Lammy Review
The Lammy Review: An Independent Review into the Treatment of and Outcomes for Black Asian and Minority Ethnic Individuals in the Criminal Justice System
Justice & Legal
Independent review examining the treatment of and outcomes for BAME individuals in the criminal justice system. Found significant disproportionality at every stage from stop and search through to prison.
35recommendations
35Accepted
Government Response
Government published response December 2017 accepting most recommendations. Justice Select Committee follow-up in 2023 found limited progress on key recommendations. Many commitments described as "in hand" rather than completed.
19 December 2017
Recommendations
Recommendation 1
A cross-CJS approach should be agreed to record data on ethnicity. This should enable more scrutiny in the future, whilst reducing inefficiencies that can come from collecting the same data twice. This more consistent approach should see the CPS and the courts collect data on religion so that the treatment and outcomes of different religious groups can be examined in more detail in the future.
Recommendation 10
The 'deferred prosecution' model pioneered in Operation Turning Point should be rolled out for both adult and youth offenders across England and Wales. The key aspect of the model is that it provides interventions before pleas are entered rather than after.
Recommendation 11
The MoJ should take steps to address key data gaps in the magistrates' court including pleas and remand decisions. This should be part of a more detailed examination of magistrates' verdicts, with a particular focus on those affecting BAME women.
Recommendation 12
The Open Justice initiative should be extended and updated so that it is possible to view sentences for individual offences at individual courts, broken down by demographic characteristics, including gender and ethnicity.
Recommendation 13
As part of the court modernisation programme, all sentencing remarks in the Crown Court should be published in audio and/or written form. This would build trust by making justice more transparent and comprehensible for victims, witnesses and offenders.
Recommendation 14
The judiciary should work with Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) to establish a system of online feedback on how judges conduct cases. This information, gathered from different perspectives, including court staff, lawyers, jurors, victims and defendants, could be used by the judiciary to support the professional development of judges in the future, including in performance appraisals for those judges that have them.
Recommendation 15
An organisation such as Judicial Training College or the Judicial Appointments Commission should take on the role of a modern recruitment function for the judiciary – involving talent-spotting, pre-application support and coaching for 'near miss' candidates. The MoJ should also examine whether the same organisation could take on similar responsibilities for the magistracy. The organisation should be resourced appropriately to fulfill this broader remit.
Recommendation 16
The government should set a clear, national target to achieve a representative judiciary and magistracy by 2025. It should then report to Parliament with progress against this target biennially.
Recommendation 17
The MoJ and Department of Health (DH) should work together to develop a method to assess the maturity of offenders entering the justice system up to the age of 21. The results of this assessment should inform the interventions applied to any offender in this cohort, including extending the support structures of the youth justice system for offenders over the age of 18 who are judged to have low levels of maturity.
Recommendation 18
Youth offender panels should be renamed Local Justice Panels. They should take place in community settings, have a stronger emphasis on parenting, involve selected community members and have the power to hold other local services to account for their role in a child's rehabilitation.
Recommendation 19
Each year, magistrates should follow an agreed number of cases in the youth justice system from start to finish, to deepen their understanding of how the rehabilitation process works. The MoJ should also evaluate whether their continued attachment to these cases has any observable effect on reoffending rates.
Recommendation 2
The government should match the rigorous standards set in the US for the analysis of ethnicity and the CJS. Specifically, the analysis commissioned for this review – learning from the US approach – must be repeated biennially, to understand more about the impact of decisions at each stage of the CJS.
Recommendation 20
Leaders of institutions in the youth estate should review the data generated by the Comprehensive Health Assessment Tool (CHAT) and evaluate its efficacy in all areas and ensure that it generates equitable access to services across ethnic groups. Disparities in the data should be investigated thoroughly at the end of each year.
Recommendation 21
The prison system, working with the Department of Health (DH), should learn from the youth justice system and adopt a similar model to the CHAT for both men and women prisoners with built in evaluation.
Recommendation 22
The recent prisons white paper sets out a range of new data that will be collected and published in the future. The data should be collected and published with a full breakdown by ethnicity.
