities.

Nick Goodwin: I recently wrote to the Committee. Because the probate inquiry is coming up, we are giving our evidence on probate and, within that, we have gone through all of the data, showing what the case load is and how that is now rapidly reducing. We have also been clear on what we think the number of workable cases is in the system. We have recently updated what we assess to be workable cases—those that have not been stopped for reason of further information to be given—to make a more accurate picture of what is going on. In essence, we have added to that stock of cases some older, typically paper cases that would have gone unregistered before. We are just trying to be as accurate as possible.

Q42            James Daly: I am trying to think of an adequate word to describe what you have just said about the discussions with the legal profession, because I think that they are non-existent. I will give you one example. The probate registry recently decided that, each afternoon, they would not be answering the telephone, because they were tackling the backlog. No legal practitioner in the country knew that that was going to happen. I just wonder how a practical thing like that, given at very short notice, is an example of you speaking in a productive manner with legal professionals.

Nick Goodwin: That change came in in the middle of April. It was discussed with a number of practitioners before we brought it in—admittedly, not with a lot of notice, but it was discussed with them. We found the reception to that change to be more positive than we thought it would be.

It is worth emphasising why we have made that change. We have not had the greatest performance in probate for a period of time. We have begun to turn that round really rather quickly since around summer of this year. We are now granting more grants of probate than we ever have done on record, and we are turning that round. By August next year, we expect to be exactly where we want to be with grants of probate. However, we are facing the fact that, over the last year, we have had more requests for grants and more applications than ever since 2012, with over 300,000 in that year, and that follows off the back of two other really high years.

From about this point in February to three months hence, we are entering the peak demand period. We want to make sure that we can preserve our recovery in terms of getting grants of probate out the door, which is best done by limiting those phone lines and having people deal with the grants of probate. Many of those calls are people chasing for progress, and so the best service that we can give is to get the job done for those people. That restriction of the phone lines to the morning has resulted in us being able to maintain that trajectory. The duration that people wait for calls has reduced and, generally speaking, it has enhanced public service.

Q43            James Daly: I can understand why you are saying that, but the service that the probate registry has been giving has been a disaster. When you say, “I have spoken to a few practitioners regarding what is going on,” it must be very few, because just about every practitioner in the country did not know that the changes were going to come at very short notice. Can you explain to me why you think that the timescale for the issuing of probate certificates increased from 14 days pre-covid to a minimum of 16 weeks now?

Nick Goodwin: The 14-day figure is not entirely accurate. The 14-day figure does not include any cases that were stopped. Because we are being more transparent with the data, you are seeing averages that include stopped cases. In terms of performance, we were able to discharge simple cases coming through our digital system last year within about two weeks. The difficulty comes when a case is either complicated or comes on paper. It is true that we have not kept pace with those over the course of the previous year. We are now seeking to turn that around, and we are turning that around.

Q44            James Daly: Are you telling me seriously that you think that the probate registry has been run in an efficient and productive manner over the last number of years? You may now be taking extreme measures to try to get things back online, but it is a complete example of the MoJ losing control over an agency that has not delivered in a timely fashion and continues, for reasons that I still do not understand, to have huge delays in things that have been dealt with in a far more efficient manner in the past.

Nick Goodwin: The performance has been turned around. I accept that it has not been good enough. There were two reasons why we fell into problems. First, I have already outlined the fact that we had record levels of demand for probate services. At the same time, we reformed the probate services going back to 2019 and, in doing so, made the error of not putting certain cases through to our more experienced staff. Paper cases tend to be more complicated, and 1% of cases tend to be very complicated, and we did not have the capacity to deal with those adequately at a point in time. That is why we fell behind, but that has now been addressed.

Q45            James Daly: Do you think that it is an example of MoJ efficiency that people are required to send certified documents to a building in one part of the country while the officers who are dealing with the application are sat in a completely different building?

Nick Goodwin: Sorry, can you say that again?

James Daly: The paper documents that you are talking about are sent to a separate building for certification, before they are then downloaded for the officer to deal with. Do you think that that is an efficient use of time in terms of how the probate registry deals with these matters? How much money is the MoJ spending on paying a company to certify documents, when you could simply have solicitors or other professionals certify them for virtually no cost to the MoJ?

Nick Goodwin: It is a good way of processing the documents. Many of those documents are sent in physical form and then, effectively, bulk processed on to our digital systems. When something is on a digital system, we can then handle it much more quickly than a paper copy. For that reason, documents come in that way, and there are really good opportunities to make that digital processing even better and even smarter, which will improve the service further.

There was a subsequent question about why solicitors do not deal with those cases.

Q46            James Daly: You are paying a firm to certify documents as true and correct copies of whatever it is that has been sent in.

Nick Goodwin: The application for probate would still need to be seen by the probate service, so it would still need to be sent in—i.e. submitted by a solicitor.

Q47            James Daly: You are asking people to send documents to A to go through a process, which then sends documents to B, where they consider those documents. You do not need to have A. You do not need to send the documents there. There are a whole load of professionals who could certify the documents, which the probate registry relies on as accurate copies.

Nick Goodwin: The probate service still needs to validate them in order to be able to grant probate.

Q48            James Daly: What do they do that solicitors could not do? You are paying a huge amount of taxpayers’ money to an organisation to verify documents. What is that organisation doing that solicitors could not do?

Nick Goodwin: They are either uploading the documents digitally or they are distributing them, if they need to be looked at in physical form, to the various probate registries. That is what they are doing. They are not doing legal work on them. That is done by our probate staff. Our probate staff will look at the document and see whether a grant of probate can be granted. That is their function.

James Daly: Chair, I could ask numerous questions on probate.

Q49            Chair: You could go on for some time. The point might be that the solicitors are bound by professional obligations to be truthful. Therefore, if they certify that the documents are true and accurate, they are giving their professional word that they are true and accurate. Why do you need to pay up for another firm to second-guess them?

Nick Goodwin: They are doing completely different jobs. A solicitor cannot grant probate. The grant of probate can be done only by the court and, therefore, our probate staff.

Chair: Have one more go, Mr Daly.

Q50            James Daly: The officers are considering the documents that are downloaded to the probate registry. Those are documents that can be done by the individual or an executor, but they tend to come from legal firms. All that we are suggesting is that, to be a more productive service and to save the taxpayer a fortune, you go to the solicitor or the legal representative, who is duty bound, if they do not feel that that is a correct document, not to certify. If it is certified as a true and original copy of a financial document, why not just allow them to download it straight to the officer and cut the third party out completely? The role they are playing does not serve any purpose. It increases delays and costs the taxpayer a fortune for no reason.

Nick Goodwin: I am sorry, but I am not sure that I follow that and I do not think that I accept that.

Q51            Rachel Hopkins: It is an outsourced service to scan the documents. It is not the legal bit, is it?

Nick Goodwin: Certain documents are bulk processed by a provider and, therefore, scanned on to a digital system, or someone applies for probate digitally themselves. That is how we get documents into the probate service, which are then examined by our staff to see whether they can grant probate. Solicitors can apply for probate, and quite often do. By the way, solicitors also make mistakes when applying for probate that have to be corrected by our staff. I do not quite follow why sending more documents to solicitors reduces part of the process. If they have to upload those documents and send them in to us, presumably they will charge a fee on top of the probate fee that is already charged, or professional fees. I do not quite see what the efficiency is here.

Q52            James Daly: I am going around in circles a little bit here. Ms Hopkins is right. Let us just say that it is not about certifying. Let us just say that it is about scanning them into the system. Let us take that interpretation of it. Why would you employ a firm to literally upload documents on to a system? Why would you not expect the person who is applying for probate to upload them?

Nick Goodwin: You can apply for probate without the help of a solicitor, and you can provide the information.

Antonia Romeo: This is for those people who cannot send it in. If, for whatever reason, they do not send it in digitally, there needs to be a system that uploads it digitally.

