A recent CSW round table examined the many benefits that would flow from better sharing of data across the many agencies involved in our criminal justice system – and the substantial obstacles to doing so. Colin Marrs reports.
With so many agencies involved in chasing, prosecuting, punishing and rehabilitating offenders, we urgently need better data exchange across the criminal justice system. The Ministry of Justice understands the potential benefits: it’s worked to create common data formats and IT platforms, set up its own digital unit, and begun to build an IT network connecting courts, police and prosecutors. But the justice system goes far wider than the MoJ: DWP chases benefit fraudsters, for example, whilst HMRC goes after tax cheats and local authorities help offenders re-enter the community.
At a recent CSW round table, held with the support of legal information provider LexisNexis, civil servants discussed how information can be better used to improve policy, efficiency and effectiveness throughout criminal justice. And the participants were clearly both enthused by the possibilities, and frustrated by the lack of systems for sharing data and the obstacles to doing so.
For example, Jackie Callaghan, who works on pensions and widows’ benefits for HMRC, pointed out that DWP often keeps to itself information that would help her identify benefit cheats. Meanwhile, she added, “information we hold could help the DWP substantiate their investigations. But we still sit in our own bubbles – we don’t talk so well.”
A mismatch was identified between the desire of senior officials to get hold of other departments’ information, and their readiness to release their own. Scandals such as HMRC’s loss in 2007 of a disk listing 25m child benefit recipients have made them cautious about handing across data. Ian Charlton, an organisational transformation specialist from HM Passport Office, said: “The argument from departments is: ‘If you lose our data, the blame will be on us’.”
Some info is being shared, mainly via dedicated portals which allow access to strictly-defined datasets. Roger Stevens, a commissioning professional from the National Offender Management Service, pointed out that when offenders are jailed – creating a need to stop their benefits – “there are only certain fields we can share with DWP: the length of sentence, for instance. You can’t share it all. We are complying with the legislation for them to deliver their part of the business.”
The legislation in question, the Data Protection Act, was repeatedly identified as the main barrier to a much wider sharing of data across departments. Many civil servants may be playing too safe here, due partly to a lack of consensus amongst lawyers about the law’s requirements. Dave Pryce, from the DWP’s Universal Credit strategy team, said: “If you get two sets of lawyers from different departments, you’ll get two answers as to whether the law allows data to be shared.” Panellists said compromises often take months to broker, and there was support for the creation of a central bank of lawyers to give clear advice on data sharing issues. Richard Crouch, director of primary law at Lexis Nexis, agreed strongly that it would be logical to have one source of guidance within central government.
A number of panellists also pointed to the amount of work involved in creating IT and data-handling systems that allow the sharing of information. Richard Cookson, head of data management at the Skills Funding Agency, said that the Department for Education is currently attempting to implement common data standards across the education sector, but that “the challenges to even doing it in schools, FE and HE colleges and associated organisations are so huge and costly that it is starting to get very difficult.” Steve O’Connor, a development manager at the Legal Aid Agency, commented: “There are massive savings, but we shouldn’t underestimate the size of the task.”
Some panellists raised the prospect of setting cross-government data standards and formats, enabling info to be shared more easily, but others highlighted the vast amount of work involved – and the fact that some departments, like DfE, are already well advanced in their own in-house projects. Cookson said: “The question is whether it should be an ambition to have something that strategic so the whole of government is doing it, or whether we should just make our systems interoperable in a way that doesn’t need us to rebuild the databases.”
Melanie Johnson, an area contract manager at the Legal Aid Agency, was unabashedly in favour of major reform: people don’t factor in the costs of “tinkering around the edges” to get a workable solution using existing systems, she said, arguing that a clear, long-term strategy set from the top of government is required to improve things in the long term. “You almost need to start from scratch with all of this,” she said. “We need a strategic body and a vision for 20 years down the road which says: ‘This is what we are going to work towards,’ so that when our system changes we have got an objective.”
When Ralph Cox, a housing policy adviser in the Department for Communities and Local Government, suggested that off-the-shelf solutions for complex data management work exist in the marketplace, NOMS’s Stevens identified another potential barrier: the challenge of persuading outsourced IT suppliers to amend existing contracts. “Even if you find software that can do what you want, you can’t put it on the network because it doesn’t fit within their rules,” he complained. Another panellist said he’d been quoted half a million pounds to install a piece of software available for free on the internet.
Others voiced worries that a database standardisation approach could work out too disruptive and costly. But passports expert Charlton thought he saw a solution: “Instead of thinking about common data standards and how we rebuild our databases from scratch so they can all talk to each other, we just need to find a common, core piece of data that can be attached to all the datasets to link them together,” he said. Fingerprints are the best option, he argued: attaching a set of prints to each department’s records could quickly pick up fraudsters and incorrect data. He added that cultural resistance, caused by the association between fingerprints and criminality, is being broken down by technologies including the new iPhone, which uses fingerprint security technology.
The panel agreed that the process of reassessing departmental data should result in a rethinking of the way processes are managed, leading in the long term to cleaner sets of data and lower administration costs. The DCLG’s Cox said: “When I worked in the private sector and went through our systems, we found we were checking some things three times. Managers had no hesitation in saying: ‘We are not doing that anymore’.”
O’Connor agreed that culture change is necessary to drive data sharing forward, stressing that senior managerial buy-in is crucial. He said his body works with two others on sharing data, with the chief executives meeting once a month to identify and attack the obstacles. “I am not saying all of the challenges go away,” he commented, “but a hell of a lot of weight in the organisation is now put behind resolving them.”
Overall, the mood was determinedly positive: all those present supported the principle of greater data sharing. Simon Christopher, public sector account director at Lexis Nexis, said: “It is clear that despite the challenges, there are great benefits to departments sharing more data with each other.” But there was some disagreement on how to overcome the significant barriers to turning the agenda into reality, along with realism on the timescale required to align the massive amount of information held on a multitude of departmental databases.
Stronger direction from the centre would clearly help to make the task easier, though, along with concerted action to reduce the real and perceived barriers created by the Data Protection Act. One participant summed up the frustrations felt by many in the group: “We are always being told to pursue greater data sharing,” he said, “but we’re not given a clear steer on how to achieve it.”