Fifty-First Report - Improving outcomes for women in the criminal justice system

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: • the proportion of women that are currently arrested or prosecuted, and the proportion of women currently remanded or sentenced to prison, who could appropriately be supported in the community instead; and • how much it would cost to provide support for these women via women’s services in the community.

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 6 Improving outcomes for women in the criminal justice system 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.

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 Improving outcomes for women in the criminal justice system 7 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: • publish forthwith the 66 commitments in the strategy that it has assessed the progress of using Red/Amber/Green ratings, with the details of the progress that underpin the ratings; • write to the Committee alongside its Treasury Minute response setting out what it will achieve and by when in implementing the strategy over the next 3 years so it can be held to account; and • write to us by the end of July 2022 setting out the new governance arrangements including how it will improve transparency for specialist providers, experts and other external stakeh

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

On the basis of a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, we took evidence from the Ministry of Justice (the Ministry) and HM Prison & Probation Service (HMPPS) on improving outcomes for women in the criminal justice system.1 We also took evidence from Women in Prison, the Howard League for Penal Reform; and Anawim— Birmingham’s Centre for Women.

The Ministry told us that it has received a record funding settlement at the Autumn Budget and Spending Review 2021.11 We asked the Ministry how much of this it will be spending on the female offender programme.12 It told us it has not yet allocated funding to specific budgets but that it wanted to fund the programme properly given that it is a real priority for the Ministry and for the government.13 The Ministry told us its funding settlement includes £550 million over three years (2022–23 to 2024–25) to reduce reoffending (by both men and women), that this amount is not directly associated with the female offender programme but that “a lot of it” would be used to support women.14 Community services

The first two objectives of the strategy (intervening earlier and a greater proportion of women managed in the community) each depend on improved community services for women.15 The Ministry told us the importance of work done in the community is “absolutely well understood”16 Despite this the Ministry has spent only £9.5 million on grants for community services over four years (2018–19 to 2021–22).17 The Ministry has not been able to make a full assessment of how much it needs to spend on community services because it has declined to set targets so has not set out the reduction in the proportion of women entering different stages of the CJS that it expects to see. It considers that it would be inappropriate to set out the extent of what it is aiming to achieve as this depends on other bodies that are independent of it such as the judiciary.18

The £9.5 million for grants for community services compares with £200 million the Ministry has committed to spend on an extra 500 prison places for women due to increases in police numbers.19 We asked stakeholders how far the £200 million would stretch if it were spent on community services and what the results would be. They told 8 Q 1 9 C&AG’s Report, para 20 10 Q 29 11 Q 79 12 Q 58 13 Q 80 14 Q 58 15 Female Offender Strategy, Ministry of Justice, 2018, paras 11 and 12 16 Q 44 17 Q 28; C&AG’s Report para 3.3 18 C&AG’s Report, paras 2.10, 2.11 19 Qq 32, 34–35 Improving outcomes for women in the criminal justice system 11 us it would be transformational. Women in Prison told us that Ministry funding could be used to stimulate funding from other public bodies and philanthropists, and that with that amount of funding there could potentially be a women’s centre in every local authority.20 It said it had not done the analysis for this but they hoped that the Government had. The Howard League for Penal Reform said the money could be spent on “…all kinds of different ways that would stop women offending in the first place and provide real solutions to solve their problems.” Anawim told us that the cost of a women’s centre supporting a women in the community is between £1,000 and £4,000 per woman. The average annual cost of a women’s prison place is £52,000.21

We asked the Ministry if it had assessed the impact of spending the £200 million on prison places for women. It has not. It told us this was because it has a duty to provide places for those sent to prison by the courts and its projections are that increased police numbers would result in an additional 500 prison places for women being required.22 The Ministry told us that implementing the Female Offender Strategy might bring that number down, and if so, it would not need all the additional prison places.23 However this modelling of expected need for 500 more prison places did not take into account any effect from the female offender programme such as more people being diverted away from prison sentences.24 The Ministry and HMPPS told us the newer prison places will be higher quality than some existing places and if they were not needed older places could be closed, but that was not an explicit objective.25 Working with others