Nick Goodwin: If documents have to be sent in and examined physically, they go somewhere and are sent to other people. They are either scanned in digitally, so that our people can deal with them digitally, or, in certain cases that are particularly complicated and must be dealt with on paper, they are collated and sent out to those probate registers that will deal with it. There is no other process that occurs within that that would benefit particularly from a solicitor’s intervention at that point, unless I am missing something.

If a solicitor did intervene at that point, rather than it being part of the probate fee, the solicitor would, presumably, be charging another fee on top of the probate fee and on top of any professional fees that they may charge. It is also worth emphasising that, by and large, a digital service works incredibly well for people. Digital services have a really high satisfaction rate; I think it is in the low 90% range. For simple cases, it works very well and people can self-serve. We often receive documents, even from solicitors, that may need correcting. I am very happy to discuss this outside the room.

James Daly: The point that I am trying to make to you is that you have a hugely inefficient, costly service that is not delivering a service that is anywhere near acceptable. Any amount of statistics that you can give to us today do not remove that fact. We are just suggesting that there are ways of saving taxpayers’ money and having a more efficient service, and that is one example.

We should not run away from the fact that this is a basket case of a service. There may be some progress being made, but legal practitioners confirm to the Committee that it is a terrible service. You had to take the dramatic step of not answering the phone to clear the backlog, so we are concerned about that. When we visited the probate registry, they were very open about the challenges that are being faced.

Q53            Chair: It might be worth somebody in the Department or in HMCTS being tasked with reading all of the evidence that has been submitted to our inquiry, which is on our website, in order to get a measure of the issues that are being raised. That might enable us to find a constructive way forward.

Antonia Romeo: We are very happy to do that. It sounds as though there is a workflow issue here about exactly who is doing what and at which point in the system. If helpful, we should set out the workflow and we could additionally submit that.

Q54            Edward Timpson: I would like to offer some light relief, but we are going to turn to the 2020 spending review and, in particular, the £4 billion investment that came out of that for Ministry of Justice on the prison expansion programme. We are now in 2024, and I believe that about £2.3 billion of that £4 billion has been spent, so over half. That has created 5,600 new prison places out of the target of 20,000. That does beg the question whether the amount that has been spent so far represents good value for the taxpayer.

Antonia Romeo: I will start, and Amy will say some things about whether it does. We have now built 5,900 new places and, by the end of 2025, we expect to have 10,000 new places as part of that programme. As you will be aware, there has been some movement to the right on some of those big prison build programmes due to planning, which Amy will say more about in a minute.

We have a really strong track record of delivering on time and budget when planning permission has been received. Five Wells and Fosse Way have both opened. We have Millsike coming next year. We have a number of house blocks, and two more to come before 2025. We have hundreds of rapid deployment cells that I have talked about before at this Committee, with hundreds more to come. There is a huge amount ongoing. Have I answered your question?

Q55            Edward Timpson: Over half the budget has already been spent and we are still around 14,000 short of the target, which was meant to be reached in 2025. Minister Argar admitted last time that he does not anticipate that happening. Clearly, if things go to plan, we are probably going to get to the halfway point.

As you have alluded to, there are issues such as planning delays, but also construction costs. We have seen a significant rise since the pandemic, of about 34%, in raw materials alone, as well as labour costs on top of that. Within the significant budget that you have been allocated, are you still under the strong impression that you are going to be able to build business cases for each of these expansion programmes and prison builds that are viable, bearing in mind those price rises in the construction industry?

Antonia Romeo: The answer to the question is yes. I will make two points, and then I know that Amy will want to come in. The money that we were given was the money that we were given during this SR. It was not to pay for all of the places, because, inevitably, the money that we were given in SR21 was only for what work needed to happen and was the money that we needed in that period. We have spent that money and expect to need a lot more in the next SR. It is not the case that we have spent more than half of the money without more than half of the places, if that makes sense.

The second point to make is that it is not linear. A lot of the work that has been done, for example, on rapid deployment cells is looking at the design. We have done a lot of design work on those rapid deployment cells to ensure that we can see where we can use them, and Amy will say more about the sorts of cohorts that can go into those and the appropriate level of risk. The point is that it is not linear in terms of building one place. You have to do a lot of design work and there is a lot of site work, and then the map of getting the places on stream comes in chunks.

Q56            Edward Timpson: Just before Amy comes in, what I am driving at is that, when you had the spending review settlement in 2020, the projection then was that, by 2025, you would have 20,000 new prison places. We are at just over a quarter of that and getting close to the wire. When it was first allocated, what was the £4 billion meant to deliver as opposed to what has been delivered?

Antonia Romeo: It would not have delivered all of those places, because it would only have been for this spending round. You are right that the planning permission delays on three of the six new build prisons have significantly delayed the programme and, therefore, not been great news from the point of view of value for money of the programme.

When you have done a lot of the work, slippage is not a good thing, especially when, to the point that you have already made, we are very vulnerable to supply chain shocks and to inflation, both related and other types of inflation. As a result, it gets more expensive to build the more you slip. We now have planning permission for two of those three, which is good news, but the fact that we did not get planning permission earlier and had to go through the appeal process has increased the cost of the programme.

The final point to make, which is what I expect you are getting at, is that, as you will see, part of the money that we have underspent on the capital side was to do with the prison build programme. This is not loss of value. This is reprofiling in years, largely to do with planning.

Q57            Edward Timpson: Bearing in mind some of the variables that we cannot foresee completely—and no one from the OBR downwards and upwards gets projections right—and based on your current projections, how much additional funding is going to be required in order to reach your figure of 10,000 by 2025? Subsequent to that, in order to get to your figure of 20,000, what are you going to be asking for in order to try to make sure that you can deliver this programme in full?

Antonia Romeo: Amy will correct me if I am wrong, but we will deliver what we will be able to by 2025 with the amount of money that we were given originally. Although costs have become more expensive per place, per prison, per house block and per cell, we will, because of the slippage due to planning permission, have the money to pay for that. I do not think that we are going to have to go back for more money this SR, but we will need a lot more money in the next SR for what will be three new prisons that we will be building and bringing on stream in the next SR.

I can feel that both Amy and James would like to say something.

Amy Rees: I want to add two things. As the Permanent Secretary has said, and as you have rightly called out, there is no doubt that, from the beginning of this programme until now, costs have gone up. To build the same thing, it is quite considerably more than it was when we started, for all the reasons that have been discussed.

The other thing that I wanted to call out, which is implicit in your question, is value for money and how we consider that. We talk a lot about the big prisons, but lots of our buildings are small, secure house blocks, additional house blocks, and things that we drop in. We have a prioritisation framework that we go through quite rigorously, which tries to have value for money. We try to weigh up geographical location, the cohorts that are needed, the category of the prison that we deliver, and how quickly we can deliver it. We have a prioritisation framework that we are looking at all the time to try to secure the best value for money.

James McEwen: I agree. We have the cash flow for this SR, to your point, Permanent Secretary. For the next SR, it will be part of our conversation with Treasury. We need to look carefully at the timing. We still have one large new prison where we do not have planning permission secured. We need to look at other slippage, and that will have a really significant impact on the total cost of finishing the programme. I do not have a figure today and I would not want to play out our conversation with Treasury in this way, but it is going to cost significantly more to finish the programme than when we started this in SR20, but that is common for all infrastructure. This is not unique to the prison build programme. The inflationary headwinds and supply chain constraints that we have seen are the same for us as they are for road building, hospital building or school building. We are in the eye of that storm as well, and so that will be for the next spending review to help resolve.

Q58            Edward Timpson: The Committee visited Five Wells a month or so ago. While there were lots of good things that we discovered there from speaking to prisoners and prison staff, it was also clear that there are some aspects of the build that have not quite gone to plan. For instance, air ventilation was an issue on some of the buildings. How are you ensuring that some of these builds that you still have ahead of you are going to be better future-proofed for the demands that are going to be placed on them?

Amy Rees: We covered some of this when we met last time. We have a really rigorous system for learning lessons from new builds. We talked particularly about how we moved the manager who helped to open Berwyn to open Five Wells and Fosse Way.

Edward Timpson: I met him.

