Tags are keywords. I put tags on every post to help you find the content you want. Tags may be people (Dominic Raab, say), organisations (The Howard League, PRT), themes (women offenders, homelessness) or specific items (heroin, racial disparity, ROTL). If you’re looking to research a particular issue, they can be invaluable.
The report recommends investing £216 million over three years which should realise extensive savings since the current annual costs for the 58,000 individuals with substance misuse, criminal justice and homelessness problems is estimated at between £1.1 billion and 2.1 billion per year.
Perhaps the most depressing finding of the survey, was that the majority of the sector has had to make redundancies with 50 organisations expecting to make 131 redundancies in the current financial year. Some of these job losses are being offset by the recruitment of more volunteers. In fact, the voluntary sector is again starting to resemble the volunteering sector with organisations having on average 1.7 volunteers for every member of paid staff.
The fact that women make up only 5% of the prison population and 15% of those on probation means their needs are often overlooked by a system which is focused on the profile and behaviour of male offenders.
The PbR model appears to be incentivising delivery as intended and there is no evidence of perverse incentives. The ethos of the provider organisations means that they are both committed to continuing support for those who remain on the streets.
While overcoming difficulties was a part of their journey towards the good life, goals such as a home and healthy relationships were as important to these individuals as most people who don’t face their challenges. The report is enlivened by a range of collages which were the key tool used by participants to express their aspirations.
These principles are based on a combination of desistance and recovery theory as well as Revolving Doors’ research and development work on the ground.
The briefing looks at these three models in some detail and helpfully identifies that they share a number of core principles: a strengths based approach, which operates over a sustained period, and which is tailored to meet individual needs.
Following a balanced and coherent examination of these key difficulties based on the real life application of PbR in the UK through the various homeless, workless, offending and troubled families initiatives, the Revolving Doors report comes to five principal conclusions:
This is just the latest piece of research that reinforces the need to develop a more integrated system of social care. Although few argue against a more co-ordinated approach, we seem to have made very little progress towards constructing it with joined-up commissioning apparently as difficult to achieve as ever.
