Scottish Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission report: Justice That Works

Chapter Nine: Strengthening the delivery of community justice

Summary

Fragmentation across the community justice landscape contributes to uneven supervision, support and outcomes. While local delivery enables close links with housing, health and community services, national leadership, coordination and accountability remain weak. Without clearer national direction, variation risks becoming inconsistency, weakening confidence among sentencers, practitioners and the public.

Enhanced powers for Community Justice Scotland to set standards, drive improvement and challenge poor performance would strengthen coherence. Local partnerships may require statutory status and control of budgets to improve consistency and strategic focus. Clear accountability arrangements are essential if community justice is to operate as a credible and reliable alternative to custody.

More integrated inspection, shared performance measures and additional scrutiny of court administration would improve efficiency and confidence. Strengthened risk-management oversight would support more proportionate, evidence-led practice across Scotland. Taken together, these reforms would support a more mature, outcome-focused system of community justice.

Local delivery

Listening to people engaged across the community justice landscape, it has become clear to the Commission that there is a need for greater cohesion and consistency across the delivery and oversight of community justice services. This is essential to ensure the effective delivery of Scotland’s Vision for Justice and National Strategy for Community Justice and to ensure a shift the balance from custody to the community.

The current model of local delivery for community justice sees a significant variation in resources and practice across Scotland. This in turn creates inconsistency in services available, quality of provision, and outcomes. Although different approaches can be a positive aspect of localism it is critical that quality is not as variable as we have heard it currently can be. We have also heard that there is a lack of oversight and accountability. This in turn gives rise to a lack of confidence in community justice by professionals and the public. While we have seen significant examples of good practice, local areas have struggled to achieve consistency nationally or to fully align with national justice objectives. Fragmentation of service delivery and differences in resource, as well a lack of sufficient monitoring and evaluation of community interventions, have made it difficult to achieve national coherence or scale up innovation. This has no doubt had some influence on the failure to fully implement the McLeish report recommendations which we discuss more in Annex B.

“Greater clarity would be useful on the role, responsibilities and justice related inter-dependencies and expectations of agencies working at a national level. These include the Care Inspectorate, Community Justice Scotland, the Risk Management Authority and the National Social Work Agency.” – Care Inspectorate, Call for Evidence.

“32 local authorities will provide different services and can lead to a postcode lottery.” – South Lanarkshire Council, Call for Evidence.

Some consider that a way of remedying this could be the creation of a national community justice delivery body along the lines of the Probation Service in the Republic of Ireland or in England and Wales. This would provide a cohesive approach to delivery and allow for greater coordination across all areas. However this approach would come at the cost of the significant benefits and strengths of community justice services, and particularly justice social work, being planned and delivered at local level. Local focus helps to ensure that community justice is embedded within wider local community services such as housing, addiction services, education, health, and social care, creating locally joined-up person centred support for individuals. The model also benefits from democratic accountability, as elected councils provide transparency and responsiveness to local needs. Local authorities are able to tailor delivery to people, place, and local priorities. They can align efforts towards protection (child protection, vulnerable adult protection) across their own teams. They have statutory responsibility for homeless individuals and delivery of many community justice services. Health provision is also delivered by 14 local Health Boards who are able to tailor delivery on that basis. On balance we prefer the continuation of a local delivery model for justice social work and community justice services.

However, it is clear that this model of delivering local community justice provision also requires strong national leadership to ensure consistent and high-quality community justice services across the country. Strong national leadership is also needed to give visibility and voice to community justice, alongside other prominent criminal justice areas like prisons as well as police and prosecutorial responses to victims suffering serious harmful behaviour and communities impacted by organised crime.

There are a number of different bodies that already have key national roles within this landscape. COSLA provides political leadership on national issues across local authorities, and works with councils to improve local services, and for the Justice Social Work profession there will be a national lead in the newly formed National Social Work Agency. Decision-making powers over service delivery and improvement efforts will continue to be local. The new National Social Work Agency will have an important role in the recognition of Justice Social Workers as important professionals from an accredited profession doing critical work in Scottish Justice, as well as advising Scottish Ministers and the Justice Directorate on policy. But these bodies do not have an exclusive community justice focus.

There is a need for an organisation that takes a holistic oversight of community justice and the complex interplay of the roles and responsibilities of the organisations that play a part in delivery of community justice services including Scottish Government, Police Scotland, Crown Office Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service (SCTS), Scottish Prison Service (SPS), health, housing and the third sector. Until 2016 there were eight Community Justice Authorities (CJAs) consisting of local councillors from neighbouring local authorities who worked with the various justice organisations at local level to deliver community justice services across their boundaries. The CJAs were allocated funds by SG to deliver community justice services.

Community Justice Scotland

Dissatisfaction with the performance of CJAs led to their being abolished by the Community Justice (Scotland) Act 2016 which also established Community Justice Scotland (CJS) in 2017 with the statutory functions to:

(a) promote the National Strategy for Community Justice,

(b) monitor, promote and support improvement in performance in the provision of community justice (and in particular, performance in relation to the achievement of the nationally determined outcomes,

(c) to promote and support (i) improvement in the quality and range of provision of community justice (ii) making the best use of the facilities, people and other resources available to provide community justice,

(d) to promote public awareness of benefits arising from community justice approaches.

