THE Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) is in formal dispute with HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) over its rollout of the Common Platform due to its negative impact on safety, jobs and the administration of justice.

Since September last year, HMCTS has been rolling out the Common Platform in Magistrates’ and Crown Courts in England and Wales.

The new mega-IT project, which has an advertised cost of £270 million, is supposed to be a shared interface between all criminal justice system users, where “cradle to grave” details of the case can be entered, recorded and accessed as appropriate by each criminal justice agency.

The Common Platform is an integral part of HMCTS Reform Programme, a systematic restructuring of the justice system made necessary by years of underinvestment by the Tories.

It has already resulted in the largest backlog in the history of the legal system and led to the closure of hundreds of courts.

At the end of the reform, up to 9,000 jobs will have been lost with the Common Platform intended to account for 3,000 of them. HMCTS offensively calls these job losses “benefits.”

PCS is vehemently opposed to these job losses, which will come by moving work out of court offices directly into the court room to be undertaken by staff whose other roles mean they simply have no time for data input.

Furthermore, HMCTS expects this work to be undertaken not on state-of-the-art technology that supports our members but rather on an IT platform that not only makes that process as difficult as possible for our members and is plagued by slow running and regular crashes, but has less stability and reliability than Boris Johnson has honesty and integrity.  

To date, moving the work into the courtrooms has caused nothing but misery and mayhem.

It has led to a shocking increase in reports from court takers of stress and anxiety and working long hours, sometimes well into the night — not to mention continued problems with performance and accuracy.

Information painstakingly entered about the outcome of a hearing is changed, with it being anybody’s guess as to what official records and notifications to stakeholders and victims of crime may look like or even if they will be generated.

There have been many reported incidents since the rollout of warrants not reaching prisons and protective orders not reaching the police.

Near misses are commonplace. At one stage, the Common Platform was identifying everyone sent to prison as a suicide risk, with all the additional work that generated for our comrades in the Prison Service.

While choosing to run at significant operational and reputational risk may be a decision for HMCTS, the impact on our members — who take pride in the service they deliver and are fearful of disciplinary action in relation to errors they are not responsible for — is immense.

PCS understands that it was the direct intervention of the senior presiding judge that resulted in the further rollout of the platform being suspended, with a direction that there can be no further rollout until the system has been stable for three weeks.

It is the first time, we believe, that a senior member of the judiciary has intervened to protect the administration of justice.

Members have been reduced to tears in the courtroom, have been signed off with work-related stress or have simply left because they cannot tolerate working in the unbearable conditions HMCTS is insisting on and the dismantling of the criminal justice system they are witnessing.

Members have been dismissively told it is their incompetence or lack of resilience that is to blame for what is an HMCTS failure.

While HMCTS has acknowledged that some of our members using the platform are experiencing significant stress, they have still failed to undertake an organisational risk assessment and identify control measures to remove the stress that is arising from the use of the platform, despite having a legal obligation to do so. PCS strongly believes that this is because the risks identified would show that the use of the Common Platform is unsustainable.
 
HMCTS has said stress is a local and individual issue that can be addressed by staff “toughening up” and by being signposted to counselling or lifestyle advice.    
 
It is a “local problem” or  a “business as usual” problem. These excuses, together with “there is no evidence of the problem” or “it is a teething problem,” are the stock answers parroted out by HMCTS to the concerns that PCS raises.

It is not without irony that, within a system imposed in a legal jurisdiction which requires proof beyond reasonable doubt, HMCTS has imposed on PCS a standard of proof beyond all and any doubt when health and safety concerns for members are brought up.

This is in sharp contrast to the standard HMCTS applies to itself, where all unevidenced statements are deemed true.   

HMCTS has also failed to undertake an Equality Impact Assessment in relation to the impact on any users. Many of our members with protected characteristics have sensory, neurodiverse or musculoskeletal conditions. Their needs have not been taken into consideration in relation to either design or rollout.

A cost-benefit analysis has never been shown to PCS and the answers to at least 80 of our questions, many outstanding since before July last year, have never been provided.  

PCS has from the outset warned the employer that the Common Platform was based on a flawed premise.

The use of digital resulting by court takers while administrative support remained was already impacting on timeliness, quality of justice and the ability to meet the mandatory requirements of the criminal procedure rules.

We also warned about the significant difficulties that would exist in developing any IT programme that was able to function seamlessly across both the magistrates’ and Crown Court jurisdictions. HMCTS pressed on regardless.  

PCS also warned that rolling out the platform last year was wholly inappropriate at a time when we needed to start recovery from a substantial backlog caused by years of ideological underinvestment and exacerbated by the pandemic, not to mention the risks from a second wave.

We told HMCTS they had presented no evidence as to how introduction of the Common Platform would support the recovery and how evidence from our members would suggest it was likely to have the opposite effect.

The Common Platform has done nothing to support the reduction in outstanding cases — and it is now a real contributory factor to the backlog increase.

We advised HMCTS that members at the courts in Derby — chosen for the initial rollout — were already talking of “meltdown” and being “on their knees.”

Many were exhibiting the physical, emotional, behavioural and psychological symptoms of work-related stress and were genuinely concerned the Common Platform would break them. The employer pressed on regardless.  

HMCTS appears not only determined to expose members to risk by pressing ahead with the Common Platform but also to continue running with significant reputational risk. To our members’ knowledge, no steps have been taken to address either of these issues.

PCS continues to press its demands with HMCTS. These include the halting of the Platform for new cases, undertaking an organisational risk assessment in consultation with PCS and an Equality Impact Assessment on the impact on both HMCTS staff users and criminal justice stakeholders

PCS has now launched a consultative ballot in the Magistrates’ Court, seeking member support from those currently affected by the stress the platform is causing.

We have made it clear to HMCTS that, if our demands are not met, we will remain in dispute and we will not rule out balloting for industrial action. Safety at work is a right, not a privilege.