Recommendation 23
The MoJ and the Parole Board should report on the proportion of prisoners released by offence and ethnicity. This data should also cover the proportion of each ethnicity who also go on to reoffend.
Recommendation 24
To increase the fairness and effectiveness of the Incentives and Earned Privileges (IEP) system, each prison governor should ensure that there is forum in their institution for both officers and prisoners to review the fairness and effectiveness of their regime. Both BAME and White prisoners should be represented in this forum. Governors should make the ultimate decisions in this area.
Recommendation 25
Prison governors should ensure Use of Force Committees are not ethnically homogeneous and involve at least one individual, such as a member of the prison's Independent Monitoring Board (IMB), with an explicit remit to consider the interests of prisoners. There should be escalating consequences for officers found to be misusing force on more than one occasion. This approach should also apply in youth custodial settings.
Recommendation 26
Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) should clarify publicly that the proper standard of proof for assessing complaints is 'the balance of probabilities'. Prisons should take into account factors such as how officers have dealt with similar incidents in the past.
Recommendation 27
Prisons should adopt a 'problem-solving' approach to dealing with complaints. As part of this, all complainants should state what they want to happen as a result of an investigation into their complaint.
Recommendation 28
The prison system should be expected to recruit in similar proportions to the country as a whole. Leaders of prisons with diverse prisoner populations should be held particularly responsible for achieving this when their performance is evaluated.
Recommendation 29
The prison service should set public targets for moving a cadre of BAME staff into leadership positions over the next five years.
Recommendation 3
The default should be for the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and CJS agencies to publish all datasets held on ethnicity, while protecting the privacy of individuals. Each time the Race Disparity Audit exercise is repeated, the CJS should aim to improve the quality and quantity of datasets made available to the public.
Recommendation 30
HMPPS should develop performance indicators for prisons that aim for equality of treatment and of outcomes for BAME and White prisoners.
Recommendation 31
The MoJ should bring together a working group to discuss the barriers to more effective sub-contracting by Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). The working group should involve the CRCs themselves and a cross-section of smaller organisations, including some with a particular focus on BAME issues.
Recommendation 32
The Ministry of Justice should specify in detail the data CRCs should collect and publish covering protected characteristics. This should be written into contracts and enforced with penalties for non-compliance.
Recommendation 33
The Youth Justice Board (YJB) should commission and publish a full evaluation of what has been learned from the trial of its 'disproportionality toolkit', and identify potential actions or interventions to be taken.
Recommendation 34
Our CJS should learn from the system for sealing criminal records employed in many US states. Individuals should be able to have their case heard either by a judge or a body like the Parole Board, which would then decide whether to seal their record. There should be a presumption to look favourably on those who committed crimes either as children or young adults but can demonstrate that they have changed since their conviction.
Recommendation 35
To ensure that the public understands the case for reform of the criminal records regime, the MoJ, HMRC and DWP should commission and publish a study indicating the costs of unemployment among ex-offenders.
Recommendation 4
If CJS agencies cannot provide an evidence-based explanation for apparent disparities between ethnic groups then reforms should be introduced to address those disparities. This principle of 'explain or reform' should apply to every CJS institution.
Recommendation 5
The review of the Trident Matrix by the Mayor of London should examine the way information is gathered, verified, stored and shared, with specific reference to BAME disproportionality. It should bring in outside perspectives, such as voluntary and community groups and expertise such as the Office of the Information Commissioner.
Recommendation 6
The CPS should take the opportunity, while it reworks its guidance on Joint Enterprise, to consider its approach to gang prosecutions in general.
Recommendation 7
The CPS should examine how Modern Slavery legislation can be used to its fullest, to protect the public and prevent the exploitation of vulnerable young men and women.
Recommendation 8
Where practical all identifying information should be redacted from case information passed to them by the police, allowing the CPS to make race-blind decisions.
Recommendation 9
The Home Office, the MoJ and the Legal Aid Agency should work with the Law Society and Bar Council to experiment with different approaches to explaining legal rights and options to defendants. These different approaches could include, for example, a role for community intermediaries when suspects are first received in custody, giving people a choice between different duty solicitors, and earlier access to advice from barristers.