Scottish Justice system signs £12m contract with CapGemini

Scotland’s Justice system signed a five year contract for up to £12m with Indian IT supplier Capgemini

Scotland’s Justice system has announced a five-year contract for up to £12m with IT supplier Capgemini.

The contract will see the supplier manage the core IT infrastructure of the justice system, officially called the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS), for at least five years.

The supplier will manage the case management system currently used by COPFS to pursue some 300,000 criminal prosecutions and suspicious deaths every year.

The contract will see the organisation improve the system's availability, reliability and cost-effectiveness, before delivering a new system in a transformation programme designed to provide users with a better service.

A 70-strong Capgemini team are currently working on the blueprint for the next-generation COPFS system, based on a modern Service Orientated Architecture, while also improving availability and reducing costs of the existing system. The services provided to COPFS are part of Capgemini’s Applications Lifecycle Services (ALS) offering.

The team is largely based at the Edinburgh and Glasgow offices, with some team members at the COPFS HQ in Edinburgh. There will also be a significant development team based in Mumbai.

The COPFS case management system is central to every criminal prosecution mounted in Scotland. It is used by 500 COPFS lawyers and 1,000 administrative staff across 47 sites.

Peter Collings, deputy chief executive at COPFS, said: ‘Our IT applications are vital for every step of every prosecution we undertake.”

Capgemini won the COPFS contract following competitive bids from other leading IT vendors, with Collings citing Capgemini’s strong track record with clients such as the Scottish Government and Glasgow City Council in Scotland and the Metropolitan Police, Home Office and Ministry of Justice in England as reasons for COPFS's decision.