Chamber and committees

The various review strands are continuing to make progress. The review work will be proportionate and will be led by what is being found in the initial phases.

Review of Open Cases

Users of the system were asked to review their caseload of open cases, to look at prevalence of the risk scoring/level issue or the alcohol/drugs scoring issue. The Scottish Government have now completed that user led review of the nearly 12,000 cases that social work recognise as their open caseload on the system. Based on the responses by social work practitioners, they did not identify any immediate public protection risks related to these two scoring issues. The open cases review did substantiate that there are cases where the risk scoring levels have not matched. All the cases with the risk scoring error are also being reviewed by the Risk Management Authority (the RMA) as part of their determination of whether there was any material impact on the management of the case as a result of the scoring error.

The open cases review was also an opportunity for social work to identify any wider prevalence of the errors or any new system issues in respect of system functionality. There were not any new errors related to scoring identified through this route.

The open cases review identified some practice issues, around cases not being timeously closed on the system. Therefore, we are undertaking a further phase of this exercise to ensure that closed cases or cases in the process of being closed are indeed closed off on the system, and returns are completed for us on those. That work is likely to conclude in mid-August. Once that phase of work has been completed we will be able to provide a final picture of cases where either the risk scoring or the drugs/alcohol scoring issue (or both) were present. Those details will be cross checked against the RMA lists of affected cases, to consider if these need to be added into the RMA review of any material impact on the management of the case. Our expectation at the moment is that the open case review findings will largely tally with the RMA lists, but we cannot confirm that until the open case review process fully concludes for those cases needing closed off on the system.

The open cases review also provided an opportunity for social work to check and if necessary amend any entries that were not correct on the system. This work on amending individual cases was a key part of the work needed before the system can be brought back into operation. In the meantime, users of the system continue to make use of the paper based version of the process where LS/CMI is needed.

RMA led review work

The group continues to meet and will report on all phases. This will include recommendations and an action plan, to be communicated to Ministers and the Justice Committee. It is anticipated an update on the first phases of the review will be provided in August 2022 with all work now scheduled for completion by the end of October 2022. These timescales will be reviewed at each stage.

Phase 1

As previously reported to the Justice Committee by letter on 12 May 2022, phase one of the review is complete, which significantly reduced the number of cases that required further review.

Phase 2

Phase two commenced on 4 May 2022 and has involved Social Work, Scottish Prison Service, Parole Board for Scotland and MAPPA coordinators considering the material impact of how cases were handled. The timescale for this review was extended to allow for robust validation to be undertaken by agencies. There has been substantial collaboration by partners in order to provide returns and the RMA will be reviewing these in order that the LS/CMI review group can consider the outcome of the first two phases by August 2022. At this point the review group has agreed to review its terms of reference and provide interim findings.

Phase 3

The RMA, Care Inspectorate and HMIPS continue to develop the methodology and focus of the external validation which will provide assurance on each stage of the review. Subject to the outcome of phase two, this work is scheduled to commence in August 2022 and the review is expected to conclude in October 2022.

LS/CMI IT system

The Scottish Government appointed a third party provider to work alongside the managed service provider for the LS/CMI system. This was for the purpose of conducting an end-to-end review of the LS/CMI system prior to any re-introduction for use. The Discovery phase of that work is now largely complete, with areas of dysfunction within the system identified that we believe have led to the known scoring issues. This process has resulted in the production of a detailed functional specification of the system, along with updated user guides. It is likely that going forward, resuming use of the system will require some technical fixes, as well as some training and practice improvements. What will follow is a stage of triaging and remediation, to prioritise what will be done and applying the fixes.

The Scottish Government have also been in the process of tendering for a managed service provider for this system. This process pre-dated the discovery of the IT errors, and it was delayed as a result of the errors being found. Following announcement of the outcome of that process, it is likely that any triaging and remediation of the system will be conducted under the new contractual period, which, on current planning would likely begin in August.

While the review work has taken longer than originally envisaged, it is being conducted thoroughly, and with positive engagement from justice partners as these review demands are being managed on top of existing workloads.