PAC: ‘Spend to save’ on women in the criminal justice system
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In a report today the Public Accounts Committee says “it is clear
to us” that implementing the 2018 Female Offender Strategy “has
been a relatively low priority for the Ministry of Justice (MoJ)
and was so even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic” The aims of the
strategy are widely supported but “actual progress delivering it
has been disappointing”: despite an emphasis on expanding community
services for women to reduce the need for courts and prisons,
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In a report today the Public Accounts Committee says “it is clear to us” that implementing the 2018 Female Offender Strategy “has been a relatively low priority for the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and was so even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic” The aims of the strategy are widely supported but “actual progress delivering it has been disappointing”: despite an emphasis on expanding community services for women to reduce the need for courts and prisons, Government spent just £9.5 million on community services for women over four years compared to a commitment to spend £200 million on 500 additional prison places for women. MoJ’s recent funding settlement included £550 million over the next three years to reduce reoffending by men and women: the Committee says “this money provides the MoJ with a clear opportunity to ‘spend to save’ in community services for women”. The strategy is not underpinned by the goals or metrics that would allow MoJ to be held to account on the strategy or demonstrate its value. Successful implementation of the strategy relies on the police, courts, probation, local authorities, voluntary organisations and the health service working together to address the underlying causes of women’s offending but the Committee says it is only in a few areas where local leadership, for example from police and crime commissioners, has led to effective co-operation between organisations to make it work. Dame Meg Hillier MP, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: “Once again we see a situation where government is unwilling or unable to prioritise the investment needed to reduce the ruinous financial, social and human costs of our creaking criminal justice system. “Imprisoning a vulnerable woman who perhaps has children - who may then also fall between the cracks - is the very picture of the cost-shunting that became the hallmark of our criminal justice system long before the massive new challenges of the pandemic. The result of this gap between rhetoric and reality is an unacceptable human and economic toll. “Government must finally put the money where its mouth is on criminal offending and ‘spend to save’ for the benefit to all society, families and individuals.”
PAC report conclusions and recommendations 1 The 2018 Female Offender Strategy was widely welcomed but progress since then has been limited and it is unclear how much of the additional money allocated to the Ministry will be spent on services for women. The Ministry set up a programme to oversee implementation of the wide range of commitments in the strategy, but it did not prioritise investment in it even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Progress in improving community options or conditions in custody for women has therefore been limited. The Ministry has several major programmes underway, however women make up 4% of the prison population and 9% of those on probation so there is a risk they may not be a priority in future. The Ministry’s funding settlement at the Autumn Budget and Spending Review 2021 included £550 million (for 2022-23 to 2024-25) to reduce reoffending. The Ministry has not yet set out how much of this funding it will allocate to its female offender programme. Recommendation: The Ministry should publish how much of its resource and capital spending it has allocated to work on improving outcomes for women as soon as it has completed its budget allocations for 2022-23. It should include details of funding for this work for future years where available, and how it will filter down to funding community services. 2 Despite its emphasis on community provision in its strategy, the Ministry has not yet quantified how much funding is required or invested heavily in community services for women. The Ministry has declined to set targets for its female offender programme. It says that doing so would be inappropriate as achieving its outcomes depends on decisions by independent bodies such as the judiciary. However, without setting out its own expectations of what can be achieved, the Ministry cannot assess how much it should spend on community services or ultimately how much can be saved from reductions in the numbers of women coming before the courts and being sent to prison. The Ministry spent £9.5 million between 2018-19 and 2021-22 on providing services in the community for women in, or at risk of being in contact with, the criminal justice system (CJS). This contrasts with the £200 million the Ministry has committed to spend on creating 500 additional prison places for women that it projects it will need due to increased police numbers. When it made this projection, the Ministry did not build in any expected reduction in numbers of women in court or being sent to prison as a result of improved community services. Recommendation: The Ministry should assess the level of funding required in the community. To do this, it should estimate and publish:
