2. Ms Bradshaw asked the Minister of Justice to outline the expected impact arising from the allocation of funding to her Department for transformation projects. (AQO 1751/22-27)

I am delighted that my Department was successful in its bid for transformation funding, which is worth £22·64 million over five years. The funding will be used on efforts to speed up and transform the criminal justice system and to modernise electronic monitoring.

Justice is demand-led, with funding, quite appropriately, being allocated to front-line services first. Given the financial pressures that my Department has faced and continues to face, that has left little opportunity to support projects aimed at transforming the system. Despite the financial constraints, the Department has continued to prioritise transformation as part of its business-as-usual operations and has sought to identify areas for further transformation and to develop proposals should the opportunity to progress them arise. The funding is therefore extremely welcome and will enable much-needed change to the criminal justice system as a whole, helping to improve the time taken to complete cases and, for example, to better manage offenders on bail. I am wholly convinced that the funding will provide opportunities to improve effectiveness and efficiency and to meet the increased and changing demands on the system, thereby providing stability for the future.

Will the Minister please outline how the transformation funding will be used?

Some £20·45 million will be used to support work to speed up and transform the criminal justice system, which is a key departmental commitment in the Programme for Government. The remaining £2·19 million will help to modernise our electronic monitoring systems. The funding for speeding up justice focuses largely on work to establish new ways of working between key justice stakeholders such as the police, prosecutors, the defence and courts, with a view to speeding up particularly the early stages of criminal cases, helping to ease pressure on courts and other parts of the system. The funding will also support work to expand the use of existing out-of-court disposals so that, where it is appropriate to do so, more low-level offences are diverted away from the courts entirely, helping to ease pressure on the system.

The £2·19 million allocated for electronic monitoring will enable my Department to take forward work to transform the way in which it monitors individuals released into the community. That will include considering the implications of GPS location monitoring for those on bail or on licence fitted with an electronic tag as part of their release conditions. That enhanced monitoring could be used to strengthen bail conditions, probation orders or prison release conditions. The availability of transformation funding is therefore a huge boost in light of the significant funding pressures that my Department has worked under for a great number of years, which have affected our ability to deliver the much-needed reforms.

I am coning in on electronic monitoring. As you said, it was part of the transformation bid. The Department has recently given a new contract to Buddi to look at monitoring across the board, and it was said that funding was the issue with electronic GPS. Can you confirm whether there is now a timeline with the new transformation bids? Will this form part of that contract looking at GPS monitoring?

The contract that we have can be expanded to include GPS monitoring, and so we were prepared for this. Whether or not we were successful in the transformation bid, we were prioritising this in the Department. The fact that we have been successful with the transformation bid simply means that we do not now need to take that money from other key priorities in order to make this happen. Work has still to be done on how we manage the data, what data will be held and for how long. All those issues will have to be worked through to ensure that we are fully compliant. It may, helpfully, create more confidence with the judiciary about people being released on licence or on bail. Also, it will hopefully create more confidence in the public that people are properly supervised when they are on licence or on bail.

On funding as a whole, will the Minister outline the effects on sex offender monitoring and visits due to the insufficient resources for her Department?

Thus far, my understanding is that, where the probation service has had to live within its budget, it has focused on, for example, the reporting to courts, so pre-sentencing reports to courts have slowed down somewhat in order to maintain the level of supervision that is required of those sex offenders and others who are in the community. There is also a responsibility through the Public Protection Arrangements Northern Ireland for the monitoring of people who are in the community, and that will be affected by all parts of the justice system. As I have said before, sometimes people underestimate what is at stake with the underfunding of the justice system. Public safety is key amongst those factors.