The courts will follow the NHS’ example in going “paperless”, whilst HMRC will minimize server usage across its national offices.
The BBC reported that the UK courts system is following in the footsteps of the National Health Service (NHS) and aiming to become fully digital and “paperless” in 2016, with the NHS announcing its move in January this year. The UK government has stated that the court system’s “outdated reliance on paper” will be ended by the move, which is part of a £160 million ($243.7 million/€186 million) initiative to improve the “speed and efficiency of the criminal justice system”.
The move has been made, according to Justice Minister Damian Green, in order to turn the courts into a “modern public service”, and comes on the back of a trial at a court in Birmingham that has utilised new technology and initiatives. Among the other measures are secure wireless connectivity, so that lawyers and judges “can access all necessary documents”, with the intention of wanting “information to be shared electronically, securely and efficiently across agencies in the criminal justice system”.
The plan, entitled ‘Transforming the Criminal Justice System’, will also encourage the use of mobile devices; video-link evidence; small cases dealt with in smaller courts; and even a crime-tracking system for victims to “check the progress of their case online”. The BBC notes that the justice system “has often been criticised for its delays, and it is a sign of the government’s concern that, in an age of austerity, it is investing £160m to digitise courtrooms”.
Many lawyers have been encouraged by the announcement, but others have expressed fears about security and the loss of files in the event of a system crash. Greg Foxsmith, a criminal advocate, told the BBC: “If the system crashes, you are not just talking about losing a document or a file, you could have a complete meltdown of the system within a court. And if security is not watertight, highly sensitive and confidential information could be accessed. The history of government procurement of IT systems is not a happy one.”
Green stated of the decision: “Every year the courts and Crown Prosecution Service use roughly 160 million sheets of paper. Stacked up this would be the same as 15 Mount Snowdons – literally mountains of paper. If we are to win in the global race this must change. It is time we move the court system into the 21st Century.
“This investment will help us get rid of our outdated paper-based system, and turn our criminal justice system into a digital and modern public service.”
Computing.co.uk reported in turn that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is moving its files and servers to the cloud to “reduce lost office hours”, a decision said by the government department to have been “partly driven by the need to reduce overheads” as it has been forced to cut running costs by five percent after the government’s spending review this week.
HMRC will be moving print and file servers to a “centralised storage solution” provided by technology provider Skyscape, because office hours were being lost to server failures. Andrew Bull, HMRC’s Director of Delivery and Operations in Information Services, stated at the Cloud World Forum in London that HMRC has “a lot of physical offices” and each of these “has a print or file server”, with all last refreshed in 2006 “and they are now coming to the end of life”.
Rather than buying new servers, the department looked for a “longer-term solution that would be more cost effective”, and it “could see [the amount of failures] going up, even in proportion to other areas such as network connectivity”, so in assessing power consumption in order to become greener, the HMRC surprisingly found that “the amount of power consumed in local communications rooms” was larger than it expected, as they housed servers and air conditioning units.
The centralisation of the servers benefits HMRC by helping save money and energy consumption, the latter alone amounting to a saving of £750,000 ($1.14 million/€874,849) per year.