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17 Sep 2008 : Column 2284W—continued
Crown Prosecution Service
Mr. Spellar: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what steps he plans to take following the comments regarding the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) made by the tribunal in the action brought by Halima Aziz against the CPS. [224203]
The Solicitor-General: I have been asked to reply.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has accepted the recommendations contained in the tribunal’s judgment and is taking steps to implement them. The CPS does not accept certain elements of the judgment in relation to its conduct of the litigation and the internal investigation following the decision of the Court of Appeal. On those elements it is seeking a review and appeal. In light of this continued litigation, it is not appropriate to comment further until the matter is concluded.
Curfews: Monitoring
Willie Rennie: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice for what reasons his Department decided to put in place arrangements for the remote monitoring of compliance with curfew conditions of certain offenders who have transferred to England and Wales from Scotland, as determined by Schedule 2 of Statutory Instrument No. 1788. [223999]
Mr. Hanson: The Scotland Act 1998 (Agency Arrangements) (Specification) (No 2) Order 2008 is part of the legislative framework which will facilitate the cross border transfer of prisoners. It will allow prisoners serving a prison sentence in Scotland who would be released under the Home Detention Curfew (HDC) scheme there to be released, on a restricted transfer basis, to an address in England or Wales and vice versa.
Officials in my Department and the Scottish Executive are working together to put the contractual arrangements with the electronic monitoring contractors in place to enable full cross border arrangements to come into effect on 20 October 2008.
Departmental Appeals
Andrew Mackinlay: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice on how many occasions his Department and its predecessor instructed the Treasury Solicitor to seek leave to appeal to the House of Lords from (a) the Court of Appeal and (b) the House of Lords itself in each of the last 10 years; and on how many occasions the application was rejected. [220815]
Mr. Wills: Neither the Treasury Solicitor nor the Ministry keep central records and we have not been able to identify any cases to which the Minister of Justice, Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs or the Lord Chancellor was a party, where the Treasury Solicitor applied for leave to appeal to the House of Lords and was refused. We cannot, therefore, say whether there were any such cases and, if so, how many.
We are aware that the Court of Appeal granted the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs leave to appeal to the House of Lords in two cases. In one of those cases, the House of Lords gave Secretary of State of Justice permission to appeal.
Departmental Data Protection
Mr. Garnier: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what incidents of data loss by or from his Department there have been since 1 July 2007; and what instructions or protocols there are in his Department to prevent such losses. [224013]
Mr. Wills: The Ministry of Justice has published details of significant personal data related incidents in 2007-08 in its resource accounts laid before this House on 21 July 2008. For the year 2008-09 to date there has been one significant incident, involving the loss of an inadequately protected storage device from the premises of an IT contractor. Other data losses will be handled at local level and compiling information on these could be done only at disproportionate cost.
I refer the hon. Member to the statement made by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster on 25 June 2008, Official Report, column 26WS, providing the final report on measures for data handling procedures in Government.
The Ministry of Justice has procedures and guidance covering security, information security and data protection designed to identify and control the risk of the unauthorised release of personal data taking place. They include:
Ensuring our sites are physically secure and protected from unauthorised access
Ensuring our employees are reliable through checks on background
Providing guidance to staff on general security with separate guidance on IT security and data protection issues
Procedures for assessing IT systems
We also have systems, for monitoring and checking compliance
These policies and procedures extend to our contracted suppliers.
Departmental Sick Leave
David Simpson: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice (1) how many staff in his Department have had five or more periods of sickness absence of less than five days in two or more of the last five years; [218970]
(2) how many and what percentage of staff in his Department and its predecessor have had more than two periods of sickness absence of less than five days in each of the last three years. [218714]
Mr. Wills: The Ministry of Justice was created on 9 May 2007 bringing together the former Department for Constitutional Affairs and National Offender Management Service, including the Prison and Probation Services and the Office for Criminal Justice Reform.
Figures for the National Offender Management Service and HM Prison Service were the responsibility of the Home Office until the creation of the Ministry of Justice.
Information for HM Prison Service, the National Offender Management Service and the Office for Criminal Justice Reform are available separately for the year April 2007 to March 2008, however any previous figures are integrated within the Home Office data.
Sickness absence data as held by the former Department for Constitutional Affairs cannot be broken down to the level of detail requested. However, the general trend of sickness levels in the Ministry overall is downwards. Concerted management attention has been given to attendance across the Ministry over the last 18 months and the Q1/2008 average working days lost (AWDL) per employee was 10.4 days—with HMCS 11.3 days and Tribunal Services 8.2 days. The latest working records indicate the year to date sickness levels to July equate to an annualised AWDL of 9.9 days, reflecting the downward trend. It should be noted that 50 per cent. of the absence figure is made up of ‘long-term’ cases where absence is greater than 20 working days.