Amy Rees: We really are trying to learn. We had some issues with Berwyn that we have not repeated in Five Wells or Fosse Way, but no doubt we will learn some of those things for some of our new prisons coming on, so that we have a rigorous and proper process for lessons learned, for both constructors and the staff who are going to run the place, and the prisoners, who have their own feedback.

Q59            Edward Timpson: With opening new prisons comes the requirement for more staff to ensure that the prison capacity that we need can be fulfilled. I do not know whether this is a live discussion, but what commitments are you seeking from His Majesty’s Treasury for additional funding to ensure that you have the staff, and the level and experience of staff, you need to make those prisons successful institutions?

Antonia Romeo: It is the next SR, as you have referred to, so it will be part of our overall bid. Because we are already talking as we get planning permission, it is quite clear that the Treasury are well aware that, when we begin an infrastructure programme, although we might not have all the money in this SR, we are going to need to build the prison and then to staff it, as well as the resulting probation staff. It is a whole flow, so all of that will be part of the conversations that we will be having with the Treasury as part of the next spending round.

Amy Rees: Shall I particularly pick up your question on experience, which is a slightly different category of question? Our experience of opening Fosse Way, for example, was quite different from Five Wells. The provider was able to staff Fosse Way more easily than Five Wells. Some of that is hyper-local in terms of what other employers there are in the region. Some of it is good lessons about planning and how far out in advance you start. We also require a minimum base, where we move experienced staff to open a prison, and then have others.

I cannot extol to you more the virtues of new prisons as opposed to trying to run old Victorian buildings, but that is to be separated from the challenges of opening a new prison, which is a really challenging thing to do. We bring together a prisoner cohort for the first time and, as you can all appreciate, prisons are pretty delicate ecosystems, so opening a new prison is tricky, even with experienced staff.

Q60            James Daly: Common Platform originated in 2016 and has had a budget that is now at around £1.3 billion. How do you feel that programme has gone and developed, and has it been a success?

Antonia Romeo: Quite recently, we did a lessons learned. As you will be aware, because Nick wrote to the Committee, we have had a refresh and have been having a look at the timelines. It is fair to say that this is an incredibly complex programme. Last time I was here, I described it as trying to rebuild a jet plane while flying it at the same time. There are a number of things that we have learned through the course of the programme, and there are three that most stick out to me.

One is that the complexity, the ambition and the vision were there, which were good, but we underestimated the complexity of the programme and planned to roll out too much of it too quickly.

Secondly, while it could not have been known at the outset, we underestimated what the pandemic would do to the running of the system and to the roll-out of some of the things. There were some things that, as it happened, the pandemic made easier to do, including things such as the video platform and so on, but it put a lot of delays in the system, and recovery took a lot longer than we had anticipated.

As you would expect me to say, the third thing is listening to feedback on the system, which is something that has significantly improved since we were talking about it last time we were in front of the Committee.

In terms of how well it is doing, it is lessons learned. The Lady Chief Justice said to this Committee that she did not see it as a single programme; she saw it as a process of continuous improvement. Some bits have been quite successful and others are still in process. We want to learn the lessons and bring it in to land in a way that significantly improves the way that we run the system for all the users. Nick will want to say more specifically.

Nick Goodwin: The question spoke about Common Platform and reform. Common Platform is a part of the reform programme, so I am very happy to talk to either.

Q61            James Daly: In order to help and to take things further, there are three questions that are perhaps a little more direct. How many projects are to be completed? How much of the £1.3 billion is left and is further funding likely? Has the programme represented good value for money?

Nick Goodwin: That is in relation to the overall reform programme, where the budget is £1.3 million. At the moment, we have delivered five services. Seven are in the process of national roll-out, and two are being piloted and, therefore, will be rolled out over the next year or so. That is the progress. As Antonia says, many of the services are working really well, and we are working really hard to make sure that the others are implemented really well. We have done a lot more. We have had a lot of learning, as Antonia says, and are getting better at implementing these changes. That is where we are.

The second question was around budget and spend. We have recently had a look at how we complete the programme and here, as Antonia says, we are really trying to make sure that we get the value out of the modernisation while maintaining the smooth operation of the courts, so making sure that there is not too much change in the courts and that what we do supports court recovery rather than pushes against it.

With those changes, we are within the budget. The official version of the budget was the 2021 business case, known as business case 6, which set a budget of just under £1.3 billion, and we expect to come in within that figure. In fact, if we complete as planned, we may come in slightly under that, by about £20 million. We are not expecting to need more money at this point, and there is some contingency in our planning, although we would always like a bit more.

Once we have finished the official reform programme, our services will pass into business as usual. Once they become part of business as usual, we will continue to improve and enhance them, as you would with any mission-critical system. There will be further investment down the line, but in terms of completing the programme, we should come in broadly in respect of budget.

Does it provide value for money? Yes. The lifetime benefits will be greater. The MVP is good. It is also true that, without reform, the courts would have not been able to operate as effectively as they did during the pandemic and we would not have seen really good improvements to some of the timeliness, for example in money claims going through.

Antonia Romeo: Could I just add one thing on the costs, for completeness? Of course, what has happened, as Nick has set out both in his letter and in what he has just mentioned, is that some of the benefits of reform, in terms of savings from replacing some processes that were going to be done by staff and digitally, have moved to the right. Those have been absorbed, so even when the programme lives within its overall financial cost base, you also have to look at the benefits that are being delivered. I just want to be totally clear that, although we think that the overall cost of the programme will not exceed its budget, what may change is the profile of some of those benefits. The MVP may therefore change.

Q62            Chair: We have dealt with quite a lot around probate. Can I just ask one thing, around Common Platform? We very recently learned that Common Platform is not going to be extended to Crown court judges. They are going to continue to use the digital case system, and that is provided by an external provider. Why is that?

Nick Goodwin: There are a number of reasons why we have taken that difficult decision. First, the last time I was before the Committee was about the time that we had moved to completing implementation of Common Platform into the magistrates court. We now have Common Platform in 100% of the courts, but that was a difficult process and we learned a lot from that. We have since had a PAC report and an NAO report.

We have been reflecting on those learnings as we have looked to complete the job. One of those learnings is that this is an incredibly complicated system. What we have done so far has been incredibly good, but we need to focus on stabilising Common Platform, making it better in the magistrates court and also as it applies to the Crown court. That requires us to invest in the technology, bearing down on technical debt and making it ever quicker and ever better.

We also had a long look at the programme, and there were two things we wanted to do. Do not forget that the programme is the most ambitious in the world; it covers all of civil, family and tribunals. We could see with the time and budget we had left to run that investing in the civil, family and tribunals part of the process would probably have a bigger impact in terms of Government efficiency, but also in terms of citizens’ experience of the justice system, than completing Common Platform as it applies to the Crown court, where, relatively speaking, there are fewer cases. We took the decision to cease that, not spend £5 million and three years completing Common Platform, and invest some of that money in completing the rest of the programme.

We could also see that at the moment, with the Crown court absolutely at full tilt, introducing a new system next year was potentially quite risky. It would have required us to train 3,000 judges and advocates on a new system while the Crown court is absolutely at full flight. One of the reasons we have decided not to progress with this is because that was risky, but also because we know advocates and judges in the Crown court very much like and are used to our digital case system. We could see that by enhancing that and joining it up with Common Platform we would effectively reduce risk and get better bang for our buck.

As Antonia said, in terms of what we have given up, we did expect that that would allow us to reduce the number of staff in the Crown court next year, but, to be honest, that reduction when you are at full tilt in the Crown court would have been incredibly difficult to land, and that is why we made the change.

Q63            Chair: Is this an indefinite postponement or for a period of time, or can you not say?

Nick Goodwin: We are focusing on enhancing the DCS in the Crown court because we think that is the best way.

Q64            Chair: It looks like this is the end of Common Platform being rolled out in the Crown court.

Nick Goodwin: We will finish off Common Platform.

Q65            Chair: So that is the end of it. Are there any abortive costs as a consequence of terminating the roll-out at that stage?

Nick Goodwin: I mentioned that at the beginning. You asked me what the potential write-off might be for the two elements we are not proceeding with in the Crown court. That was around £5.5 million.

