Reducing pressure on UK prisons
MINISTRY OF JUSTICE
HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) is an executive agency within the UK government's Ministry of Justice (MOJ). HMPPS is responsible for the operation of UK prisons, probation services, and the management of offenders.
The Community Accommodation Service (CAS) provides temporary accommodation to eligible current, alleged or former offenders who can be housed outside of prison but who have no suitable accommodation of their own. One service within CAS called CAS-2 Bail can provide low-risk alleged offenders with temporary accommodation so that they can be bailed and avoid being remanded in custody in prison. This reduces loading on the limited remand prison capacity.
The challenge
CAS-2 Bail is a part of ongoing HMG plans to reduce pressure on prison beds, so increasing the number of successful referrals is a major driver for HMPPS.
Their hypothesis was that not all alleged offenders eligible for CAS-2 Bail were currently being referred and that some referrals that were currently failing could be successful. A pre-discovery phase identified a number of possible reasons, in particular the use of paper-based referral forms that were time-consuming and error-prone.
Additionally, less than a quarter of referrals were made when the alleged offender was still in court with the majority completed after they had already been remanded. HMPPS wanted to significantly increase the percentage of referrals made in court to keep more low-risk alleged offenders outside of the prison system entirely.
HMPPS' immediate goal was to come up with a digital replacement for the CAS-2 Bail referral process, proposing that it would solve immediate issues as well as being a platform for unlocking further efficiencies.
What we did
MOJ commissioned a five week discovery from Register Dynamics alongside our partners Oxford Insights via the Accelerated Capability Environment (ACE) and Vivace network. We worked as part of a multidisciplinary agile team, synthesising the outputs from user research into data-centric solutions to CAS-2 Bail's problems and engaging closely with MOJ Technical Architects to understand how new data flows from existing systems could be built.
We found that delivery of a digital service could be significantly shortened by reusing one of the other existing CAS-2 digital services as a template. Whilst this was an important finding, we also found lots of opportunities to improve the template digital service by capturing and reusing data.
Whilst the service did produce some management information, it wasn't precise enough to allow improvements to be made. There was also some service failure modes that weren't captured, meaning that MOJ did not have any visibility of what was preventing referrals being made in court.
There were also lots of opportunities to use data more intelligently as part of the referral process, including through using linked reference data to auto-populate more of the referral form, highlighting possible quality issues before the referral was sent, and preventing oversharing of unnecessary data.
Register Dynamics and Oxford Insights continued into an eight week alpha phase to prototype and test the ideas we had generated from discovery, alongside new partners dxw, TPXImpact and Zaizi.
We developed a new management information (MI) model that drilled down into the possible reasons that CAS-2 Bail referrals might be incomplete, unsuccessful or never made, identifying specific service interventions that could address each root cause. We designed and tested a number of alpha ideas for capturing new MI data and finally proposed a mixed media solution combining UX changes to the digital service with new data collection protocols carried out in HMPPS' flagship case management system.
We also explored new ways to reuse existing data from across MOJ and how to use emerging technologies like artificial intelligence to drive practical and measurable improvement to the service. We built out a complete roadmap for the service, from the next steps to be taken in Beta to service improvements that could be made once the service and emerging technologies had reached maturity.
The result
Our work on the new CAS-2 Bail digital service successfully passed an internal Alpha assessment at MOJ and the quality of our work and staff were highly praised by senior stakeholders in both ACE and HMPPS.
Our Discovery and Alpha has significantly derisked a high-pressure deadline for HMPPS whilst also setting out a vision for a future CAS-2 Bail service that uses data to drive efficiency and better meet the needs of all of the service's users.