In brief: An audit of Jersey’s Probation and After-Care Service has found that a joint IT procurement with Guernsey selected a preferred supplier whose accounts showed just £3 in assets. The deal collapsed after the firm’s directors admitted they could not secure funding, and the service is still running a case management system first introduced in 2004. The audit also flagged a growing backlog in community service hours and repeated shortfalls in procurement standards.
A £3 Company Gets to the Finish Line
If you were designing a procurement process to inspire public confidence, selecting a company with £3 in assets as your preferred supplier would not be the obvious starting point. Yet that is precisely what happened, according to a report published by Jersey’s Comptroller and Auditor General on the island’s Probation and After-Care Service.
Bailiwick Express reports that the joint procurement exercise, run between Jersey and Guernsey to find a new probation IT system, cost around £43,000 before it ended without a contract being signed. The firm in question was selected at the end of 2023. Its accounts for the year to February 2024 showed £3 in assets. The procurement lead did ask for proof of funding before any contract was signed, which is something, but the Comptroller and Auditor General, Lynn Pamment, was not exactly effusive in her praise of the process. “I am surprised that a new company with no meaningful assets was able to satisfy the due diligence requirements and get to the latter stages of the procurement process,” she said.
Both Jersey and Guernsey probation services formally ended the process in March 2025 after the company’s directors reported difficulty raising the money needed to proceed. Some of the work paid for during the failed exercise has since been used in a second procurement, which has now identified a new preferred supplier.
A System From 2004 and the Problems It Causes
The urgency of finding a replacement is not in doubt. Jersey’s Probation Service is still using a case management system first introduced in 2004, according to the report. The business case for replacing it cited delays in sharing public protection and safeguarding data with partner agencies, particularly around work linked to violence against women and girls. The report noted that “the current case management system has limitations which result in inefficiencies, data quality issues and incompatibility with the prison system.” A probation service that cannot easily talk to the prison next door is, to put it gently, a suboptimal arrangement.
Beyond the IT failures, the audit found that the procurement and project management fell short of the requirements of Jersey’s Public Finances Manual. There was no record of a formal recommendation to award the contract after bids were assessed, and early progress was neither recorded nor monitored through the government’s approved system. These are not minor administrative oversights; they are the kind of gaps that make it very difficult to hold anyone accountable when things go wrong.
Community Service Backlog and Budget Underspends
The audit also raised concerns about community service delivery. Courts ordered 21,039 hours of community service in 2025, but only 15,180 hours were actually worked, equivalent to 72% of the hours ordered that year. That is a notable drop from 94% in 2024. The Comptroller and Auditor General has called for a plan to clear the backlog.
On the financial side, the service underspent by £441,000 in 2025, its seventh consecutive year under budget. It expects another underspend in 2026, with posts funded to supervise offenders after their release from prison remaining vacant because mandatory supervision has yet to be introduced. Posts sitting empty while offenders go unsupervised is not a combination that should sit comfortably with anyone responsible for public safety.
Source: Bailiwick Express