Q66            Chair: That is the bit you mentioned. That is fine; that ties it up. Will there be any extra costs that we have to pay out to the external provider of the DCS?

Nick Goodwin: DCS will need to be maintained over a period of time, so yes, we will obviously be working with—

Chair: Perhaps when that is quantified you could write to us with that.

Nick Goodwin: I cannot give you that figure now, but it will be ongoing for years to maintain the system.

Antonia Romeo: We can write to you.

Chair: When you have an estimate going forward it would be helpful to have that, to save time today. I understand the reasons, but it would be useful to have the transparency about what the downsides are as well as the upsides.

Q67            Rachel Hopkins: Can you give me an outline of One HMPPS? What is its purpose? What are its full financial costs, and how are those costs being met?

Amy Rees: There are two sides to One HMPPS. We talked about that a little bit at the beginning. One is to make sure we right-size headquarters and it is fully focused on serving the frontline. Overall, the programme is going to save us £37 million.

The other side is to introduce area executive directors. They are the seven regional leads who will oversee both probation and prisons in their region. We are not making probation officers into prison officers. They are still separate entities, but it is trying to manage the hand-offs between the two and make sure we have really local, responsive decision making.

Q68            Rachel Hopkins: We have seen in some of the recent inspections and some of the feedback that probation is significantly understaffed. In fact, in some of the recent staff interviews as part of that inspection, over 60% said their workloads were not so or not at all manageable. How will One HMPPS contribute to improving workloads and the effectiveness and efficiency of the probation service?

Amy Rees: Shall I just talk to you about what we are doing about that in general and about trying to make the probation service as good as it can be? The first thing is absolutely investing in staffing, and we have done really well on that in the last few years. We have had 4,000 PQiPs—probation officers under training—recruited. That is a record number. We have invested £155 million in the probation service. We also went up nearly 10%—9.9%—in one year on staffing levels. We are really trying to make the big investment.

Of course, by making the investment in staffing, we hope that will drive down workload, which we absolutely recognise needs to happen. We also have to have an investment in quality delivery. We do recognise that there will be a challenging balance of experience and inexperience because of all that recruitment that we now have to get right.

We are doing things like investing in SEEDS, which is essentially a framework for how we engage. It is a quality improvement framework, looking at how the probation officer engages with the offender. Also, as the Permanent Secretary mentioned up front, we got some money in the productivity review to improve our digital systems for things like risk management. One of the things probation staff say is that they spend quite a lot of time re-keying data from one system to another. That investment will try to help reduce their workload in that respect.

Q69            Rachel Hopkins: You mentioned that there has been significant recruitment, and obviously there are a lot of trainees and newly qualified probation staff. How are they being supported? Is that taking time away from experienced staff to help develop them in their early career?

Amy Rees: It is a really good question. It is a challenge, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The first thing to say is that we have done really well on the staffing but that is not even. We have some parts of the country, such as Wales and Greater Manchester, that are pretty much fully staffed, although they still need to work on the balance of experience and inexperience, as we talked about. In other places, such as London, we still have quite a lot more to do in terms of recruitment. The first thing to say is that it is not uniform.

The second thing is we are then trying to invest in quality, with things like quality improvement agendas and individuals who try to help them, but also an investment in the senior probation officer. We are trying to look at how we can do that. For example, in a recent inspection report in Wales, the human factors—how you invest in the senior probation officer to then help the newly qualified staff—was called out as being good practice. We have a variety of things that we are trying to do.

To answer your question straight, it does take time from more experienced probation officers to help their colleagues, which is one of the reasons why we have had a profile of how we have recruited probation officers. We could have tried to recruit more than 1,500 in some of those years, but there is a recognition that there is a big requirement to invest in those staff that we recruit, otherwise it will be a wasted investment. We think there is a limit to how much experienced staff can help our new staff, hence we have quite carefully tried to profile how we recruit probation staff.

Q70            Rachel Hopkins: A number of reports and stakeholders, including the outgoing chief inspector of probation, recommended that the probation service should be more localised, with more local governance. How does One HMPPS help achieve that?

Amy Rees: The second part of One HMPPS is designed to do exactly that. It is designed to have a senior leader, an area executive director, who oversees both prison and probation, so it can be much more responsive to local needs. We also have our regional probation directors, who are very engaged on a local level. For example, in Greater Manchester they are doing lots of specific work on domestic abuse perpetrators. That is all run locally, and it is led by the regional probation director. We are trying to move the service as much as we can to having properly locally responsive and engaged staff. We are in no doubt that probation works best when it is really engaged with local stakeholders.

Having said that, I want to be really candid and direct: I feel quite strongly that another big change programme would be the last thing probation needs, for three reasons. One is the investment in staffing that we have talked about. The experience is that, when it was more devolved, that investment did not happen, particularly in fully qualified staff. I would worry about that. The second is the digital services, which is quite significant, as we have talked about. The last thing we would want is 37 different computer systems trying to talk to each other. I would worry about that. The third thing is much more human. We really need to focus on quality of practice, as we have briefly been talking about in this session. I fear that another change programme would just mean a diversion from the focus on practice and quality management.

Q71            Rachel Hopkins: So you do not agree with the outgoing chief inspector of probation that there should be an independent review about whether probation should be much more locally governed.

Amy Rees: Justin Russell’s perspective is interesting, given that prior to being chief inspector he ran one of the incarnations of how we looked at probation services and how we did them. He obviously has an interesting perspective, but I am very clear that another big change programme of that kind would be the worst thing we could do for probation right now.

Q72            Rachel Hopkins: I appreciate your frankness. What steps are you building to ensure the independence of the probation service from the Prison Service? There is recognition of their different roles, as you said.

Amy Rees: Yes, absolutely. Again, I recognise the concern, because sometimes we have that played back to us. It is the complete opposite, in that both I and Phil Copple, who is the DG that runs ops, are very clear that we think the best way to get outcomes for HMPPS—i.e. protect the public and reduce re-offending—is for probation to take the lead with partnerships. It is probation that has the relationships with chief constables. It is probation that has the relationship with safeguarding boards locally. What we really want is for that engagement to be through probation.

Equally, as you will appreciate, offender management is an end-to-end system, and we know there are hand-offs. Probation is there right at the beginning and makes recommendations to court through the PSR, etc. It is also there when someone comes out of custody at the end, or indeed to manage a community sentence, if that is what happens. We need to do as well as we possibly can with the handovers, because we have to manage people at the beginning, right the way through the system and in the end, in terms of when they are in custody. We are really trying to make sure that system has much better hand-offs, which is why we think managing regionally is the best way we can achieve good offender management overall.

Q73            Rachel Hopkins: Do you understand why Napo and its members are worried about the retention of their professional identity, though, rather than its being merged?

Amy Rees: We definitely do.

Q74            Rachel Hopkins: I can understand the journey of an offender, but that professional identity is really important. While the journey is one thing, what steps are you taking to reassure members that this move to the area director model will not undermine some of that?

Amy Rees: I totally understand the question, and we are having lots of engagement on that. Like I say, my candid view is that it is the opposite. We would like probation to take a lead. It is not that we want probation to be overtaken from prisons—far from it.

The other thing we are trying to do is invest in the professional identity of probation. We have had a skills register. If we can, we are looking to take that further to a proper independent registry, because I totally believe that probation is a profession and should be recognised as such. It is a different profession from running prisons, without a shadow of a doubt. It is just that we have to manage these people right the way through the system and the hand-off should be good. I do not seek in any way to try to merge or smush the roles of probation and prison; they are different.

Q75            Rachel Hopkins: I am pleased to hear you say they are two separate entities. That comes to some concerns that you have probably heard about the new area executive director model—the fact that they will have a lot of autonomy and how that might butt up against established collective bargaining arrangements for the probation profession. Can you give some assurances that that new regional model will not undermine that?

Amy Rees: Yes, I absolutely can. Again, I understand the concern. As you would expect, I have been engaged in conversations like this. I had a good away day with the probation trade unions about all this stuff. There is no change to collective bargaining arrangements. That is the straightforward, candid answer. There is no change at all.

