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.
New value for money evaluation of the London Family Drug and Alcohol Court by the Centre for Justice Innovation finds each £1 spent generates £2.30 in savings.
Michael Gove, the Justice Secretary, recently visited a number of justice reinvestment projects in the States and is reported to be considering a similar approach in England and Wales.
An excellent new report from Rob Allen for Transform Justice makes a compelling case for devolving the rehabilitation of young offenders to PCCs.
Splitting up responsibility for offender management has created a divide between a small national probation service and the 21 CRCs leading a huge increase in bureaucracy and growing professional tensions. The probation profession is potentially being undermined as there is no longer a requirement for CRCs to use staff with recognised probation qualifications. They no longer have to employ qualified probation officers to manage complex cases.
A proper assessment will have to wait until we have more details but these figures do suggest that Payment by Results may be a more successful approach when savings are shared between government and providers with an explicit understanding that providers will reinvest their success payments rather than merely pass them on to shareholders.
Payment by results has been getting a fairly consistent bad press recently with concerns about the funding mechanism’s use in the Work Programme, Drug Recovery pilots and worries about how it will work for the new reducing reoffending contracts.
So it was refreshing for me to see an example of a successful (albeit smallscale) example of PbR at last week’s No Offence (@NoOffenceCiC) conference. West Yorkshire succeeded in driving down their youth custody rate by a third through a PbR approach.
Earlier this week, the MoJ published the findings from the first evaluation of the justice reinvestment project conducted by Kevin Wong and his colleagues from Sheffield Hallam University. The pilot operates a payment by results approach which means that if the pilot areas succeed in reducing demand on criminal justice services (by 5% for adults and 10% for young offenders), they receive additional funds generated by the savings to invest in further reducing re-offending initiatives.
Commissioning by outcomes is always right, public money should be focused on what we want to achieve – people in work, off drugs, no longer
