The Women’s Justice Board (WJB) Report, published in March, is to be very much welcomed.
The recommendations provide a clear and comprehensive framework to improve the response to women impacted by the criminal justice system (CJS) in England and Wales. This represents an opportunity to unblock the glacially slow pace of reform seen in recent years and moves us closer to implementing the agenda of the seminal Corston Report, as we approach its 20th anniversary in 2027.
It won’t, however, take us all the way.
The WJB Report focuses on making systems work better, with the aim of reducing women’s imprisonment. Its recommendations are calibrated to improving the existing system rather than dismantling it, as Baroness Corston had envisaged nearly 20 years ago.
This is not a criticism of the WJB: its remit was framed and constrained by the limited ambition of government to close just one women’s prison. In contrast, Corston called for the women’s estate to be closed, using instead a few small custodial units to cater for the relatively few women who really do need to be in custody.
Unfortunately, the WJB was also unable to bring the laser focus needed to the crucial question of prevention: just how do we stop women and girls getting needlessly sucked into the CJS in the first place? There are good recommendations on young women in the report, but very little else concrete relating to women before the point of arrest.
Women’s centres
Corston identified that one important answer lies with women’s centres and specialist services. While progress on many fronts over the last two decades has been extremely slow, a key Corston recommendation has been realised: we now have a robust network of women’s centres and other women’s specialist services working preventatively with women and girls at risk, as well as with those at every point of their contact with the CJS.
These organisations have survived and indeed thrived over years of the most challenging of circumstances, evidencing the game-changing impact of their work.
Women’s Diversion Fund
At least the WJB report acknowledges the need for the prevention agenda; recognises the vital work women’s centres do with women at risk; and the precarity of their funding situation. But the government’s response to the WJB’s call for “proposals to transform funding of women’s specialist services and unlock other sources of support” has come with a major problem.
The launch of the £25.6 million Women’s Diversion Fund (WDF) on 16 June, while welcome in its recognition of the vital role of women’s centres, has replaced previous core costs grants. Over the past five years these grants have helped both keep women’s organisations afloat; and doing the crucial upstream work with women at risk before they get to the point of arrest, in order to prevent their criminalisation in the first place. So by explicitly excluding from its scope support for women “solely deemed at risk of becoming CJS-involved”, the WDF underscores the very problem we have long identified: funding follows criminalisation, not prevention. Without investment in upstream work, how will that work happen now?
Furthermore, by doubling down on a diversion-only model, the WDF forces organisations to reshape services to fit Ministry of Justice (MoJ) priorities, not women’s needs. It also embeds MoJ control through imposing MoJ-defined outcomes on funded organisations, and requiring service-user data — including personal identifiers — to enable MoJ-led tracking of CJS outcomes. This sits at odds with the independence facilitated through previous core grants, which forms part of women’s centres’ success in engaging women.
Lessons from the Corston Report
The WJB’s recommendations do represent an important step forward and it is vital, if change is to be secured, to see their full implementation. Crucial to success is heeding the lessons learned since the publication of the Corston Report on the structural conditions necessary for delivery. Key amongst these is the need for independent governance and clear accountability, as we explored last year in our publication Breaking out of the Justice Loop.
Jean Corston was not opposed to the concept of a Women’s Justice Board. In her report, however, she instead called for a Women’s Commission, reaching across government and working inclusively alongside the women’s sector. There was insufficient political courage to do this then and, worryingly, there appears to be insufficient political courage now to back the much-needed independence of the WJB.
Ending the work of the current Board and moving to a group with a merely advisory role, as government communications have stated, is puzzling and surely a major error.
Learning from the implementation of Corston and, indeed, the Female Offender Strategy, also makes clear that this agenda needs champions for all aspects of the work set out in the recommendations. This includes having an inter-ministerial, cross-departmental group to drive delivery, in particular of those issues requiring change outside of the MoJ remit. It is important that the government signs up to this fully to avoid repeating the failures of the Corston and Female Offender Strategy eras.
