Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 11 March 2019 to Question 227393, whether the review into the causes of the probation and courts IT systems failure in January 2019 has been completed; and if he will publish that report.

The independent review commissioned by the Permanent Secretary was finalised in May. To protect the department’s security and commercial interests we will not be publishing this report. I can confirm that the report found that three separate and unrelated issues occurred at the same time, creating significant business impact. Steps have already been taken to learn lessons from these incidents. We are working closely with our suppliers to make sure that diligent care is taken of the department's infrastructure, accompanied by a more robust internal capability to control and manage our vital services.

An updated business continuity plan for the department will be completed this month; that plan will include specific scenarios around significant IT failure covering one or more of our agencies. We are also reviewing the monitoring applied to the core networking infrastructure to provide us with earlier sight of any future problems. There was no evidence of any foul play, and no data was lost during the incident.