Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation’s report, A thematic review of the quality and effectiveness of probation services recovering from the impact of exceptional delivery models introduced owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, published on 25 February 2021, what steps he is taking to establish the extent to which service user digital exclusion affects access to available service support and provision and resolve shortfalls.

Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) thoroughly reviewed technology requirements to ensure that Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRC) and partner organisation staff could access Microsoft Teams collaboration tools remotely and helped purchase laptops and mobile phones as part of Covid-19 relief and change notice 41. Several CRCs have also adapted their own ICT approach to enable remote working in advance of migration to HMPPS.

As part of the transition activity, the Probation Reform Programme has begun migrating CRC staff over to the same Ministry of Justice (MoJ) equipment and environment used by National Probation Service (NPS) which will allow CRCs to access the digital solutions they require for partnership liaison and remote service provision. People Plus (WWM) were the first CRC to successfully migrate on February 14th; all remaining 21 CRCs will migrate by June 13th.

Remote supervision has played a key part of our exceptional delivery models through the pandemic. Whilst video call capability has offered a digital solution for maintaining virtual contact with our service users, we recognise that digital poverty disproportionately impacts the people we supervise. In recognition of this, we sourced 6500 talk and text devices in April 2020 for NPS service users without access to a mobile phone. The CRCs separately sourced 11,000 at the same time. Whilst these devices do not provide access to digital applications for video calling, they form part of a mixed approach which underpins remote supervision. We believe there is an ongoing need for text and talk devices for service users. We are therefore scoping requirements for the probation service to cover demand during 2021/22.