Improving outcomes for women in the criminal justice system

The Ministry has begun to make changes to the way that women are treated in the criminal justice system. To demonstrate that its approach is achieving value for money, the Ministry should: a) set specific goals for each of its three main objectives to give an indication of the scale of its ambition. These should reflect changes it wants to see in the way the system is working;

b) make a full assessment of the funding required to meet its aims and explore ways that it can address any funding gap with other government departments, providers and other bodies;

c) set out a list of the work it is doing to implement the strategy’s aims, with milestones. It should report against this full list at the Advisory Board for Female Offenders (ABFO) to increase transparency and accountability;

d) develop an influencing plan for how it plans to work with other government departments, building on its National Concordat. This should include where it wants to get to and how it plans to get there;

e) set up clear accountability structures to enable senior leaders to be held to account for progress in delivering the programme;

f) set out the performance measures it intends to use to measure progress against the strategy’s aims. It should also provide reports against these measures to ABFO;

g) identify gaps in available data which reduce its ability to monitor changes in women’s journeys through the system at key stages, and plan how to work with other bodies to develop better data;

h) develop and publish an evaluation strategy that sets out how the government might assess the impact of its interventions on women. This should include how it plans to: • evaluate its main programmes and commitments; • work with other government departments to do the same; and • work with government and third-sector organisations to develop the evidence base of what works, including the costs and benefits of different options, to aid funding decisions.