Q76            Dr Mullan: I want to ask some questions about self‑harm and violence in prisons. I understand that self-harm in the female prison estate is much higher than in the male estate. It is approximately 10 times higher. I just want to understand what you are doing to understand why that is. Could you share any of your understanding?

Amy Rees: The first thing to say is that, obviously, we want to drive down self-harm as much as we possibly can. It is also worth acknowledging that, although the rate is up, the number of women who self‑harm is not; it is broadly static. It is the number of incidents of self-harm that each individual woman is committing, which is quite important in how we help to manage it.

Also, we are not really aware of any women in the system who self-harm in custody but do not self-harm in the community. In other words, this is real trauma that we have to try to deal with. The reason that is so important is that it means we have to work in partnership with the NHS and others, because women, as you know, tend to have shorter sentences. They move in and out between custody and not being in custody.

In general terms, though, what we are trying to do is, first, invest in the staffing, like we were saying; and, secondly, invest in the regime, because we know a well-run regime reduces the chance of having that. Thirdly, there are some specific things we are trying to do with women. Going back to my NHS point, we are working in partnership to have a really trauma‑informed approach and work with psychologists, as well as just us. We are trying to have an overall system of case management that involves lots of medical professionals as well as prison staff. We are really trying to make that investment. We are also investing in the early days in custody—the first 28 days—when we know that is a real issue.

Q77            Dr Mullan: These are really insightful statistics. Do you know if it is similar for the male estate? What proportion of male self-harm is new on the estate?

Amy Rees: It is a really interesting question. We are not as clear about it as we are for the female estate, although we know that in general self‑harm is more prevalent in society than it has been. It is more prevalent with young people, so we can expect to see that turn up in our prison estate. In general, though, levels of trauma are higher among women than they are among men.

Q78            Dr Mullan: There has been a significant increase in both prisoner-on-prisoner assaults and prisoner-on-staff assaults in the last 12 months. What is the historical trend? Is it higher or lower on a historical basis? Why do you think there has been an increase in the last 12 months?

Amy Rees: In a minute I will talk about what we are trying to do to address it, but I think you know that the levels during covid were artificially low, because obviously we were running a very restrictive regime. We have returned to those levels—

Q79            Dr Mullan: That is what I am getting at: have we? Is it just normal, pre-covid levels, or is it higher than that?

Amy Rees: We are more or less on pre-covid levels now, but we want those levels to be much lower than they are. It is the same sorts of things. I do not want to repeat myself, but you have to invest in the staffing; you have to invest in a good regime. We have put out a letter to governors recently about starting our new regime on 1 April and how we run that.

On levels of violence, it is probably worth calling out the work we have done on drugs. We have done quite a lot, with our drug-free units and our incentivised substance-free living units. There is also the investment in technology, in terms of body-worn video cameras, etc. There is a lot of activity, and we really do want to drive down those levels.

Q80            Dr Mullan: You mentioned technology and you mentioned drug‑free prisons. We might have discussed this before on one of our prison visits. That was a long time ago, but at our recent roundtable with governors they confirmed this was still policy. You have this great technology for detecting smuggling into prisons, but you do not actually pursue or prosecute people who you find through the scanners are smuggling. There is a trade-off. It is, “If you let us have what you have on you, that is the end of the matter.”

The explanation given is that it is an operational challenge to secure police time and CPS interest, etc., but I continue to think that, in the long run, that is not the right decision, because you are not creating a moral hazard or a risk for people to do it, if they know, “I’ll try. If I get caught, I’ll give it up, and I’ll try again next time.” Is that something that the MoJ could look at again, working with the Home Office, in trying to get some difference in approach?

Amy Rees: I am certainly happy to look at it again and drive the levels up, but it is absolutely not true that in every case we do not prosecute. We prosecute in quite a few cases. We have quite a lot of success.

Q81            Dr Mullan: Our understanding is that, the majority of times, if people are willing to give up what they have smuggled in that is detected by the scanner, that is the end of it.

Amy Rees: We can certainly have a look again at whether our decision making is in the right place and whether we can do more, but, as you alluded to, it is also trying to get police time and whether we could secure a prosecution, which depends on chain of evidence and all of that stuff. I am sure there is more we could do, and I will take that away to look at it.

Q82            Dr Mullan: It might be that you are correct in the decision that you are taking, but if you are seeking to do it and then you are blocked from doing it, that is a different argument to make to the Home Office than just accepting the local police force’s position on it: “There are all these people that would have been prosecuted but for your local police force’s decision not to attend.”

Amy Rees: I certainly accept there is more we can do and there are probably more referrals we need to make to the police, but it is certainly not our policy that we just do not attempt to get a prosecution. We do.

Q83            Dr Mullan: There have been a number of significant compensation payments, three over £1 million, to staff and prisoners. Sorry if this is a silly question, but do those necessarily involve an admission of liability or might some of them not involve an admission that you have done something wrong? Can you tell me the difference?

Antonia Romeo: I think there is only one over £1 million. Amy’s team work in an environment in which they manage a huge amount of risk, so it is not that surprising that this would happen. I do not know if you want to say something about the particular matter.

Amy Rees: To be candid, without getting into individual cases, in cases over £1 million I expect we would have admitted liability.

Q84            Dr Mullan: What have you learned from those? What are the broad themes that you can draw out from them and some of the other more significant ones? You are right, there is just one £1 million one, but there are a few that are just below £500,000.

Amy Rees: As you would expect in a big operational organisation such as ours, as the Permanent Secretary is managing risk, we have a constant learning programme on this. We have a review every quarter, and then we try to look at the learning particularly from big cases, and then we do change our policies on the back of it. A recent example of adjudication is catering. That has directly come from some of these cases: we have changed the policy. But in general our learning is often record keeping. It is not necessarily that the wrong decision was made, but we need to be able to have good record keeping.

Q85            Dr Mullan: My final question is similar to the harm question, but around self-inflicted deaths, which have increased by 22% in the last year. Is that a historical increase or is that just an increase from the covid era? If it is a genuine historical increase, what have you done about that?

Amy Rees: Again, we definitely had a low period during covid. It is probably worth calling out the recent stats. We definitely had a rise, and that is unacceptable and we want to drive it down, but for the last published quarter—October, November, December—it was 11, nine, six. In December 2023 it was six self-inflicted deaths, as opposed to 12 in the December before. It is much too early to say that is a trend, but you can appreciate that Christmas is quite a difficult time in our environment. We were genuinely pleased to have seen a proper, noticeable reduction in that period. We now need to keep building on that work.

There are a couple of things I will specifically say. We have had good investment in the Samaritans, and the new thing we have done is postvention. Copycats are unfortunately an issue in our world, where you have one and then you might have another one. We have really tried to work on postvention and trying to prevent the copycat.

I would like to call out the PPO. We have a new PPO, Adrian Usher. He has shown real investment and engagement with us as a service in trying to get the learning we just talked about but in another context, so that we can try to learn everything we can from every single death in custody.

Q86            Rachel Hopkins: Can I ask a follow-up? I was just thinking about the horrific case recently of prisoner-on-prison-officer violence, where he was attacked with a razor blade. I was really intrigued as to why there has not been a shift from wet razor blades to electric shavers, for example. That is a recommendation from the POA.

Amy Rees: I am really engaged with the POA on this. We recently had a discussion about it. As you know, in some prisons we have been piloting using electrical shavers, which has broadly gone quite well. We have the evaluation now. We are due to make a decision at the end of March about whether to withdraw wet shaving completely.

Q87            Edward Timpson: In the Taylor review in 2016, Charlie Taylor, who is now the HMIP, recommended the opening of secure schools, which is essentially putting education at the heart of where children are in custody. The Ministry of Justice accepted the recommendations and committed to opening two, one by autumn 2020. We still do not have a secure school open. We have been told one is going to open this spring. Are you, first of all, able to help us as to when exactly the Medway secure school will open?

