Senior officials at the Ministry of Justice this week denied MPs’ charges of ‘complacency’ and running a ‘dysfunctional organisation’ following an ­auditors’ report criticising the administration of Crown Courts.

At a hearing of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee on Monday, chairman Edward Leigh MP said he found it ‘staggering’ that the Courts Service is still using a 20-year-old computer system.

The committee was taking evidence from Christine Mayer, chief executive of the Courts Service, and Peter Handcock, director general, access to justice, at the MoJ.

Last week, a National Audit Office report into the Administration of the Crown Court revealed that staff have to rekey data into an obsolete IT system at a cost of £300,000 a year.

Leigh told Handcock: ‘Your computer system is pre-Windows, 20 years old. It is a manual updating system. This would not happen anywhere else.’

Handcock replied that although the system, CREST, is old, it is ‘an excellent system and most reliable’. However, he admitted that the software needs to be ‘replatformed’ and that the MoJ has ‘been slow to get that done’.

To charges of being complacent, Handcock responded: ‘I am not complacent about it. It is an effective system and is available 99.7% of the time. We will take something that works well and make it better.’

Asked if she was running ‘a dysfunctional organisation’, Mayer said ‘the Crown Court is a complex landscape’ and that ‘considerable improvement’ needs to be made in levels of staff absence.