Any successor to the Women’s Justice Board must be placed on a statutory footing, with powers to publish independent assessments, require departmental responses, and scrutinise cross government delivery. Without independent oversight, the justice system will continue to mark its own homework and women will continue to pay the price.
History tells us that there are risks in having the MoJ as the lead agency on this work: its core focus is necessarily on the hard end of the CJS. The compelling arguments underpinning the WJB recommendations on early intervention, to curtail women from becoming entrenched in the CJS, largely come under the remit of the Home Office (HO).
We know that when the Corston implementation shifted from the HO to the MoJ, this had a marked adverse impact on the ambition for early intervention: the government needs to be mindful of this.
Early on in her Review, Baroness Corston identified a tendency within the MoJ and the National Offender Management Service (now HM Prison and Probation Service) to view women as a minority issue. In a prison-centric system where women only represented five per cent of the prison population (four per cent now), there was a sense that somehow, they only merited a limited amount of attention.
It will require real political will to put women front and centre in delivering on the WJB recommendations and to avoid seeing women as an ‘add on’ in what is still a system designed for the majority: men. As with Corston, officials in the MoJ leading on this work will benefit from readily available expertise and support from the women’s sector, those with lived experience and other external stakeholders.
Substantial challenges ahead
In some ways, implementing the Corston report in the noughties should have been straightforward. The courts and the probation service were still functioning relatively well at that point. Structures were in place and, in theory, could be amended and reformed to reflect better policy and practice for women impacted by the CJS. That is no longer the case.
The near-broken CJS, with the massive courts backlog and the long undervalued and underfunded probation service, together with the decimation of public services in recent years, means that implementation of the WJB recommendations faces substantial challenges that will need the utmost commitment from all involved to ensure change is secured.
An independent WJB that can push for all of these things is needed, together with ring-fenced, joined-up and front-loaded funding of all the costed elements, not only the funding for women’s centres to do diversion work, as welcome as that is for many. This is especially important in relation to the crucial recommendations on pregnant women and mothers and the implications for those women’s specialist services that are necessary to support them. There is very little viable funding allocated for this important work at the moment.
The resilience of the women’s sector is awesome: get the funding conditions right and it will provide the crucial underpinning to the realisation of many of the WJB recommendations and must be valued for being the major asset it is.
Trapped in the Justice Loop
Right now, it feels like we are back to being ‘Trapped in the Justice Loop’, waiting yet again for progress. We are tantalisingly close to real change at last; but only if:
- the WJB blueprint for change is implemented in full;
- clear structures for independent governance and accountability are put in place;
- cross-government sign up is secured with clear ministerial responsibility beyond the MoJ;
- there is fully costed funding for all elements of the work, including early intervention and prevention;
- women’s specialist services and women with lived experience are embedded as equal partners in designing, delivering and scrutinising the reforms; and
- ultimately, as recommended by the WJB, an economic model is developed to reallocate prison funding towards women-specific community-based accommodation and services. Such a move, over time, has the potential to lead to the closure of the majority of women’s prisons, as Jean Corston recommended.
Breaking out of the Justice Loop
That’s why, in the run-up to the Corston Report’s anniversary in 2027, we will be working with the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, the National Women’s Justice Coalition and as many thinkers, dreamers, planners and influencers as we can muster to interrogate three of the important themes of changing the justice system for women as we see it: the economics, the public health approach, and working with future generations.
Crucially, the expertise of those with lived experience of the system and of those working in the women’s voluntary sector will inform all of these three areas of focus.
We want our Breaking Out of the Justice Loop programme to continue to explore big ideas; to support and challenge those implementing policy and practice with women; and to provide an independent voice to ensure the government delivers its promises… and goes further.
We’ll be holding a series of events, publishing papers and communicating our work and we’d love you to get involved. Please sign up for updates below.
The WJB report offers a new opportunity to deliver the Corston agenda. Let’s make it count.