Antonia Romeo: At the moment we cannot be more precise than the spring, partly because of all the checks that will have to happen before we put any child in there. As with all infrastructure projects, as discussed, there might be some snags that arise between now and the planned date. We would not want to be more precise than the spring, but it will be the spring and obviously there is a limit to how long the spring can be.

Amy Rees: Shall I just add some detail, in case it is helpful? For it to be a secure school, it has to meet the Ofsted registration. We are in the process of agreeing a date with Ofsted to come and inspect us in April. There is a minimum of six weeks for it to be registered if we pass that inspection, so we are hopeful for late spring.

Q88            Edward Timpson: Some of us were very excited when these were announced such a long time ago. I was actually a Minister back then, believe it or not. Here we are, eight years on from the review, and we still do not have a secure school open.

Converting the Medway secure training centre was deemed to be a more efficient financial model for opening a secure school. The original cost was £4.9 million. The best estimate that we can now find is £40 million, including a bit of optimism bias. Taking into account all the things we have already discussed—inflation, construction costs and other hidden costs that were not anticipated—in the hope, or maybe expectation, that further secure schools will follow after Medway, what has the Department learned from this exercise in terms of due diligence and process that it will take forward to ensure that we do not have a similar scenario for future secure schools?

Antonia Romeo: This was a completely innovative approach, as you have identified, hence the excitement when it was first announced. As a result, some things came up that took longer than we had anticipated. As you will know, we had to change the law to create a secure academy as a new entity. That took time. We used the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act to do that. One reason for the delay is things in the planning that require legislation and a lot of consultation.

In terms of the costs, the pandemic has had a significant impact on the supply chain. That happened exactly in the middle of the plans, when we were trying to think about how we would bring the secure school in to land. That caused a lot of delays from contractors. With all our construction programmes, as we talked about before, we are heavily reliant on contractors and construction materials. That also caused some delay. We are learning all the time from this approach, because that will have impacted the costs as well as the timeframe.

Amy Rees: There are a couple of things I want to add about the learning. The learning is split into two groups: things that would be repeated, and things that would not be. In the things that would not be repeated if we built a second one, we now know that we need legislation, and have that legislation. There were a load of delays around that that would not be repeated because we have done it and we know it.

In terms of things that would be repeated, we underestimated what was needed to meet the requirements of the Ofsted inspection and to be a secure children’s home. We thought it would be more akin to a secure training centre. Actually, there are a lot of requirements, so if we were opening a second one, we would know it would cost a bit more this time to make sure the building itself was up to the regulations expected by Ofsted.

Q89            Edward Timpson: Also, fire safety upgrades and electrical and mechanical infrastructure were all issues that, in hindsight, should have been more closely looked at before you embarked on the project. We look forward to its opening. When are we going to see another one—the second one that the Department are committed to?

Amy Rees: As we have just talked about, we need to learn a lot of lessons from this one—lessons, which we have already learned, from opening and constructing it, but also lessons from our experience of running it. Then, as you would expect, we will need to bid, with all that we have learned, into a Treasury process and see if we can secure funding.

Q90            Edward Timpson: Is there ongoing work to identify another site or to pull together a business case?

Amy Rees: We do have work already under way for a second site. What we do not have at the moment is a pot of money from which we could build it. We would need to make that part of any new SR—

Q91            Edward Timpson: But it is still in all your budget lines and your planning to move forward with a second secure school?

Amy Rees: We have certainly identified a site and have some outline costs.

Q92            Edward Timpson: Can I ask something very recent but relevant to this? It is about the unannounced inspection of HMYOI Wetherby on 5 March. For people listening or watching, that is for children who have been sentenced and remanded between the ages of 15 and 18. It is one of only three types of this institution that hold the seven—that figure may or may not surprise people—girls currently imprisoned in England and Wales.

That inspection identified 11 key concerns, seven of which need to be treated as a priority. Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, homed in on something that is really quite troubling. He said that the inspectorate “were deeply shocked to find adult male officers restraining and stripping an incredibly vulnerable girl, not once but twice. While they no doubt acted to prevent serious harm, the presence of multiple men pinning her down and removing her clothes will have caused further trauma and, given how predictable the behaviour of this particular girl was, the YOI has no excuse not to have made sure that female officers were in attendance.”

I am sure you will agree that that is totally unacceptable, but what is going to follow in terms of actions to ensure, first of all, that there are sufficient female staff deployed there from now on? Something that the chief inspector said was lacking—and I am quoting from Charlie Taylor—was a “coherent national plan” for caring for these girls. What actions are going to follow?

Antonia Romeo: As you rightly note, the report raises really serious concerns about a range of issues, including staffing, education, self-harm, time out of cell and, in particular, the example that you gave. Amy will outline in a minute the full action plan that HMPPS has responded to the findings with, but the other thing to say is that, as you also noted, there is a very small number of girls now in custody. That has fallen by 70% since 2015. The remaining cohort is a very complex cohort who require really specialist support, which is why one has to be so careful. That has informed the plan that HMPPS has put in place, which is quite comprehensive.

Amy Rees: On the specific incident, there is no doubt that incident should not have occurred in the way it did, both for the child and for the staff involved. As the chief inspector has said, it was indeed to prevent very serious harm. Without going into the individual incident in too much detail, there were some very specific challenging circumstances around the individual and her immediate pressing needs. It happened during a night state; obviously, we have less staff at night. There were some female staff present, but for a variety of reasons those female staff either could not get there or were not appropriate to be deployed in that incident.

There are a couple of things to add. We immediately did a learning review. Within 24 hours, the establishment referred both incidents to the safeguarding review, so to the LADO in the local authority, to look into the incident.

Q93            Edward Timpson: If you were able to share with the Committee whatever further work is planned off the back of both the inspection and this particular incident, it would be very helpful.

Amy Rees: We will.

Q94            Edward Timpson: We touched briefly on drugs in prisons. The most recent data on random mandatory drug testing goes back to 2019‑20, so pre-pandemic. For obvious reasons, it ebbed away during the pandemic. Although there is now some random drug testing taking place, it is still coming back slowly, I think you would accept, and it is certainly not yet at the level required for reliable estimates to be made at national level, or even at establishment level. When will you get to a point where it is viable and you can rely on the testing to give you a proper readout of what is actually happening in our prisons? The last time we had that, back in 2019-20, about 14% of tests for illicit substances were positive, but we simply do not know at the moment. When will we?

Amy Rees: The first thing to say, candidly, is that I accept that it has come back slowly since covid. We have had to make choices about that, delivering the regimes and all sorts of things, given the challenges that we have had. The second thing is that it is not the only source of testing we do. This is random mandatory testing, but we also do voluntary and compact testing, in particular on our ISFLs—the incentivised substance-free living units—and our drug-free units.

During covid, we also started wastewater testing en masse. We think this might be a really interesting new innovation in terms of where we go with drug testing. We now have 30 sites where we are doing wastewater testing. That does not allow us to find out if an individual has been taking drugs, but it does give us a really good indication of the overall prevalence of drugs in an establishment and the range of drugs, which we do not always get from random mandatory testing.

In fact, where we are hoping to go with this strategically is a balance of the two, seeing if we can build out some wastewater testing. We think having the combination of the two would be the most reliable way of knowing what sort of drugs there are in the system.

Q95            Edward Timpson: Part of this is knowing what is going out of a prison, and obviously wastewater is one way of finding that out, but it is also what is going into the prison—the drug infiltration levels: the types of drugs and how they are getting into the prisons. That is getting more and more sophisticated, as the Committee has heard. For instance, drones are a growing problem. How are you ensuring that prison staff are themselves equipped to deal with some of these new and seemingly quite effective ways of getting drugs into our prisons?

Amy Rees: You are right that it is something that is ever evolving. That applies not just to the methods—we probably would not have been talking about drones as a major method of ingress even three years—but to the types of drugs. For example, we have seen a change towards synthetic drugs. That was quite a big change for the system. It can change the way you can port it into the system. There is also a change towards prescribed medication, which we also have to look out for.

In general, there are two ways we try to manage drugs in the system. It is demand and supply. If there was no demand, because we had managed to effectively get everyone off drugs in prisons, there would be less reason to try to transmit them into prisons. We then try to work on supply in the ways you have talked about, including investment in hardware, gate searching, airport‑style security and x-ray body scanners, which have had over 40,000 hits for substances and other items that might have been illicitly brought into prison.

