Why Keir Starmer’s Digital Transformation Matters Today

In a fascinating exploration of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s time as head of the Crown Prosecution Service, his biography reveals impressive managerial skills and empathetic decision-making. Below is a LinkedIn post I shared, highlighting some pivotal moments from the book.

Sir Keir Starmer said his “transformation from paper to digital is one of the defining moments in the history of the criminal justice system”. It’s worth reading his full 2013 interview in Civil Service World https://lnkd.in/ee7wj2gt

As a geek, it won’t surprise you that I picked up on this mention of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s time as head of the Crown Prosecution Service. The biography’s chapters on his managerial skills are impressive to read. First, he is a good explainer – why is digitisation important?

“‘I wanted fewer prosecutions abandoned due to lost paperwork – which happened too often – or because we had run out of time,’ he says. ‘The consequences of such reforms were far from boring to the family of a child that had been injured by a drunk driver or an elderly victim of burglary. Losing the paperwork for their case or failing to deal with it properly meant it would be harder for them to get over what had happened; it was like rubbing salt in a wound.’”

Second, he focuses on details, from the front-lines, In his first year:

“He visited all forty-two regional divisions, personally met about a third of his staff and made a point of asking senior managers to leave the room so that other members of staff would get the chance to speak. ‘Many of the best ideas came from them because they understood the systems we used better than anyone and knew the “work-arounds” that could make it more efficient,’ he says.”

He is also quite empathetic, especially with parents. He declined to prosecute the parents of a quadriplegic who asked to go to Dignitas in Switzerland. “‘I thought about what that must have been like for them and wondered what I would have done if that had been our son,’”

He met with the parents of Jane Clough, a nurse brutally murdered by an ex-partner the police had released despite her reporting his rape. CPS sent him to prison for the murder but declined to charge him for rape. “It made no sense at all to Jane’s parents to be told the rape charges would ‘lie on the file’… Starmer promised to help, even though it meant disturbing the equilibrium within the CPS. ‘The first instinct of an organisation when it’s challenged in this way is often to defend what it’s done so far,’ he says. ‘But this was one of the occasions when something wrong needed to be put right.’”

Every year, on his daughter’s birthday, Starmer sends the Cloughs a message to say he’s thinking of them.

These and other stories are all from Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s biography. I don’t agree with everything he has said and done, but reading the book helped me understand his thinking and difficulties. It is very difficult to be in politics let alone run a country.

I hope others will find these extracts useful as well and I do recommend the book by Tom Baldwin.

https://lnkd.in/eBPnTU7t

You can see the actual LinkedIn post here.