- Costs of the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry have been questioned, with some warning it may rise to £50 million
- But it seems that savings are being made – with an electronic data system costsing less than paper
- The Magnum system, used to manage legal documents, is relatively new software
- Estimated to have already saved the inquiry £500,000 in printing costs
A PIONEERING electronic system to manage legal documents is being used by the inquiry into historical child abuse – potentially saving millions of pounds.
The Independent Jersey Care Inquiry is one of the first government investigations to use Magnum technology, an electronic storage system which enables thousands of pages of evidence to be saved and managed without the need for physical copies.
The system has proved so successful that a team from the UK’s inquiry into child sexual abuse, which will begin later this year, recently visited the Island to view and test the technology.
It is estimated that the system could save millions of pounds for the inquiry in printing costs and work time.
The technology, which has been developed by British company Opus 2 International, enables documentation to be quickly cross-referenced and has allowed the inquiry to avoid a large amount of paper waste.
In a report ahead of a States debate into providing additional funding for the inquiry, Chief Minister Ian Gorst revealed that the cost of the Magnum technology had been just over £300,000, while it has been estimated that the printing costs would have been in excess of £800,000 so far.
So far, the inquiry has heard evidence from over 200 witnesses with more than 300,000 pages of documents are currently being stored on the Magnum system. It is thought that providing hard copies would have meant that each page would have to have been printed 16 times for the members of the panel, inquiry counsels and legal team.
A spokesman for the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry said: ‘The inquiry is dealing with events dating back to the last world war. As such there is a vast amount of documentation to gather, categorise and store.
‘The panel recognised early on that it needed an efficient and secure system to help with this – one flexible enough to allow relevant documents to be retrieved quickly as and when needed.
‘The inquiry tested Magnum’s capacity to meet this unique set of requirements. With work going on in Jersey as well as the mainland, we were mindful of the need to reduce costs and also of the environmental impact of manually handling hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence.’
The inquiry is currently on a break from public hearings to prepare for its second phase, which will involve hearing evidence from members of staff at Jersey care homes, including some alleged abusers. Hearings are due to be held for three days from Tuesday before the inquiry resumes fully next month.