Q96            Edward Timpson: How confident are you that your drug-free units are drug free?

Amy Rees: I would never want to say that there is zero access to drugs, because of all the ways we have just been talking about. We are trying to work on the incentive for people and prisoners who want to be there to try to get off drugs, so that they can try to get free of the substances. There is a lot of support in prison for those who want to come off drugs, both from us and partners in the NHS.

The other thing we are really working on is our reducing reoffence targets. Even when we are successful at getting them off drugs, we know it only works long term if you can then manage them back out into the community and join up that drug treatment. We are really trying to work on that aspect as well.

Q97            Chair: We are going to wrap up with some courts and judiciary‑related issues. Perhaps you could help me with the position with respect to the Crown court backlog. I have talked about things that have been going on for some time, like the secure schools. Mr Cartlidge, when he was a junior Minister, said in November 2021 that the plan was to reduce Crown court backlogs caused by the pandemic from 60,000 to an estimated 53,000 by March 2025. When she gave evidence to us, the Lady Chief Justice was pretty frank about the fact that that was not achievable without some radical reform. Do you accept that now?

Antonia Romeo: The story of the outstanding case load is that just before the pandemic, at the end of 2019, it was 38,000. It then went up, post pandemic; in June 2021 it was 61,000. Shortly after that was when former Minister Cartlidge came in front of the Committee. By Q1 2022 it was down at 58,000, but unfortunately then between the spring and the summer was the CBA—

Chair: It is now at 66,000.

Antonia Romeo: Between the spring and the summer was the CBA disruptive action, which meant that, to a large extent, the courts were functioning in a different way. It is now back up at 66,000. It is a story of a number of things happening during this process that have taken us off course.

There are a raft of measures we are taking to get it down. We are funding unlimited sitting days. We funded over 100,000 sitting days in the last financial year, as is in the annual report and accounts. We have done the same this year. In 2023-24 the number will be greater than that. Again, it is unlimited. I do not want to prejudge what will happen next time, but we are aware of the view, Sir Bob—it is obviously true—that funding unlimited sitting days in the Crown court is very important.

We are on track to recruit 1,000 more judges and tribunal members, because judicial capacity has in the past been a constraint, but we do not want it to be and neither does the Lady Chief Justice. Last year the Government announced £220 million of court maintenance for the next two years—so this year and next year, across all jurisdictions—in essential repairs and modernisations. That was a significant increase on the amount of money that we had originally been able to allocate from the budget. We got new money from the Treasury for that, as well as redeploying some money from elsewhere in MoJ.

We have the Nightingale courtrooms, which we will continue to use as long as necessary. They represent value for money. We have 20 of those that we will be taking forward into the 2024-25 financial year. We are straining every sinew to bear down on the outstanding case load.

Q98            Chair: Are submissions being made to meet Baroness Carr’s point that not having a cap on sitting days is, in her words, critical? Are submissions being made to try to maintain that position?

Antonia Romeo: Yes. Obviously, we are having the conversations at the moment on the concordat and, as I say, we are doing allocations, but we are well aware of what needs to happen.

Q99            Chair: Is any support being given by the Ministry to the work of the Crown Court Improvement Group, which Lord Justice Edis chairs as presiding judge, to try to bear down on things like timeliness from the offence to completion and so on? What are HMCTS or the MoJ doing to try to support them in that work?

Nick Goodwin: There is support to the Crown Court Improvement Group. As you say, it is judicially chaired, so it is the senior presiding judge, reporting to the Lady Chief Justice. So it is in the judicial line, but it convenes people throughout the system to have those discussions. There is a particularly strong role both for policymakers within the Ministry to be engaged with that, but also for ourselves to provide the right information and insight that allow judges to effectively pull the levers to make sure case management is good.

It is not just that. There are quite a lot of other cross-criminal justice system fora that are essentially trying to make sure that cases go through as smoothly as possible. For example, Antonia chairs the Criminal Justice Action Group, which is one such forum where we are trying to bear down on ineffective trials.

Antonia articulated where we are very well. There are a couple of points it is worth being really clear about. We are straining every sinew. Disposals are significantly up. We will sit even more sitting days in the upcoming year; in fact, currently we will sit a record number of sitting days, going back a great many years. That is all good, but the receipts coming to the system are up even more. The receipts coming to the system are particularly made up of sexual offences and violence offences, which means the case mix is really difficult. That is the reason why it is proving a stubborn beast to shift. There are some good signs, but it really is a stubborn problem at the moment.

Q100       Chair: Of course, one of the difficulties that arises, as well as judicial capacity and sitting days, is the availability of barristers to prosecute those particularly serious cases. Are discussions being had with the Treasury about maintaining fee levels to ensure that we get barristers attracted to do those serious and more complex cases, both to prosecute and to defend?

Antonia Romeo: As you rightly note, this is a case of supply and demand. We have already injected a significant amount of money—£141 million in steady state—as a result of the response to the criminal legal aid independent review. We are expecting that, on average, a barrister will earn an additional £7,000 a year. We are hoping that those additional fees will attract more people into the profession.

Another key driver is the amount of work that there is. There is a lot of work now, so we are expecting that that should attract people into the profession. We have obviously seen the recent surveys. We are talking to the professions about that.

Q101       Chair: Lord Bellamy recommended that injection as the minimum required to maintain a steady state at the time that he made his report, which is already out of date. Part of his recommendation was to have a committee or a body to update and review the fees as they went along. What steps have been made to put that in place? Is it meeting, and how often?

Antonia Romeo: That body has been set up and is chaired by a judge. It is the Criminal Legal Aid Advisory Board. It was set up in response to CLAIR, as you know, to look at the operation and structure of all of the fee schemes now and in the future. As a result of this we have a consultation under way that will lead to an extra £21 million being invested in criminal legal aid solicitors. That consultation closes at the end of March as part of those reforms. That is aimed at front‑loading money in the system, because something else that the Committee has discussed before is that you really have to front‑load investment at the beginning of the system. We are injecting that money. It will go towards police station fees, for example, as well as some of the youth justice work.

Q102       Chair: There was some litigation that went on between the Law Society and the Ministry in relation to the solicitors’ element of the advocates’ graduated fee scheme. The contention was that they had not had the full 15% recommended by Bellamy but had got rather less, about 9%. I do not think that was actually disputed. The Law Society won their court action. The High Court ruled in the Law Society’s favour and the Government have said they are not going to appeal that decision.

Antonia Romeo: There were four grounds. The claimants were successful on two quite specific narrow grounds, on two particular points. A number of arguments were rejected and some were upheld.

Q103       Chair: Beyond saving the Department’s face, the fact is that the Law Society won on the substantive issue. When are you going to pay them the money?

Antonia Romeo: I am not sure that is quite right, Chair.

Q104       Chair: Are you are going to hold out on paying the money, Ms Romeo?

Antonia Romeo: The question is what you consider a substantive issue. We are considering the judgment carefully and will respond in due course, but if you look at the grounds, there are some quite specific grounds on which the Government will now be responding. The Law Society did not appeal, so we will obviously abide by the grounds the High Court upheld.

Q105       Chair: The crunch is that people are leaving the criminal legal profession. Bellamy recommended 15%. A previous Lord Chancellor took a decision not to pay the full 15%. That was litigated. As a result of the litigation, is the full 15% going to be paid? If so, when?

Antonia Romeo: I do not want to prejudge, because if you look at what has been upheld, there are some particular ways we will need to make the decisions. We are considering the judgment very carefully. We are going to respond in due course, but I just want to reiterate that we are investing an additional £141 million in steady state and we have the additional £21 million, which is specifically looking at investment on police stations, as I mentioned, which we think will provide an uplift of 11% for solicitors.

Q106       Chair: But it still not Bellamy’s 15%, is it? It is obvious, isn’t it? Bellamy said 15% minimum and they have not got 15%. The Department is arguing the toss.

