UK's Home Office denies plans to scrap probation system

The UK's Home Office has denied that its Probation Service IT system is a fiasco or that it plans to scrap a key part of it.

The statement follows a report in last week's Financial Times that the Home Office intended to scrap the Probation Service's Case Record and Management System (CRAMS), which is designed to keep tabs on former prisoners.

But a Home Office spokesperson blamed any difficulties with the system on "challenges to working practices" to which "The Probation Service has had to adapt."

He continued: "We are trying to modernise [CRAMS], but it is not a failure. It is a success. It has delivered capability to the Probation Services to work together so they can share information about offenders and provide information to other criminal service authorities like police courts - things not available to the Probation Service previously."

"CRAMS is now in daily use by 35 out of the 43 Probation Services. How we upgrade to a new version will be looked at next year. We will update the system. CRAMS will evolve and will take into account changes in the Probation Service and changes in IT. There is no abandonment," he claimed.

But he added that the Home Office had not yet decided on whether any rewriting of the system would be put out to tender. "We have not decided on a tendering process. At some point next year we will look at the future of how to evolve CRAMS," he said.

The Home Office selected Bull Information Systems in the early 1990s to provide a common infrastructure, dubbed NPSISS, to link the Probation Service's 54 national offices together, but Bull claimed that CRAMS represented only 12 per cent of the overall NPSISS contract.

The Home Office spokesperson agreed: "Bull has a much wider £50 million contract with us than just CRAMS, which is worth about twelve per cent. It is a small software element. We still have two years left with Bull."

Stephen Meyler, Bull's marketing director, said: "The old version of CRAMS was not easy, but not as difficult as has been made out. Version 4 was enhanced to improve navigation and search capabilities, which we implemented in August 1998."

He added: "People are going to have to change how they do things and this causes them to be concerned. CRAMS facilitates joined up government, but there's always room for improvement."