Effective implementation of the strategy has been undermined by insufficient joined-up working. Working across government is always challenging and the Ministry is reliant on many other bodies for the female offender programme to be successful. For example, the NHS, several government departments, local authorities and the voluntary sector have key roles in providing treatment for mental health problems and addiction, support to escape domestic violence, housing advice, children’s services and help finding employment. Such bodies need to work together to provide clear routes to the support individual women need to turn their lives around. The Ministry has taken a first step to build co-operation between government departments by negotiating a concordat with them, although this took two years longer than it had promised. There are good examples of bodies working together locally but several of these started doing so before the female offender programme. The Ministry says it recognises the importance of joined-up working locally, which it calls the ‘whole-system approach’, but it has not committed nearly enough to bringing this about. In fact, it has not spent anything on helping new areas to set up these types of approaches since some it provided some seed funding for 2017-19. Recommendation: The Ministry should set out how it plans to influence more joined-up working. It should write to the Committee alongside its Treasury Minute response with an assessment of any barriers to local areas implementing ‘whole system approaches’ and how it plans to work with other government departments and organisations to address these barriers. 3 The Ministry is taking some steps to address the needs of ethnic minorities in the CJS, but it recognises that it has not yet done enough to achieve equality of outcomes for ethnic minority women. The Ministry’s Female Offender Strategy included actions to tackle the overrepresentation of, and unique challenges facing, black and other ethnic minority women in the CJS but progress has been slow, and the Ministry acknowledges that it needs to do better. The Ministry accepts that it can learn from others and it is committed to addressing the concerns raised in a recent publication by providers of specialist services for ethnic minority women in the CJS. The Ministry recognises that there is also an issue in making sure that it funds services specifically for ethnic minority women. The small charities that work in this field find it difficult to compete with larger organisations, which can have whole teams dedicated to developing bids for grants and contracts. The Ministry has provided some funding to help smaller organisations prepare bids. Recommendation: The Ministry should work with specialist providers and experts to establish a set of actions it needs to take to deliver equality of outcomes for ethnic minority women. This should include its arrangements for supporting smaller specialist organisations that support them. It should publish the set of actions with a timetable so that Parliament, stakeholders and others can hold it to account. It should confirm in its response to this report a planned timescale for publishing this action plan.
It is not clear how Parliament, the public and other stakeholders can hold the Ministry to account for delivery of the strategy’s commitments. The Ministry’s decision not to set targets affects not only its ability to make good funding decisions, (see conclusion 2 above), but also makes it difficult to hold the Ministry to account. This is compounded by the way the Ministry implemented the strategy. It did not set out clearly how the female offender programme’s progress could be measured. Collecting data, or metrics as the Ministry refers to them, is not sufficient unless it is clear how they relate to what the Ministry intends to achieve. The Ministry considered that the programme required light governance because of the limited funding available and its objective to influence others. This limited stakeholders’ visibility of the programme’s progress. The Ministry claims that it now has a list of 66 commitments from the strategy with an assessment of how much progress has been made on each. It also said that it is rearranging how it manages and oversees implementation of the strategy. One of the changes is that specialist providers of women’s services will no longer be members of the minister-led board, which may reduce public scrutiny. Recommendation: The Ministry must clarify what it aims to deliver via the strategy and its progress to date. It should:
4 The Ministry does not yet know the effectiveness of its interventions, or whether it is achieving its aims. This limits its ability to identify and share best practice and to understand where it needs to invest to achieve its aims. It is now almost four years since the Ministry published its Female Offender Strategy and it still does not have a plan for how it will monitor and evaluate the work it is doing to achieve its aims. The Ministry says it now recognises the importance of having the data it needs to understand progress towards its aims and measure the value of the work it is doing. But it is disappointing that it is still working on what its performance metrics will look like and does not have plans to evaluate all its interventions. It is important that it gets on with this work as it can take years to evaluate criminal justice interventions as it is often essential to track their effects on reoffending. In the shorter term, the Ministry recognises that there is a lot of good practice locally and that it now needs to work out how to share that and scale it up. The first step will be publication of the ‘one-year-on’ review of the concordat, which will include some examples of joined-up work.
Recommendation: The Ministry should publish a monitoring and evaluation plan by September 2022. This should include the following:
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