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Written evidence submitted by Transform Justice

Transform Justice is a charity working for a fairer, more open and more compassionate criminal justice system. We published two reports on justice reinvestment in 2014 and 2015 and more recently made the case for localising criminal justice services in our paper Close to Home: the case for localising criminal justice services in England and Wales. This latest paper forms the basis of this short submission to the Home Affairs Committee inquiry into the role police and crime commissioners ten years on from their introduction. Our submission focuses on the efficacy of the PCCs at driving collaboration to improve public safety, and what reforms are needed to the PCC model.

Our paper outlines how police and crime commissioners are currently hampered in their attempts to drive collaboration by several factors:

1. our criminal justice services (prisons, probation, courts, prosecution and to some extent policing) are incredibly centralised. Each service works to its own objectives and performance indicators which often do not reflect local priorities. Police and crime commissioners have no power over these elements of the system.
2. many levers to prevent crime and reoffending – including health, employment and housing – lie outside of the criminal justice system. Local actors are not financially incentivised to work together to tackle drivers of crime and invest to solve problems upstream. Public services work in silos rather than together towards common goals.
3. an overreliance on centralised funding pots. A large amount of the time and money afforded to PCCs, local authorities and other local agencies is currently wasted on bidding and grant management for centralised pots of funding, which could otherwise be spent on partnership-building and delivery. This squanders resources and stifles innovation. It also forces local leaders to deliver activities within the narrow remits set by central government civil servants rather than what local actors know will improve public safety in the long-term.

The solution is to give local leaders the right levers and incentives to tackle crime at a local level – by localising justice services and budgets to the PCC or mayoral level.

What would localised justice services look like?

• Delegation of justice budgets for prison places, magistrates’ courts’ administration, policing, prosecution and probation to police and crime commissioners or mayors. In Wales the budget is delegated to the Welsh government to choose whether or not to devolve budget and responsibility further.
• Development of shared crime and justice goals.  Local agencies agree to joint outcomes/aims for crime and justice, held by the PCC/mayor, for example to reduce reoffending, reduce certain types of crime, reduce short prison sentences and/or remand, or reduce imprisonment of children or women. This could use a similar mechanism to local area agreements, whereby areas set local priorities within a framework agreed by central government.
• Pooling of criminal justice resources so that local services work together towards a shared aim and share any savings made. Local services work together towards those shared aims and share the savings when they are achieved. This is facilitated by making regional probation, CPS and magistrates’ courts services coterminous with police force areas. PCCs or mayors are also represented on the new Integrated Care Boards and vice versa, which bring local partners together to address the wider health care, public health and social care needs of the population.
• Financially incentivising local services to shift investment upstream from enforcement to prevention, by allowing them to benefit from the savings from investment. Local leaders are financially accountable for anyone who is sent to prison (for all but the most serious crimes), with a fixed charge for anyone sentenced to prison or remanded pre-trial. Money that would otherwise be spent on imprisonment would be used by local communities to support rehabilitation locally and invest in community services. Services will also be incentivised to support those who receive out-of-court sanctions and court sentences to comply with rehabilitative conditions, and not to reoffend.
• Standards monitored through the inspectorate and effective community scrutiny. Accurate local data published regularly on a data dashboard, enabling citizens and organisations to view performance and compare with other areas. Reformed police and crime panels provide scrutiny of performance.
• Prisons and Crown Courts continue to be managed nationally
• Prosecutorial and judicial independence maintained through continued use of nationally agreed prosecution and sentencing guidelines.

A more localised justice system would increase trust in the criminal justice system by giving communities greater control of crime priorities and approaches. PCCs and mayors are directly accountable to local people for crime and justice outcomes and budget. Community scrutiny is provided via reformed police and crime panels, who review performance against agreed goals informed by performance data.

Further evidence and detail on the case for localising criminal justice services by devolving budgets and responsibility to the PCC/mayoral level can be found here: https://www.transformjustice.org.uk/publication/close-to-home-the-case-for-localising-criminal-justice-services-in-england-and-wales/

November 2023