Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether his Department has provided support to HM Courts and Tribunals Service to facilitate upgrades to the digital systems of the court network to allow remote hearings.

The Ministry of Justice Digital and Technology team has provided a range of support to HM Courts and Tribunals Service to ensure its continuity of service with an increased rate of remote working.

We have scaled up and re-configured existing infrastructure and systems to ensure stability with increased demand, or to create Covid-19 secure environments. We have supported the increased use of CVP (cloud video platform) from an existing pilot, to enable remote hearings, managing the associated network infrastructure changes. We have also onboarded CVP into live service under a robust support model (for all MoJ users) and supporting additional functionality required by HMCTS.

MoJ Digital and Technology have led on the deployment of technology to set-up Nightingale courts. Our teams have managed the delivery of infrastructure, providing network connectivity, video services, end user compute, print and digital recording solutions. This deployment was devised to mirror provision at permanent sites.

The department has increased the deployment of the magistrates bench solution to provide better facilities or magistrates in the courtroom environment and also deployed the Panel solution to enable non-salaried judiciary to access digital case files.

We have also ensured that staff working remotely have the right device and access to systems to continue working and have deployed collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams and scaled up the number of audio conferencing lines.