Recommendation 188

The National Audit Office told us that “the Ministry let contracts worth £46 million for services ‘tailored to female offenders’” through its 2021 commissioning process (see sections on “the 2021 commissioning process” starting at paragraph 169 and on “mainstreaming wraparound support” starting at paragraph 92) but that, otherwise, “the Ministry of Justice had only spent £9.5 million on grants for women’s community services over four years (2018–19 to 2021–22) and that the short-term nature of grants made it difficult to sustain services”. The NAO pointed out that “in January 2023 MoJ announced that it had launched multi-year grant competitions to invest up to £24 million in community support services for women as part of its new female offender strategy delivery plan”, which “would equate to around £8 million a year, an increase of over three times compared to the previous four-year period (around £2.4 million a year), without adjusting for inflation in the comparison.” 363