The Ministry recognises it needs to work together with many other national and local bodies to improve outcomes for women in the CJS.26 It established a concordat with other government departments, creating a basis for joint working, although this was only published in January 2021—two years later than planned.27 The Howard League for Penal Reform told us the that as well as the Female Offender Strategy, there are numerous strategies across government to tackle drug abuse, mental illness, violence against women and girls and that the challenge is to bring them together: “we know that drugs affect a lot of women. We know about mental ill health and violence.... We know that a large number of women who are in the Female Offender Strategy are equally captured as victims under the violence against women and girls strategy. They are the same women. We need to better understand how these strategies fit together”28

We were told of several good practice examples where many different agencies worked together to help women with multiple problems. These include the ‘one-stop-shop model’ that women’s centres try to adopt.29 The Ministry told us about ‘problem solving courts’ where packages of support and oversight are tailored for individual women.30 The Howard 20 Qq 3, 12 21 Qq 4, 5; C&AG’s Report, para 1.9 22 Q 39 23 Q 37 24 C&AG’s Report para 17 25 Qq 38, 40 26 Q 46; C&AG’s Report, paras 3 and 1.8, and Figure 3 27 Q 30; C&AG’s Report paras 2.12–2.14 28 Q 10 29 Q 24 30 Q 31 12 Improving outcomes for women in the criminal justice system League for Penal Reform told us of good work between different services in Avon and Somerset to provide alternatives to stop offending.31 We asked what had been the driver for getting bodies working together there and heard that it was a mix of women’s centres, a committed police and crime commissioner and the police leading it. We were told by the stakeholders that although there were examples of good practice, these were in pockets “that are making things work on a shoestring”32 and Women in Prison said the national picture was poor.33 We asked specifically about joining up drug rehabilitation services for women in the CJS. Anawim told us that it had struggled to work with drugs services, and that it would be ideal to have specialist substance misuse workers located at women’s centres.34 It also highlighted that some statutory service providers were always missing from joined-up working, particularly children’s services but also housing.35 Women in Prison said that key partners from the police, local authority and health were not routinely sat around the table in every area. It told us it thought that greater leadership from the Ministry is needed.36

We asked the Ministry why it had not had the support from others it had hoped for and how it could incentivise their support. It told us that the COVID-19 pandemic had changed priorities for a lot of departments, and this had slowed down progress on joined- up working. It acknowledged that the ‘grip across the whole picture was not as strong as it might have been’. It told us the new Women in the CJS and at risk of entering the CJS board (chaired by a Minister from the Ministry of Justice and made up of Ministers from partner departments and agencies) has reiterated support for the strategy’s objectives and is now looking at how things can be improved.37 Despite its recognition of the importance of joined-up working by local bodies, which it refers to as the ‘whole-system approach’, the only funding the Ministry has provided specifically to support the adoption of this approach was seed-funding for six areas and the last funding was for 2017–19.38 Meeting the needs of women from ethnic minorities

The Ministry’s strategy included specific actions to tackle the overrepresentation of, and unique challenges facing, black and other ethnic minority women in the justice system. But progress has been slow.39 The Ministry told us that after the publication of the strategy it recognised that this is an area where it needs to do more and go further than the strategy. It has set up a minority ethnic female offenders group and worked with the group to understand where things are going wrong.40 Many providers of specialist services for ethnic minority women are small and Women in Prison highlighted the difficulties that small organisations face when bidding for grants in competition with larger organisations with well-resourced bid teams.41 The Ministry told us it had that it had provided £1.5 million in 2020–21 to groups supporting black and minority ethnic 31 Q 21 32 Qq 23, 24 33 Q 15 34 Q 9 35 Qq 11 36 Qq 10, 18 37 Qq 52, 80 38 Qq 68, 69 39 C&AG’s Report, para 3.10 40 Q 54 41 Q 13 Improving outcomes for women in the criminal justice system 13 offenders (both men and women) generally through the system and funding to Clinks to help smaller organisations bid for money.42 It has also worked to design a specification for improving translation services.43

The Ministry told us that it wanted to work with others to help it make greater progress.44 In particular, it referred to a recent publication, Tackling Double Disadvantage that specifically addresses issues faced by minority ethnic women in relation to the CJS.45 It said it recognises many of the recommendations in the publication and wants to work with its authors to make sure it addresses the concerns they have raised.46 42 Clinks is an umbrella body that supports, promotes and represents the voluntary sector working with people in the criminal justice system and their families. 43 Q 54 44 Q 54 45 Tackling Double Disadvantage, 10 point action plan for change, Agenda, Hibiscus Initiatives, Muslim Women In Prison, Zahid Mubarek Trust, Criminal Justice Alliance and Women In Prison, January 2022 46 Q 54 14 Improving outcomes for women in the criminal justice system 2 Programme management Holding to the Ministry of Justice to account

