The Justice website contains a whole host of information and tools for those who work in and around the justice system.
News and policy information from the site was moved over to GOV.UK in April.
The next step will be to move over the ‘specialist’ tools and information for professionals and practitioners, such as lawyers.
This includes everything from training materials for youth offending teams to guidance for coroners.
The aim is to get this on the new site by early 2014.
As we said in our digital strategy, we’ll be using this as an opportunity to rework, rewrite and improve the content wherever possible:
As with the mainstream content, we will not automatically move all specialist content on the justice.gov.uk website to GOV.UK. We will ensure that it is rewritten and repurposed to meet clearly identified user needs and presented in user-friendly formats.
This will be a big challenge given that the content is generally more complex than information for the general public.
However, we know that professional users are often busy and have to find what they need quickly.
Some of the information will also have to be made more accessible for non-professionals, like those who represent themselves in court or at a tribunal.
With things that can’t be rewritten – as with court procedure rules and instructions for prison officers – we may be able to make it easier for users to search and navigate their way through the content.
Developers are starting to redevelop some of the tools on the site, such as the court finder, but there’s still a lot to do.
We’ve met with most of our agencies and arm’s-length bodies to outline our approach, and had some useful initial feedback from outside organisations (for instance at an Administrative Justice Advisory Group meeting).
However, we’d love to know what you think. What guidance or tools do you use on the Justice site? What do you find most useful, and most frustrating? Where can we make improvements?
2 comments
Comment by Greg Callus posted on
The two things for which I primarily rely on the old MoJ website are:
- Civil Procedure Rules and Practice Directions
- Daily Court Lists
It would be great if the free online CPR was hyperlinked, wherever:
(a) it refers to another part of the CRP/PD; or
(b) to a particular Act or Regulation (link to legislation.gov.uk; or
(c) to BAILII for particular leading cases; or
(d) to forms/precedents where appropriate.
Ideally, given the growing number of litigants in person, it'd be amazing if the MoJ could just licence the electronic version of The White Book (to include the commentary etc) but this would at least approximate the basics.
It would also be wonderful if you could view, not just tomorrow's cases, but the historic Daily Court Lists (to check the date of a hearing long past, who heard it, etc) and to be able to search that archive by party names or case number.
Ideally, each record would include full case details (such as the HQ number), the citation of the case being appealed (in the case of CA hearings), and links between "Court number" and the map of the court building in question would be amazing too (RCJ at very least is necessary).
Comment by Kushal Sood posted on
Similarly to the comments from Greg Callus, it would be very helpful if emails could be sent to subscribers once Prison Service Instructions and Orders, as well as Probation Instructions come into effect, or expire.