Women offenders: after the Corston Report - United Kingdom ...

Justice Committee: Evidence Ev 2115 January 2013 Peter Kilgarriff, Jackie Russell, Sharon Spurling and Joy DoalJoy Doal: An awful lot of money. It is like what happenswith social services. We get shedloads of referrals fromsocial services, and no money from social services. Yetlet me give you one example of one family. We have aproject called Reunite, which is about helping womenwhen they come out of prison. We have a partnershipwith Midland Heart, which is a social landlord. Whena woman comes out of prison, the housing providersays it will provide a property large enough for her tohave her children with her, provided that she can getthem back. What normally happens is that someonecomes out of prison as a single woman in terms ofhousing, and she is housed in a one-bedroom flat.Social services say, “You can’t have your children backbecause you haven’t got a suitable property—and youcan’t have a suitable property because you haven’t gotyour children.” Reunite is there to get over that barrier,so Midland Heart provides us with a property that islarge enough so that she can have her children back.At the moment, we have a family of six children, allin social services care in different foster homes. Wehave managed to secure a four-bedroom house throughMidland Heart. We have worked with the family; wehave dealt with the issues and done parenting with themother. We have been to all the case conferences andsorted everything out. Those six children are beingreturned to her care. For just that one family, that isprobably a saving of £1 million.Chair: I think Ms Spurling wants to come in on this.Sharon Spurling: We would lose £160,000, which isnot much in the great scheme of things, but it wouldbe a lot for the women of Northumberland. We did asocial return on investment exercise last year that wasfunded by the LankellyChase Foundation. For everypound of that £160,000 invested, we were able to showthere was a £6.65 return on social value, which wasequivalent to a benefit of £314,662 to the state, buta massive £748,000 benefit to those women. That isthe benefit around all the other stuff you do with thewomen to move them away from offending for ever.Our £160,000 will stop on 31 March, and that will havea huge impact on women in Northumberland.Mr Llwyd: I am very grateful to you for putting thaton the record.Q113 Chair: Isn’t this such an imaginative andpromising area, where both general fundraising andsocial investment bonds have a potential appeal, thatthere must be quite a lot of people who, if they gotto know about your kind of work, would see it assomething that they wanted to support, either by givingor by loan investment?Witnesses: Yes.Q114 Jeremy Corbyn: I want to ask you about theeffectiveness of the centres. When you are doingmonitoring or an evaluation, what weight do you puton the rates of reoffending as opposed to any wellbeingindex you could apply to the woman concernedor her family?Sharon Spurling: The programme was alwaysabout diverting women from custody and reducingreoffending, so quite rightly we have placed a heavyweight on that. When we have done an evaluation wehave concentrated on those aspects. We sampled it byfinding out what the women were doing six monthsbefore they were engaged with the project, and thenwhat their arrest or conviction rates or charges hadbeen once they had been engaged with the project.We have also used soft outcome stuff, which is aroundimprovement in their family relationships, self‐esteemand confidence-building. The model we have used forthat is something called an outcomes star—a wellevidencedmodel that can track, with the womanherself, her progression in a number of different areas.Normally, there are about 10 points, which includeoffending, drug and alcohol abuse, social networks,family and relationships. We have used that to beable to assess what progress a woman has made inthe time that she has been engaged with the project,in comparison with the six months before she startedwith the project.Q115 Jeremy Corbyn: Apparently, where thereare women’s centres, the reoffending rate is 8.82%compared with a predicted 9.09%. Do you think that isa significant difference?Jackie Russell: NOMS did.Jeremy Corbyn: I know NOMS did but I am askingyou.Jackie Russell: The difficulty is and always has beenwith this evaluation that there is not really a coherentapproach to evaluation and the data. That oversightwent way back to when the £15.6 million was grantedfor two years. There should have been built into thatsomething that put in place a data capture system thatwould have value to all the agencies. That did nothappen. Different performance management regimeswere imposed on the projects and kept changing aswell. There has been a huge problem with this data.That is why my answer is that NOMS did it, because,to me, the data you see in our projects makes moresense. When Joy tells us that she has a 1% reoffendingrate, that is significant. Sharon will be able to tell usher reoffending rate, and that is significant. The datathat NOMS captured was about their actual assessmentof the value of projects. They did that for only one fullyear because they kept changing it, so there is no trenddata around that. What they showed in their returnswas that figure, and they call it statistically significant.Therefore, in terms of evidencing it to the people whoare making decisions, i.e. NOMS and probations, thathas some currency; in terms of sitting here and talkingto you about success rates, the data that the projectshave for themselves makes more sense. Does thatmake sense to you?Q116 Jeremy Corbyn: It does. Where do you thinkthe geographical gaps are concerning the provisionof women’s centres? What is your view about accessto women’s centres, or other appropriate services, byblack and minority ethnic women? What is the ethnicmake-up of the customers or clients you are dealingwith?Jackie Russell: There are huge geographical gaps.If you look across the country, there are 31 fundedprojects across England and Wales. You have to do thegeography yourself, and it just does not come near toevery magistrates court. To go back to what Sir Alansaid earlier, you want every magistrate at least to have