Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 9
Twenty-First Report: Transforming electronic monitoring services
Published 21 Oct 2022
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Electronic Monitoring programme All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
Both the Ministry and HMPPS told us that they had learnt lessons from weaknesses in governance and scrutiny in the programme. The Ministry explained that a lack of scrutiny can be the nature of big departments with a small corporate centre and multiple agencies. Often project teams did not know at what point issues should be escalated as tolerances had not been explicitly agreed. The Ministry told us that recent work in both the Ministry and HMPPS had improved governance, risk controls and thresholds for escalation. The Ministry explained that it had introduced additional governance for its portfolio of major projects and programmes with a whole-life cost of at least £30 million. This additional governance included a delivery board and thresholds on affordability, delivery timetables, benefits slippage and risks and issues.16 The consequences of relying on legacy systems
From: Public Accounts Committee, Twenty-First Report: Transforming electronic monitoring services (HC 34), 21 October 2022
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 14 December 2022 (deadline 21 December 2022).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government states that it agrees with each of the Committee's six recommendations on the Ministry of Justice's electronic monitoring services, and gives target implementation dates for five of them.
- On real-time police access to GPS data, the government agrees with the recommendation, but says police have advised that live access is not a current priority; it will "consider whether and how changes to the service can be made" should the police's view change.
- On outdated technology, remediation work has moved from December 2022 to March 2023, and system improvements "by the end of January 2023" are intended to let the GPS system cope with rising volumes.
- On evidence of impact, a benefits management strategy and realisation plan will be in place "By April 2023", and a formal evaluation strategy for electronic monitoring is being developed. The target implementation date is August 2023.
- On oversight of the expansion programme, the agency commits to write to the Committee in August 2023, once new contracts have been awarded.