Helping people on low incomes with the cost of visiting family in prison
Helping people on low incomes with the cost of visiting family in prison
The new Help with Prison Visits digital service, built by HMPPS Digital Studio (part of MOJ Digital & Technology) and Kainos, is making it easier for people on low incomes to get help with paying for visits to family and friends in prison. There is also a staff-facing user-interface to process claims faster and more effectively. There are currently around 86,000 people in prison in the UK. Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) is responsible not only for detaining them, but also their welfare and rehabilitation. The Assisted Prison Visits Scheme (APVS) enables people on low incomes to visit loved ones in prison. It's an important service - The MOJ Resettlement Survey 2008 showed that offenders could be 39% less likely to re-offend if they had received family visits whilst in custody.
Previously, the scheme was run as a paper-based postal service that was costly and time consuming for everyone involved. It involved completing and mailing a form, and waiting on receipt of a giro cheque which could be exchanged for cash at a Post Office branch. The case workers worked on a 'production line' system, with applications moving from one person to another to process claims over a period of time. The process could take up to 4 weeks from application to payment. For people on low incomes, a delay in getting paid is a serious problem. HMPPS wanted to enable visitors to make a claim more quickly and easily, in a way that would also be less time consuming for caseworkers to administer. Having identified the opportunity to digitise their service, HMPPS partnered with Kainos and the joint team were tasked with improving the process for both the end user and the department, to deliver on customer satisfaction, accuracy and costs.
- implementing Gov.UK Notify to communicate with claimants,
- prove eligibility of qualifying benefits through an API with DWP built by the Legal Aid Agency
- Reusing MoJ single sign on for case workers
- Verify mileage using Google tools.