Recommendation 26

We asked the Ministry and HMCTS whether they have identified lessons from the programme they can take forward into other major projects. They acknowledged that there were several lessons that they have identified from the programme so far that they plan to take forward.53 However, the Ministry and HMCTS have similarly given us assurances that they have learnt lessons from both reform and other major programmes in the past. For example, in 2018, the Ministry told us that it had learnt lessons from delivering reform programmes to rehabilitation of offenders and its electronic monitoring system. The Ministry explained at the time that it considered that these programmes took too long, were over-complex and difficult.54 In particular, the Ministry’s timetable for delivering ambitious reforms to rehabilitation was too compressed which in turn created an unacceptable level of risk to delivery.55 The Ministry also asserted that the court reform programme would not have the same fate as its other large transformation programmes as the reforms were more modular which reduced interdependencies between projects and that a mistake or missed milestone would not threaten the rest of the programme.56 However, seven years into the programme, HMCTS and the Ministry do not seem to have taken lessons on board. For example, HMCTS has had to extend its timetable for a third time and to look again at its approach to rolling out common platform.57