CJS is a non-departmental public body (NDPB), with approximately 39 staff who work across four operational teams to deliver these statutory functions: insights and intelligence, learning and engagement (local), national engagement, and communications. In addition to working with the Scottish Government it must work with a number of partners specified in the Act including Police, COPFS, SCTS, SPS, local authorities, health boards, integration joint boards, Scottish Fire & Rescue Service (SFRS), and Skills Development Scotland (SDS).

If CJS or the Scottish Government identify a need for a specific type of community justice service the Act specifies that, having consulted with the statutory partners, CJS can design models for types of services but it does not currently have the authority or funding from the Scottish Government to directly commission them. Unlike the former CJAs it does not receive the funding to resource services directly – the Scottish Government and local authorities and other partners hold the funding and appoint the service providers. An example is the design of a new national throughcare service, Upside, which commenced in April 2025, consisting of a partnership of national and local third sector organisations to provide support for people leaving custody to access health, housing and employment services on their release. CJS designed the service requirements and ran the grant application process, but the Scottish Government awarded the contract and pays the provider, while CJS manages the contract on behalf of the Scottish Government who then release the funding to Upside if CJS report there has been acceptable performance.

The relationships between CJS as the national lead for community justice and those responsible for the delivery of national and local services are critical but CJS is not currently viewed as possessing the components necessary for the successful delivery of community justice. Although the leadership of Community Justice Scotland is often regarded as active, visible and committed, some consider that CJS is not currently viewed as a national leader and there are issues regarding its accountability and performance management which require to be addressed.

In 2021 Audit Scotland highlighted that “it is not clear whether roles and accountability arrangements are well understood and working effectively.”³⁷¹ Although CJS aims to provide strategic leadership nationally, it does not have the authority to intervene directly in cases of weak local performance. Nor does it have the powers to require statutory partners to take action, nor the confidence of some partners. This dynamic places inherent constraints on the national body’s strategic influence and contributes to inconsistency in the use, delivery and quality of community justice services across Scotland.

The current model creates a gap between responsibility and authority. National policy expectations for a consistent, high-quality community justice offer are articulated by Ministers and the National Strategy, and CJS is charged with promoting that strategy and supporting improvement. However, delivery, commissioning and resources largely sit locally, and statutory partners are not accountable to CJS in the way that would enable timely intervention where performance is weak. This structural ambiguity contributes to variation in provision and outcomes, and undermines professional and public confidence. There is a sense that CJS leadership is attempting to guide a system it is not fully empowered to control.

Stakeholder evidence reinforces this picture. During our engagement, while partners report positive and constructive relationships with staff within CJS, there is a degree of ambivalence about the organisation’s role, and at times tension between national expectations and local autonomy.

Although we are mindful of these criticisms and take them seriously, we consider that there is a clear need for strong leadership in this area, and a national body to help bring consistency of quality of delivery across Scotland. Creating another organisation to carry out a similar function would be too disruptive at this critical juncture. Instead there must be reform to strengthen the existing arrangements.

“…more could be done with CJS. It has greater potential and importance than it has so far been allowed to achieve. There is a need for an organisation which combines oversight of criminal justice social work in local authorities, with the promotion of crime prevention and community safety at local level.” – Scottish Quaker Community Justice Working Group, Call for Evidence.

“Justice services are also open to doing things differently and would welcome Community Justice Scotland taking the lead on innovations and sharing good practice nationally.” – Justice services for adults, the City of Edinburgh Council, Call for Evidence.

“The establishment of Community Justice Scotland has provided the route to promoting best practice however this has not addressed all of the issues of the former authorities and the lack of ability to compel or penalise poor performance undermines the value of such a body.” – Braveheart Industries, Call for Evidence.

In considering the functions and powers of CJS, the Commission is struck by a number of points. The first is the limitation of its current remit. As we have set out in Chapter Two, prevention and early intervention are critical to reducing the risks and factors that cause people to offend and addressing the conditions that generate crime, and there is the need for working holistically and systematically across the criminal justice system. Broadening the scope of the definition of community justice to include those at risk of offending would allow CJS to take a more active role in prevention and thus better reflect the recommendations of the Christie Commission.³⁷² However, this must be done carefully to ensure that it does not diffuse the focus and remit of CJS.

Secondly, as set out above CJS’s powers are limited to making a “reasonable request” for information or assistance from statutory partners and implementation of any improvements are conditional on the agreement of delivery partners. While able to issue improvement recommendations, partners subject to them are not compelled to take the actions recommended. We consider that this dynamic is not as effective as it needs to be and requires revisiting. For example, CJS could be further empowered by Ministers to set standards for community justice services and be able to require compliance with these.

