Recommendation 187

They also argued for more funding for women’s services. Niki Scordi argued that women’s services have been “underfunded up and down the country for over a decade”. 358 She welcomed the fact that women’s services are now commissioned in a holistic way but found that, “as a result … those services are underfunded, because obviously if you are funding one service for all needs, you are likely to under record that as opposed to funding separate needs”. 359 She said that “women’s highest level of need is in mental health, and there is a real shortage and no specific funding for that”, adding that counselling was funded separately from those services commissioned by the Ministry of Justice for people on probation. 360 She added that women who see the benefit of the services they receive “will often want to engage for longer than the service is funded for”, and that her organisation offers services to girls aged 15 to 18 that are “not funded in most areas up and down the country”. 361 Going beyond women’s services, Dr Matthew Cracknell, Senior Lecturer, Middlesex University, wrote that, instead of trying to make custodial sentences increasingly tough, “significant funding needs to be given to probation services and related community services including those concerned with housing, mental health and substance use, in order to make community orders more attractive and viable to sentencers.” 362