Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department is taking to help ensure improvements to data flow across the criminal justice system.
The Ministry of Justice is committed to improvements in data flow across the criminal justice system, including progressing this work through the Criminal Justice Action Group, and we are exploring funding settlements to achieve this. Antonia Romeo, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice, made this clear in the ‘Reducing the backlog in criminal courts’ meeting of the Public Accounts Committee on 13th December of last year, by confirming that data is a priority and that she would expect money to be allocated to data join-up. We can confirm that departmental allocations are still ongoing and that these will be agreed between the Secretary of State and the Permanent Secretary ahead of the new financial year.