Custom HMCTS video platform bought as part of £280m digitisation project used less than Zoom, say judges

More judges prefer using Microsoft Teams for remote court hearings than a made-to-order video platform bought as part of a £1.2bn Ministry of Justice digitisation initiative, an internal survey has revealed. As government bans on leaving one’s home for all but the most vital reasons bit into the nation’s economy last year, …

[Pascal Monett]

"no central record was kept of [,,] who had heard cases remotely between 19 03 2020 and 31 07 2020"

I would say that that is unbelievable, but this is UK Gov IT, so yeah, par for the course.

[Roland6]

Re: "no central record was kept of [,,] who had heard cases remotely..."

The implication of this is that the official court record is either incomplete or not held in a way that facilitates query.

[Eclectic Man]

Justice must be seen to be done

On the basis that in a democracy justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done*, how is that achieved over web video applications? I realise that some tribunals etc. are closed (in that the public are not allowed in to protect the privacy of children or vulnerable adults) but if online judicial hearings are to continue they are going to have to consider this fairly urgently.

I also wonder at the security of the Zoom calls after Boris's little 'mishap' early in the pandemic.

*and, on occasion, must be seen to be believed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Justice must be seen to be done

Ah - security. The standard answer to the question' Why can't i use this widely utilised industry standard software that JFW - instead of the weird bespoke app that no one has heard of, can't be installed on any normal device, probably doesn't support the latest flavour of Windows/Android/IOS?'

Extra marks for the app that can't be loaded from an official app store, so means you have to switch off some default protections to install it.

[karlkarl]

Re: Justice must be seen to be done

"Extra marks for the app that can't be loaded from an official app store"

Usually vendors make that very hard to install software from an official app store (official and internal to your company right?). Instead they always want you to use their consumer app store like Apple's AppStore or Microsoft WinStore which is obviously an absolute no-go for internally deployed software.

So an .msi file on Windows, a .deb and .rpm for Linux. Frankly any other device is probably inappropriate for this kind of work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Justice must be seen to be done

Companies can offer a tailored app store on Windows, Android and Apple IOS. (maybe Mac App Store too?)

My very much locked down work PC and phone (Apple) only offers a very small selection of %company% approved (and developed) apps for download.

[Warm Braw]

Re: Justice must be seen to be done

Civil proceedings are usually closed as the only interested parties are the litigants themselves. After a cautious start, the technology seems to have been adopted enthusiastically. Particularly as it means as the cases can proceed and the lawyers get paid.

Criminal law is a different matter and the already-long waiting list for trials has become even lengthier. Additional Nightingale Courts have been provided to partly compensate for the lack of space in most traditional courts for social distancing, but the provision for public access has been somewhat perfunctory although it is in theory permitted. In some cases video conferencing has been used to allow lawyers, defendants and juries to be in physically separate spaces in the same building whilst still allowing the proceedings to be observed.

[Fr. Ted Crilly]

CVP...

CVP...

From inside, the problems seem mostly to be the outside looking in, certainly it does not seem to suffer the afternoon blues like Teams does.

The Court side interface is clunky and has an annoying habit of having a nap and becoming unresponsive mid session.

Oh and i nearly forgot the pathetic and near inability to filter out howl-round feedback, how did i nearly forget that!

Still, Teams and Zoom are more familiar to general users, perhaps that very familiarity is skewing the responses...

Not that i'm defending CVP

[Missing Semicolon]

jitsi

Why didn't they just download that and create a Courts-only server?

[Rol]

Re: jitsi

I didn't send my children to public school, for them to have to work hard for a living.

It's expected that opportunities like this to gouge money out of government coffers come along in sufficient quantities to help maintain the socio-economic balance that we have come to expect in this country.

Just what kind of diplomatic skills do you expect to get from a hard working, nose to the grindstone, honest, upstanding citizen...yeah exactly. Without opportunity, the civil service would have zero entrepreneurial skills to call upon in our time of need.

When the going gets tough, you want Arthur Daly on your team, not Atticus Finch.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: jitsi

When the going gets tough, you want Arthur Daly on your team, not Atticus Finch. Lol - No, you really really don't. That's basically how you end up job lots of Betamax surgical PPI that your mate bought from this bloke he met down the dogs.

[Fr. Ted Crilly]

Re: jitsi

yes, we have wondered that too in the office, considerations about that are about42 pay grades above those of us who have to use it... :-|

[EnviableOne]

simple solution

use COTS software for the meeting with people participating (lawyers, judges, parties involved, witnesses, etc.) invited

Stream the output (Gallery view / Slideshare) as a webinar available to interested parties, with code and identification via a webinar platform

Pretty sure you can do this with some of the platforms currently available, if not I'm sure any of the big boys will link their conferencing to their webinar solution for an appropriate pork barrel.