Court and tribunal reform
A blog from Susan Acland-Hood on our plans to re-tender for an independent organisation to lead the evaluation work for the flexible operating hours pilot. At the same time, we’ll make more information available and spend more time with legal professionals in each jurisdiction, including those outside the pilot areas, to refine our plans. This will mean the pilots will now begin in February next year.
Susan Acland-Hood reflects on what she has learnt since she started as CEO of HMCTS last November. Susan explains her plans to write a set of blog posts that outline what we need to do, what we’ve done so far, what our plans are, and how to get involved in shaping HMCTS’s reforms for the future. This blog post focuses on her first-hand observations of our courts and tribunals system, its strength and value, but also the deep challenges it faces and the reasons why she believes only radical reform can make it flourish for the future.
A blog post from Fiona Rutherford, which discusses the implementation of remote working, specifically virtual hearings. Fiona talks about the opportunities (and responsibility) presented by the ‘once in a generation’ £1 billion investment in our courts and tribunals. This work will re-shape how we enable access to the justice system and how we deliver our reformed public services in the future.
A blog from Susan Acland-Hood, the Chief Executive of HM Courts and Tribunals Service about looking at options to use court and tribunal buildings in a more flexible way, letting people have their cases heard outside the current traditional 10am to 4:30pm court day.
A blog post from Kevin Gallagher, Head of the Digital Change Directorate who was one of the judges for the Online Courts Hackathon event co-hosted by the Society for Computers and Law, Legal Geek, the Judiciary of England and Wales and HM Courts and Tribunals Service.
A blog post from Fiona Rutherford that explains the role of her HMCTS Business Strategy and Design Team and how they are responsible for helping to shape how our justice system will look and operate in the future.
A blog post from Robin Marchant explains how HMCTS is developing an online service for the Social Security and Child Support (SSCS) tribunal appeals process.
A blog post from Sue Walker-Russell, a Regional Implementation Co-ordinator for the Criminal Justice System's Common Platform Programme. Sue talks about our online plea service, a public facing service that enables defendants to engage with the Magistrates' court process more easily.
Over the last year, we’ve recruited 13 user testers into the Criminal Justice System Common Platform Programme. Over that time, we’ve experimented with a number of on-boarding processes, with varying results. We needed to get people up to speed quickly about the technologies that we’re using, the application that we’re building and the domain language and context that goes with them.
On 22 September 2016 I gave a presentation to the National Digital Practitioners’ Working Group summarising interim findings of the two-factor authentication survey which I mentioned in my last blog post. In summary the majority of practitioners have access to a smart phone, would be able and willing to install an app on their smart phone to provide an access code.
