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

82 Women offenders: after the Corston ReportThe Government’s strategic priorities4. We welcome the production of a set of strategic priorities for women offenders butthey need to be given substance, and we believe that the recommendations we makein this Report should be the basis for taking the priorities forward. (Paragraph 44)New governance arrangements5. We do not consider that the Advisory Board without wider ministerial involvementwill constitute a sufficient mechanism for high level cross-departmental governancearrangements of the sort that Baroness Corston initially proposed, and advocated bymany of our witnesses. It is not likely to have the authority to bring about integratedstrategy and co-ordinated service provision. Most Government departments have acontribution to make to the work of the new Advisory Board, but we consider that ata minimum there must be representation from the Department of Health,Department of Communities and Local Government, Home Office, the Departmentfor Education and the Department of Work and Pensions. We welcome the fact thatthe first three of these are full members of the Board but as poverty is an importantdimension in women’s offending we consider that the Department for Work andPensions should also be required to participate as a matter of course rather than onan ad hoc basis. The same status should be afforded to the Department forEducation, which does not at present have even a peripheral role, in order to addressthe question of effectively identifying girls at risk of offending. It is only with robusthigh-level support that collaboration between departmental officials on the AdvisoryBoard will be effective. We would like to see women offenders, and those at risk ofoffending, become a standing item on the agenda of the Inter-Ministerial Group onEquality as an additional means of facilitating collective responsibility for thesematters. (Paragraph 49)6. There was limited external input into the Government’s development of its strategicpriorities. It is regrettable that this was the case and this, together with theuncertainty about the membership of the Advisory Board, adds to the appearancethat the priorities were produced in haste with insufficient thought. This ismanifested in the absence of any detail about how the Government intends tomeasure success towards meeting its strategic priorities. The Advisory Board shoulddevise appropriate measures of success in relation to each of the strategic prioritiesand publish regularly progress against them, alongside an account of its own work infurthering the priorities. Accountability should lie not just with the Minister withresponsibility for women offenders but should be built into relevant roles withinother government departments and local authorities. It is not possible for theMinistry of Justice alone to address the wide range of problems that contribute tofemale offending. There must be much more explicit recognition, including by theMinister herself, of the need to focus as much on those women and girls on theperiphery as those who are already involved in the system. (Paragraph 50)Segmentation of women offenders7. NOMS’ segmentation work—which aims to separate out groups of offenders in away which enables providers and commissioners to understand their risks and needs,