2019 Elsie Cropper Award Winner
Benjamin Lavelle, Ministry of Justice
Paper Title: "A New to OR Guide to… automated forecasting of criminal court cases at the Ministry of Justice."
Recruiting a new judge, opening a new courtroom, building a new prison; responding to changes in demand in the criminal justice system can be a lengthy and expensive process. With a responsibility to deliver an efficient and effective justice system that caters for such changes whilst responsibly managing the public purse, the Ministry of Justice has to rely on forecasting and analytical insight to predict future levels of demand on courts and prisons.
Disparate and disconnected data from Britain's nearly 100 crown courts, a range of stakeholders and governance structures and careful quality assurance work can soak up analysts' time. This talk will introduce the conference to the cross-government Reproducible Analytical Pipeline (RAP) project, and demonstrate how the RAP has been extended to provide an automated data-gathering and decision support platform for forecasting criminal court cases in England and Wales, equipping the team with the data and tools to produce deeper insight at a faster pace.
It will cover a number of the challenges of working with large administrative data systems, competing measures of hearing times, case classification and courtroom usage, and maintaining consistency and reproducibility against a shifting data architecture and under keen political scrutiny.