About Us
Our history
HM Prison Shared Services is based at the Celtic Springs Business Park in Newport, South Wales and brings together the 3 corporate functions of Finance, HR and Purchasing under one roof.
HMPS went live with Shared Services for Finance and Purchasing at the end of April 2006, followed by HR Services in October 2006 and was formally opened by Sir Peter Gershon on 1st November 2006.
Employing over 1000 staff, with a budget of £60m pa, the state of the art Shared Services is underpinned by the use of modern technologies (Oracle 11i), a rigorous approach to service performance management and the effective deployment of Six Sigma.
The Prison Service had already launched the Phoenix Programme prior to the Gershon report, which recommended increased efficiencies in Government working, especially around the duplication of Corporate Services.
Phoenix was an initiative to introduce new ways of working in Finance, Purchasing and HR to reduce costs while providing consistent, high quality support to the organisation. Pre Phoenix, support services for the 48,000 prison officers and other staff had been provided by a network of devolved Finance and Purchasing staff and a central HR Department.
Consequently, HM Prison Shared Services was designed to bring together and simplify processes within these areas. The project itself was unique among Central Government Shared Services in providing all the services from the same facility.
Our clients
Our main clients since go live in April 2006 have been the 128 Prison Service establishments throughout England and Wales. Her Majesty’s Prison Service serves the public by keeping in custody those committed by the courts. Its duty is to look after them with humanity and help them lead law-abiding and useful lives in custody and after release.
To that end it employs 48,000 staff, is responsible for 80,000 inmates and costs £2.5 billion per year to run.
In May 2007 the Prison Service moved from the Home Office and became part of the new Ministry of Justice (MoJ). Within MoJ it forms part of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), which is both its parent organisation and its main commissioner
A new structure was introduced to NOMS on April 1 2008 as part of reorganisation of the Ministry of Justice. NOMS and the Headquarters and regional structures of HM Prison Service were streamlined into a single organisation responsible for front line delivery running HM Prison Service, overseeing the contracts of privately run prisons, managing probation performance and creating probation trusts.
Already an exemplar Shared Services, we also have a growth plan. The first stage of this growth plan was to establish Home Office Shared Services from the same Newport site servicing 30,000 staff.
This is the first example of inter-departmental Shared Services in Central Government. Home Office Shared Services currently provides Accounts Payable, Employee Expenses and Oracle User Support functions, previously provided from within the Home Office, to the Home Office HQ and the Border and Immigration Agency (BIA).
Success and the future
We are already a multi-service line and multi-customer Shared Services, employing over 1000 staff. High volume Purchasing and Accounts Payable activities have also been brought together into one service line, Purchase to Pay.
By incorporating the best of private and public sector thinking, HMPS Shared Services was runner up in the 2007 European New Shared Services Awards in Prague, despite only being operational for 12 months.
In 2008 we went one better, as we were recognized by IQPC as the winner of the Shared Services Excellence Award in the category of Best New Shared Services Centre.
Later in 2008 the Home Office will upgrade its existing Oracle platform and implement HR Self Service for staff and managers; and the Shared Services will provide a range of HR Services to the organisation as well as additional Finance and Purchasing services.
