The Ministry of Justice has made limited progress on its Female
Offender Strategy to improve outcomes for women in the criminal
justice system because it has not prioritised investment in this
work, according to a report from the National Audit Office (NAO).
Women in the justice system have distinct needs and worse
outcomes than men. They are more likely than men to have specific
vulnerabilities that drive their offending, including experiences
of trauma and abuse, and they also pose less of a serious risk to
the public.1 In 2018, the Ministry of Justice (the
Ministry) published the Female Offender Strategy (the strategy)
to reduce the number of women entering the criminal justice
system, and increase the proportion of women offender managed in
the community. The strategy contained over 50 commitments which
ranged from publishing guidance for police working with
vulnerable women, to creating residential women's centres (RWCs)
as an alternative to prison.
The female offender programme (the programme) was established to
oversee the strategy, but the Ministry decided against setting
targets for the programme's main objectives - such as how many
women it expected to divert from the criminal justice system or
give community sentences - because they would depend on actions
from independent bodies, including the judiciary. Without clearly
setting out the scale of its ambitions, the Ministry could not
estimate what funding would be required to deliver the programme,
or what savings the programme might achieve.
The Ministry allocated limited funding and resources to the
programme because it prioritised other strategic aims, including
dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. The only funding it initially
made available was £5.1 million in 2018-20 for supporting women's
services in the community. Across the 2020 and 2021 single year
Spending Reviews, the Ministry allocated to the programme just
£13.1 million of the minimum £40 million that the programme team
initially estimated it would need for certain aspects of the
programme. The programme team focused funding on developing
community options for women, in part because it was the most
urgent need.
Despite its focus on community options specifically for women,
the Ministry has made limited progress. Funding to providers for
women's services was restricted to short-term grants of less than
a year because of the constraints of the government's one-year
Spending Reviews. Providers told the NAO that this made it
difficult to plan ahead and sustain services. The Ministry's
plans to pilot five residential women's centres have also been
considerably delayed because of difficulties finding a site for
its first centre in Wales, and resource issues. Only £500,000 of
an expected £3.5 million will be spent on these centres in
2021-22.
The Ministry does not have a good understanding of whether it is
making progress towards the strategy's wider aims. Noperformance
measures were set for the strategy, which means the Ministry
cannot identify if trends in the data on women in the criminal
justice system align with its objectives. As a result, the
Ministry's ability to make joined-up decisions has been limited.
Its plans to create an additional 500 prison places for women,
for example, did not consider any likely change in demand that
might come from more women being managed in the community.
The women's prison population has decreased, but the NAO did not
find evidence that this was caused by the system beginning to
work as the strategy intends. The female prison population
decreased by 16% between June 2018 and September 2021. Most (81%)
of the decline occurred between March and December 2020; data
suggests this was probably because of the impacts of the COVID-19
pandemic, including fewer opportunities for crime and a
significant reduction in court activity. The remaining 19% of the
decrease happened outside this period, and did not coincide with
decreases in arrests, or increased use of community options - as
set out in the strategy's aims.
The NAO recommends that the Ministry puts in place specific goals
for the strategy's main objectives, and makes a full assessment
of the funding required to meet its aims. It should also set out
how it will measure progress and evaluate the success of the
programme.
, the head of the NAO said:
"The Ministry of Justice has not made the Female Offender
Strategy a priority. The strategy is intended to improve outcomes
for women, but a lack of clear goals makes it hard to evaluate
progress. Even in the areas where it focused attention, such as
developing community options for women, delivery has been
disappointing.
"The Ministry of Justice must clarify its aspirations and
priorities for women, and match these to clear actions and
funding, to improve how the criminal justice system treats
women."
- ENDS -
Notes for Editors
- In 2007, the government commissioned the Corston Report,
following the deaths of six women at Styal prison within a year.
The report stressed that the underlying reasons why men and women
offend and their response to interventions and rehabilitation
differed.
