Recommendation 6

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: • how it will work with other government departments to evaluate the main strategy commitments and build on the evidence of what works to aid funding decisions; • the specific performance measures it will use to assess progress towards its aims. For example, how women are dealt with at various stages – before 8 Improving outcomes for women in the criminal justice system court proceedings are started, while they are progressing through the courts, and when they are sentenced; and whether they offend in future; and • how it will use performance measures, along with other qualitative methods to identify good practice in local areas and what it w