The Ministry decided not to set targets because achieving them would be reliant on bodies independent of the Ministry, including other government departments and the judiciary.47 We asked the Ministry about the impact of this decision on cross-government working.48 It told us that Ministers across government are reviewing what outcomes they want to see and how best to measure progress towards them and that the new cross- departmental Women in the CJS and at risk of entering the CJS board (chaired by a Justice Minister) is working on what these measures will look like. The Ministry accepted that the female offender programme had not been tightly governed but said that had now changed.49 It told us that the new board is focusing on ensuring it has the right programme in place and on measuring outcomes.50

We asked the Ministry how it could measure progress as it did not yet have milestones. In its reply it claimed that it had looked at 66 commitments from the strategy and given each a Red/Amber /Green rating for progress.51 We asked if it would publish the 66 commitments and show the us which were green and which were red. The Ministry replied that a progress update had been shared with the Advisory Board on Female Offenders (ABFO) in November 2021. However, Women in Prison, a member of ABFO, did not recall such a document and reported that ABFO members “are still uninformed of what the 66 commitments in the strategy are.”52

Stakeholders who sit on ABFO told the National Audit Office that without performance measures they had found it difficult to understand progress at a national level and for different groups of women. They reported that this had limited the ABFO’s ability to hold the Ministry to account.53 Ministers attended the ABFO so the stakeholders who were members were able to contribute to developing their understanding of women’s experiences of the CJS and how best to improve outcomes.54 It appears that stakeholders will have a diminished role in the new governance arrangements as specialist providers of women’s services will no longer be members of the board.55 Monitoring, evaluation and disseminating good practice

It is nearly four years since the strategy was published and the Ministry does not yet have an overall plan to evaluate the work it and others have done in this area.56 We asked the Ministry if it had the data it needed to know what it is achieving against each of the strategy’s aims and the performance measures it will use to assess progress. It replied that it is still working on what its performance metrics will look like. To do this it needs to understand what it is it is trying to achieve, how it will know when it has got there and 47 C&AG’s Report, paras 2.9–2.10 48 Q 46 49 Qq 46, 76 50 Q 29 51 Qq 28, 66 52 Q 75; Ev CJS0013 Women in Prison submission para 3 53 C&AG’s Report, para 3.19 54 Ev CJS0011 penultimate para, page 3 55 Ev CJS0011 para 2, page 4 56 Q 45; C&AG’s Report para 3.12 Improving outcomes for women in the criminal justice system 15 how it is going to measure it. It told us it will soon be appointing a director general for performance strategy and analysis to focus on data and evidence.57 The Ministry told us that the governance and data are important to make sure it is investing in the right sorts of interventions.58

In evaluating the effect of its interventions, the Ministry told us it is difficult to attribute changes in the number of women in custody to specific actions, such as the use of out- of-court disposals, pre-sentence reports and community interventions. It accepted that it should be able to evaluate its interventions as it is spending taxpayers’ money.59 It told us that patchy data was part of the problem but that it was still building the necessary data, several years after the strategy was published.60 The Ministry told us that it is evaluating some individual interventions, for example out-of-court disposals and housing advisers in prisons (both for men and women) but that evaluating interventions takes time especially in relation to any impact on reoffending.61 It does not currently have plans to evaluate its £9.5 million in grants to community services.62

We asked whether the Ministry was looking at savings for the overall system and how a good outcome for an individual woman can be cost-effective for the taxpayer. The Ministry told us that it had done an analysis on the total cost of reoffending two years ago. It said it thought it would be straightforward to use this to make the case for funding interventions that reduce reoffending by women, especially given women’s higher rates of reoffending.”63

There are many examples of local good practice where organisations work together to help women turn their lives around.64 We asked the Ministry how it is going to identify and disseminate best practice. The Ministry told us that its ‘one-year-on’ report on the concordat will set out some of the joined-up work it has been doing and where best practice exists and that it will then want to further invest in that.65 57 Q 30 58 Q 31 59 Qq 44- 46 60 Qq 31, 45 61 Qq 44–45, 64, 82 62 C&AG’s Report, para 3.14 63 Qq 81–82 64 Qq 11, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24; C&AG’s Report para 3.25 65 Q 77 16 Improving outcomes for women in the criminal justice system