Antonia Romeo: As I say, we are going to respond to the judgment and we will certainly be abiding by what the judgment says the Department should do—definitely.

Q107       Chair: Do you understand that that damages faith between the Ministry and the professions, the sense that the Department—forgive my saying so—is finding almost every legal avenue to wriggle out of paying that which Bellamy recommended?

Antonia Romeo: There are things that are matters for officials and things that are matters for Ministers.

Q108       Chair: I understand. It may not be your decision. It was a decision by a previous Secretary of State, but I just wondered what your view was, as the accounting officer, given the judgment, about whether it is actually more cost-effective to just pay up rather than risk ongoing tension and risk litigation.

Antonia Romeo: My view is that we will completely abide by the judgment, without a doubt. We are considering the judgment and we will be abiding by that. As the accounting officer, I found money in the budget to pay for the response to CLAIR as a result of the Bellamy report. The CLAAB, which was set up in response and is going to look at additional investment needed, is going to be absolutely crucial.

From my point of view, what really matters is value for money and incentives. You would expect an accounting officer to say this: it is not just about the total pot. The question is what is being paid for and how you most appropriately judge the fees that should go according to different bits of work. That is detailed work that needs to happen. CLAAB are going to oversee that.

Q109       Chair: You mentioned the extra money for court maintenance. Baroness Carr gave evidence that there were something like 100 unplanned courtroom closures every week, nearly 200 every month. Is it estimated that that additional funding that you have secured is likely to make a significant difference to the number of unplanned court closures that the Lady Chief Justice referred to?

Antonia Romeo: The number of sitting days lost due to planned and unplanned maintenance is something like 0.1%, but Nick will want to comment on that particular aspect.

Nick Goodwin: What the Lady Chief Justice said is broadly right, but, as Antonia said, our ability to juggle trials to ensure we do not lose sitting days is actually quite effective. It is disruptive. Will the extra money make a difference? Yes, it will make a big difference, because quite a lot of what we are investing in is things like roofs, heating systems and cooling systems.

Chair: Yes, it is basic stuff.

Nick Goodwin: It is the stuff that takes our courts out of business. There are hot summers, so getting the cooling operating and working well means we will have much less disruption in the courts. Having a better budget than we planned for when spread over two years is really important. It means we are better able to plan. It is a real boon and it will make a difference. We will try to track the evidence as far as possible to show that it has, but it is a real godsend.

Q110       Chair: The other thing on court estate is that some courts have been identified as having RAAC concrete, like many other public buildings. Are bids being made to Treasury for any separate funding for that? You have your maintenance, which you have very fairly set out, Mr Goodwin, that we need to catch up on. What about the particular crisis of RAAC?

Nick Goodwin: In many ways we have been quite fortunate with RAAC, for two reasons. First, we were very much ahead of the game. We started surveying for it extremely early. We have actually not found that many with RAAC. RAAC has affected 10 court buildings. Five are already in the clear. We are not going to reopen two, which is actually one court in Blackpool. That does not cost us anything, because we have already got investment plans to replace the court in Blackpool. That boils us down to three courts. Just for the record, we spent about £1.2 million on looking at those issues.

To give you an example, Harrow is a big court in London and is closed until April 2025. We were already in there taking the roof off and we found the RAAC. In essence, there is no need for additional expenditure because the roof will have to be replaced there. We will correct the RAAC within our buildings maintenance budget, but we have spent a bit more to displace some activity. It is about £1.2 million, as I said. We are very much on top of it. We are coming to the end of our RAAC saga.

Q111       Chair: That is helpful. Finally, on civil legal aid, we know that back in September and October last year the Ministry did a user provider survey. That suggested that 42% of providers said they would leave the civil aid sector in the short term, in the next year. In the long term, 40% said they were looking to leave. We know that there has been a legal aid review. Do you have any idea when the report is going to be published, for a start?

Antonia Romeo: For this review, which is a review of civil legal aid, the evidence‑building phase is planned to conclude by May this year.

Q112       Chair: It was announced in January 2023, was it not?.

Antonia Romeo: It has been ongoing. There has been a lot of evidence.

Chair: It has been running a long time.

Antonia Romeo: It will then move to the policy development phase, with a Green Paper targeted to launch in July this year with some policy options. That is the intention.

Q113       Chair: You said July for policy options, but you have people from your own provider survey saying, “In a year or so we are going to be off. We are going to be out of the market because we frankly cannot afford it any more.” What work is being done with Ministers and Treasury to identify interim measures in advance of the report that can try to arrest some of those very alarming statistics from civil legal aid providers?

Antonia Romeo: You are quite right that there is lots of work already ongoing. We are launching the Housing Loss Prevention Advice Service, which provides early legal advice for people at risk of eviction or possession. That is an injection of an additional £10 million a year. We are increasing fees by 15% for work done under the Illegal Migration Act. We are providing £1.5 million in funding for recruitment of trainee housing solicitors, and up to £1.4 million for accreditation of immigration caseworkers. We are injecting more money now, but we obviously want to do this big evidence-based piece of work.

Chair: Perhaps you can keep us updated on that as well.

Antonia Romeo: I am happy to.

Q114       Chair: We are now virtually at the end. This is the probably the last time that you will come and do the annual report to the Committee in this Parliament. It does strike me that, since I have chaired this Committee, there have been nine Lord Chancellors and Secretaries of State. Without making any observations about that, because those are political decisions, does a frequent change of departmental Ministers at the top create additional managerial pressures for you and your senior civil servants? If so, how do you manage those?

Antonia Romeo: There are two points on this. One is that civil servants are very adept. The main part of our job is supporting the Government, and we therefore need to understand what Ministers wish to do and what the agenda is. That can be a change of Secretary of State or it can be a change of Government. We are adept at understanding what the vision is and what the agenda is, and then making sure it is delivered. That is the job.

The other thing I would say is that, in a large operational Department, a lot of things that a lot of our staff do are not massively impacted on a day-to-day basis by a change of Government. I want to pay tribute to MoJ staff for doing it with professionalism. Building really strong relationships with the Secretary of State and with Ministers to ensure that we can understand and deliver their agenda is an absolutely essential part of the job, and I am really privileged to do it.

Q115       Chair: Is there a tension between having prisons and probation in the same Department as the courts, which actually drive the demand for the prisons and probation? How do you manage that?

Antonia Romeo: This is well above my pay grade.

Q116       Chair: How do you manage it from a purely practical point of view?

Antonia Romeo: It is about bringing things together. As Amy has mentioned in another context, when somebody is in the system, the hand-offs are the hardest thing to manage. From an official point of view, it is having a system where you have more of it end to end, both within and outside of the Department.

Nick mentioned the Criminal Justice Action Group, where we work closely with the Attorney General’s office, the Home Office, the police and the CPS. Being able to look end to end is the only way to be effective in what you are trying to deliver, which is ultimately to keep people out of the criminal justice system, bear down on reoffending and crime, and protect the public. It is also about doing that in a way that is efficient. Bringing things together is an efficient way to do it, but obviously it is one model and there are others.

Chair: Ms Romeo, Ms Rees, Mr Goodwin and Mr McEwen, thank you very much for your evidence.

Antonia Romeo: Before you finish, there were just four things I wanted to say, of which three are very quick corrections. First, if this is the last time that I am going to be doing this, I just want to say thank you very much to the Committee for the scrutiny and support.

I have three quick corrections, if I may. One is on pressures. I slightly misspoke: it is £55 million of pressure on prison officer pay. On the productivity review I said I thought it was over two years. In fact, the money is up to 2029. Thirdly, on compensation payments I said there was one; it was actually one to a member of staff, but you were correct that there were three, because two were to prisoners. I just wanted to get that on the record.

Chair: That is fair enough. Thank you very much, Ms Romeo. I thank you and your officials for the way you engage with us. Sometimes we have to probe, but I hope it is always done in in a constructive manner. I am personally grateful to you and your officials for the courtesy you have always shown me and the other members of the Committee. In some cases there will be different personnel when you come and do your next annual report, but I am sure there will be other areas where we will continue to engage with the Department before then.