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Wednesday, January 09, 2008

£150m offender-tracking system scrapped

£150m offender-tracking system scrapped

By Philip Johnston
Last Updated: 2:09am GMT 09/01/2008

A £500 million computer project to underpin the criminal justice system and protect the public has been scrapped.

C-Nomis was supposed to track and manage offenders from charge to sentence, imprisonment and beyond, linking the courts, prisons and probation services.

But the Government said a ''version" would be introduced in prisons only.

C-Nomis was designed to make it easier for probation staff to prepare for a criminal being freed, protecting the public and reducing the chance of new crimes.

But, after spending more than £150 million, David Hanson, the Justice Minister, pulled the plug. He said steps would be taken to increase data shared between prisons and probation.

Opposition MPs said this could have been done without spending so much. Nick Herbert, the shadow justice secretary, said: "This blows a hole in the Government's promise to deliver end-to-end offender management."

Harry Fletcher of the probation union Napo, said: "This is yet another government IT disaster. Tens of millions have been wasted on projects that have not delivered".

Comment: I suppose this makes a change from losing discs containing data...now they just lose the whole system!

3 comments:

James Higham said...

Scrapping projects is not as much fun as losing a nation's data.

Anonymous said...

JHL, I'm so glad you are back on-line! The Mirror Forums have become so BORING!!!!!! What with their self-congratulatory slaps on the back about who was the best poster/the best theory blah blah blah....And all these new posters have appeared asking/going over the same old bits of info. It's such a pity because in June/July it was so very interesting and investigative. I have noticed that the old good posters are posting less and less, and consequently, I am reading them less and less. Please keep doing what you are doing. What a pity you are not being paid for your good work!

Anonymous said...

This is obviously one of the reasons why our council tax bills are so friggin high.