Joined-up justice pilots ready to go

The first major pilots of the government's 'joined-up justice' programme are due to go live at the end of this month.

Criminal Justice IT (CJIT) has a dedicated budget of more than £1bn to link the seven agencies of the UK criminal justice system (CJS) including the police, the courts and the prison service.

The first phase is a secure email system due next year.

The second stage is the CJS Exchange for securely sharing documents, and the final element will be the creation of a Virtual Unified Case File.

The two pilots, in Snaresbrook and Warwickshire, are precursors to the CJS Exchange.

'The long term objective is to join up criminal justice agencies and these schemes are stepping stones on the way to do that,' said CJIT commercial manager Duncan Dunnett.

'We are trying to prove what we want to do is technically possible and look at the various technical and business issues involved,' he said.

A Microsoft .Net exchange has been set up at the Crown Court in Snaresbrook to test the ability of court systems to interface with the new technology.

The scheme has been in development for around a year and is due to go live at the end of this month.

The two-part Warwickshire pilot uses Sun's Java platform. The first part, due to go live at the same time as Snaresbook, is an online portal to give support staff easy access to information on the progress of victims' and witnesses' cases.

The second part is to share electronic information between the area's police, magistrates' courts and youth offenders' teams. It is due to go live at the start of next year.

A key objective is to look at agencies' different business processes, whether they can be made more efficient and what kind of training might be needed, says Dunnett.

Work is also going ahead on an XML-based indexing system of common data standards and protocols to allow agencies' legacy technology to exchange documents. Sun is due to deliver the system in December.