Within Her Majesty's Prison Service 361 staff have taken five or more periods of sickness absence of less than five days duration in two or more of the years between 2003-04 and 2007-08. An absence of less than five days is defined as an absence where the return to work is less than five days after the first day of absence.
The Ministry is currently developing a new Attendance Management Policy which, subject to remaining consultations with unions, is intended for launch before the end of this calendar year. The introduction of the new policy will upgrade and standardise the procedures for recording absence across the former DCA so that more detailed analysis of attendance trends and case management can be conducted in future.
Domestic Violence
Mrs. May: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice pursuant to the answer of 22 July, Official Report, column 1217W, on domestic violence, how many people have commenced, but not completed, the CDVP and IDAP programmes; and how many people ordered to attend a domestic violence programme have failed to (a) commence and (b) complete such a programme. [224209]
Mr. Hanson: Information on delivery of the CDVP (Community Domestic Violence Programme) and IDAP (Integrated Domestic Abuse Programme) is given in the following table. These figures have been drawn from administrative data systems. Although care is taken when processing and analysing the returns, the detail collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system.
| 2007-08( 1, 2, 3) | |
| (1 )Data subject to occasional updating. (2 )Reassignment to programmes, leads to some multiple starts per offender. (3 )Equivalent to “ordered”. | |
Legal Services Commission: Pay
Mr. Bellingham: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what expenditure his Department incurred on bonuses for the Legal Services Commission's (a) Executive Team, (b) staff and (c) directors in the last two years. [224015]
Maria Eagle: As a non-departmental public body, the Legal Services Commission (LSC) is responsible for its own administrative budget which includes staff pay. The Ministry of Justice and HM Treasury approve the LSC’s annual pay remit. The expenditure incurred by the LSC as bonuses is shown in the following table.
| £000 | ||
| 2007-08 | 2006-07 | |
Bonuses paid relate to performance for the previous financial year. A breakdown of bonuses paid to individual executive team members in the past two years is shown in remuneration reports contained within the LSC's annual reports for 2007-08 and 2006-07, which can be found at:
Mr. Bellingham: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice if he will remove any bonuses paid to the staff at the Legal Services Commission involved with setting up community legal advice centres and community legal advice networks. [224016]
Maria Eagle: Bonus payments for senior LSC staff (Executive Directors and directors) are determined by the achievement of shared and individual objectives which are linked to the LSC's corporate priorities as set out in its corporate/strategic plans. This approach means that bonus payments are made only when a corporate target or priority is achieved. The LSC's performance against its targets is reported on its annual reports, (available at www.legalservices.gov.uk).
For staff below director level, the LSC operates a performance related non-consolidated bonus system. Non-consolidated bonuses are usually used to target one-off in-year contributions that are particularly significant but unlikely to be repeated and are therefore not something that the LSC would pay for year on year.
Any bonuses paid to staff at the LSC involved with setting up community legal advice centres and community legal advice networks would have been paid in accordance with the criteria set out above.
National Offender Management Information System: Expenditure
Mr. Garnier: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice how much his Department and its predecessors spent on the procurement, development and commissioning of the IT system, C-NOMIS, in each of the financial years 2004-05, 2005-06, 2006-07 and 2007-08. [224011]
Mr. Hanson: The expenditure on C-NOMIS was £56 million in 2005-06 (including a small proportion incurred in earlier years), £69 million in 2006-07 and £52 million in 2007-08.
Until December 2007, the active element of the NOMIS Programme was C-NOMIS. From January 2008, following a strategic review, C-NOMIS became Prison NOMIS, one of the projects in the revised NOMIS Programme.
National Offender Management Service: Buildings
Mr. Garnier: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice how much his Department has spent on the development of the National Offender Management Service’s Headquarters to date. [224012]
Mr. Hanson: As at the end of July 2008, a total of £699,000 had been spent on the development of the National Offender Management Service headquarters. This is not additional expenditure but a re-allocation of existing resources to this very important programme of work. £232,000 relates to permanent staff which have been seconded to the programme in either project management or subject matter expert roles, but their substantive roles have not been filled. £467,000 covers the use of specialist IT and consultancy support, predominantly using resources from the agency IT provider.
The first phase of the programme covers the fundamental merger type aspects of transferring staff into the Headquarters, Areas and Regions of the NOMS agency and the associated issues around their terms and conditions, accommodation needs, IT requirements and the necessary transfer of data from Home Office to NOMS. The programme then consists mainly of an organisation design phase where the structures will be designed to be fit-for-purpose to meet the financial and operational challenges to March 2011.
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