Recommendation 25

HM Government Accepted

35. The Government agrees with the Committee that effective oversight and transparency of criminal justice bodies’ delivery of victims’ entitlements is crucial to securing confidence 14 Pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Victims Bill: Government Response in the system. We have, therefore, broken this recommendation into its various parts to ensure each aspect raised received the necessary consideration for Clause 5. Those parts are: i) Consulting the Victims’ Commissioner and local victims’ groups on the data collection requirement. ii) Standardising the data to allow comparison across police areas. iii) Placing a duty on PCCs to publish the data in a form that can be disaggregated by crime type and protected characteristic, and share it with the Victims’ Commissioner and inspectorates. iv) Ensuring the necessary safeguards within the data collection and sharing to ensure victims’ and survivors’ confidentiality is not compromised or jeopardise their ability to consent to access services and support. 36. We agree that the Victims’ Commissioner’s and local victims’ groups’ views are valuable in developing the data collection required to monitor agency’s compliance with the Victims’ Code. We have and will continue to engage closely with these stakeholders as we progress with this work. The Bill currently states that the Secretary of State must consult such persons as they consider appropriate, which allows the flexibility to consult based on the specifics of the data being collected. As such, we do not consider this change to be necessary. 37. As set out in Clause 5(3) of the draft Bill, the relevant criminal justice bodies are placed under a duty to collect data and keep their Code compliance under review with regulations setting out what data should be collected and shared. This will ensure consistency across England and Wales, building a national picture of delivery of the Victims’ Code across the criminal justice system, but also generate insights into disparities and enable the sharing of best practices to help local criminal justice agencies drive improvement. Therefore, we accept this recommendation. 38. The Government recognises the value in disaggregating data by crime type and protected characteristic and will explore this as we develop the minimum dataset required for collection to monitor compliance, which will seek to be both proportionate and sensitive to the challenges that come with collecting individual-level information, including the potential administrative costs. Additionally, we intend for the data collected to be published where feasible, encouraging cooperation and transparency. We will consider the most appropriate route for publication and will explore the best way to share data with the Victims’ Commissioner and the inspectorates to utilise their valuable insights. We will, therefore, consider this recommendation further as we explore options for publication. 39. We recognise the importance of having adequate protections in place when collecting and handling data. We thank the Committee for raising these points and will consider them as we develop the data collection requirements. Pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Victims Bill: Government Response 15