Book a Secure Move

Background

Since 1994, the Prisoner Escort and Custody Services (PECS) contract has outsourced the secure transport of prisoners across England & Wales including: adults; children and young people to and from Police Stations; Courts; Prisons; Secure Training Centres (STCs); and Secure Children’s Schools (SCHs). On average 622,000 moves occur over any given year across the country, covering around 10.5 million miles of distance.

I was hired as Senior Product Manager to lead development of a digital service (Book a secure move) that would support the generation four contract.

The generation four contract would also introduce an updated fleet of escort vehicles with enhanced safety and security features, providing real-time data on the location of detainees and prisoners who are being moved to Book a secure move.

These changes would improve the efficiency of the PECS service as well as overall safety, security and decency for prisoners. The government would also realise significant benefits during the 10-year term of the contracts such as reducing the number of delays at court, stopping mixed transportation of adult and youths and minimising the time a prisoner spends in a court cell or prison van.

I joined the programme team early in the bid phase and was tasked with outlining/scoring digital requirements for potential transport suppliers.

Approach

The bid phase enabled me to rapidly grow my understanding of PECS service, meet a wide range of users/stakeholders working with the programme, conduct initial research and quickly validate initial concepts for the service.

Suppliers had concerns around shaping their digital proposals, integration was a key concern as suppliers had a requirement to accept digital move requests and risk assessments. Previous contracts had relied on individual sites sending spreadsheets to the transport supplier with all other forms being paper based and provided at the point of pickup. Reporting as a result was restricted, the new contract provided an opportunity to deliver real-time reporting which would improve prisoner safety and identify operational efficiencies sooner.

We published a high level roadmap and draft API specification for the service, this would provide timelines for releases alongside collections/ resources that would support each release.

We adopted dual track agile which enabled us to learn and iterate quickly. The service was complex covering multiple business areas:

Component	Book a secure move benefits
Move requests	Users can request moves and supply initial risk assessments via a single service as opposed to sending spreadsheets over email
Population Management	Provide an overview of the current and projected prison population and enable single and bulk transfer requests between prisons supported by prisoner profile search
Complex risk & medical assessments	Each move required detailed assessments, these could be partially pre-filled from previous forms and other systems saving significant time over completing paper forms
Handover	Final checks and confirmation for transfer of care
Events	Suppliers provide notifications of events that occur whilst a move is underways
Location	Suppliers provide GPS locations for vehicles, this both improves safety but also helps sending/receiving locations better plan resources
Billing & compliance data	Provide a single source of truth for move requests against authenticated HMPPS users. This would greatly reduce assurance workload (approx 5,000 manually checked records month) and deliver automated costing of moves

The programme and digital team worked closely together to identify key stakeholders and ensure appropriate governance was in place.

Squads formed to focus on specific areas of the service alongside business change to ensure a shared understanding and develop relationships with stakeholders. We started with a limited number of sites initially who were willing to participate in research and test Alpha & Beta versions of the service.

Rollout

The service roll out was complex with:

over 25k users across 772 sites (prisons/police custody/youth estate/courts)
multiple cross government stakeholders at site, regional & national level
complex legislation, policies and overlapping processes
internal operational, assurance and finance teams rollout
operational concerns required constant flexibility

Our initial focus was on move requests from police custody, we found that as adoption increased in the business so did confidence. Any issues identified were quickly addressed, this was a key factor in growing confidence. A number of sites primarily used the service in the early hours of the morning which resulted in feedback at all hours but also helped shape an appropriate post live support model.

Suppliers were developing their services in parallel with integration assurance occurring in stages normally in the Limited Beta phase. We provided sites with the ability to generate email based move request summaries to ensure continuity of the service where integration assurance had not been finalised. Once suppliers were assured on the simple use cases we introduced more complex assurance.

Data

We identified key rollout metrics:

percentage of moves requested on the service vs requested via email/phone for each site
number of risk assessments started online vs completed online vs completed on paper for each site.

Whilst simple these became good success indicators, numbers would vary by site and would be a good indicator that additional support or research was required.

A large number of reports were developed over time to support compliance reporting providing valuable insights that previously were not available or required substantial manual effort to produce.

Outcome

Book a secure move was rolled out to all 772 sites in under 15 months overcoming numerous challenges, including Covid. At the time of rollout the service achieved a 95% user satisfaction rating.

Suppliers have fully integrated with the service, with real time data providing valuable insights and transforming reporting, compliance and billing. Most importantly the service has enabled improved safety, security and decency for prisoners through improved sharing of relevant risk information.

The work was awarded `Collaboration of the Year` and `Innovation of the Year` awards by MOJ Project Delivery function in 2021.

"Thank you for the excellent work, perseverance and superhuman effort seen across the teams to deliver the significant solutions and services which have been provided on behalf of the PECS Generation 4 Programme. The systems, engagement, supporting services and continued improvements that have been delivered to colleagues across the justice estate have proven to be not only well received, but also facilitating significant positive change in this environment."
Robert Urquhart - Senior Business Change Lead, MOJ