Thirdly, meaningful improvement in the effectiveness of Community Justice Scotland and the wider community justice system will require structural and operational reforms that address the underlying issues identified by Audit Scotland and other stakeholders. Clarifying the statutory roles and responsibilities of CJS and Community Justice Partnerships would help to establish a more coherent accountability framework, build confidence, reduce ambiguity and support more consistent national oversight.

Clear and balanced system leadership, assurance and escalation arrangements are essential to improve consistency and availability of community justice services across Scotland. Community Justice Scotland has established effective accountability through its governance, audit and sponsorship framework as a national public body. However, greater clarity is required in how national leadership, standards-setting and delivery assurance operate across the community justice system to ensure consistent outcomes in practice. Community Justice Scotland should be responsible for providing national leadership, setting clear expectations, developing standards, and reporting transparently on performance and outcomes at a national level.

In parallel, all statutory partners, through participation in local Community Justice Partnership arrangements, should retain responsibility for the planning, commissioning and delivery of services that meet both national standards and local need. These arrangements must operate in both directions: local services should be able to demonstrate how they are delivering against agreed national outcomes, while Community Justice Scotland should provide effective advice, assurance, challenge and escalation where provision is inconsistent, inadequate or unavailable. Without clearer arrangements for system-wide leadership and delivery assurance, supported by shared data, defined standards and proportionate intervention powers, variation in service availability and quality will continue to undermine confidence in community justice and limit Scotland’s ability to deliver a genuinely equitable national system.

Recommendation 9.1: Review the existing functions and powers of Community Justice Scotland and take steps to ensure that it can provide leadership actions aimed at cohesive delivery of preventative and community justice services. The review must include the ability to set standards and the power to hold statutory partners to account for meeting these. Lead Partner – Scottish Government.

Community Justice Partnerships

Community Justice Partnerships (CJPs) are not statutory bodies. They are the groupings made up of local representatives of the statutory partners to fulfil the duties that the Community Justice (Scotland) Act 2016 places on the specified partners. The Act places a duty on community justice partners to work together to produce a Community Justice Outcome Improvement Plan which outlines key local needs, priorities and plans, and specifies the actions local partners will take to address these, in alignment with nationally determined outcomes. They must also report annually on progress against their local plan and share this with Community Justice Scotland.

CJPs should act as a link between local partnership delivery and national policy. We have heard that CJPs do not work as effectively across all priorities, for a range of issues including governance, differing seniority of co-ordinators and absence of senior decision-makers in planning discussions. While all areas have some form of partnership bringing together local partners, these structures are varied and lack the power to hold budgets to commission services, or coordinate delivery meaning that they are not delivering to their full potential. It is our view that this position would be improved were CJPs to be given a statutory basis. This would emphasise the importance they require to play in ensuring local delivery of community justice services is effective and efficient. It could allow them to hold budget allocations, commission necessary services, and ultimately improve the delivery of community justice services. Now that ten years have passed since the Act was passed, it seems timely for a review of the structures needed to help local statutory partners to work more effectively.

Recommendation 9.2: Review Community Justice Partnership structures which should include consideration of putting them on a statutory basis with defined duties and powers. Lead partners – Scottish Government and Community Justice Scotland (CJS) with involvement of local and national partners and voluntary sector representative groups.

CJS should continue to play an enabling role in relation to CJPs. Its task should continue to be to assist local CJPs to align their plans with the national strategy, providing guidance, toolkits, and constructive challenge without undermining local ownership or duplicating local authority functions. It should also continue to help build capacity through training, peer learning, and technical support, championing innovation and setting evaluation frameworks. This role would be facilitated if CJS was responsible for the statutory guidance to CJPs which currently sits with the Scottish Government.

Recommendation 9.3: Transfer responsibility for statutory guidance for Community Justice Partners from Scottish Ministers to Community Justice Scotland. Lead Partner – Scottish Government.

Scrutiny and accountability

It is the Commission’s view that despite some collaboration there are gaps in the scrutiny of the delivery of community justice. There is no consistent national inspection cycle for community justice, and the findings of inspections of existing inspectorates that relate to the delivery of community justice services are not always followed by structured improvement activity across all local authority areas.

The Commission recognises that there are a number of bodies already engaged in the scrutiny of different aspects of justice services including the Care Inspectorate, HM Inspector of Prosecution, HM Inspector of Prisons Scotland and HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland, Healthcare Improvement Scotland, the Scottish Human Rights Commission, Audit Scotland, and Education Scotland. We are also aware of the examples of collaboration on various themes between some of these scrutiny bodies, but also that in some instances while recommendations have purportedly been accepted by the partner they have not been implemented.

Close collaboration needs to become more routine, maintained, developed and better mapped to show roles and responsibilities. Joint inspections of community justice should be carried out, using multi-agency teams to reduce duplication and focus scrutiny on cross-cutting issues such as adherence to standards and guidelines, practice standards, effectiveness of service and outcomes, and the work of CJS itself. A common outcomes framework, like the current Community Justice Strategy, should be adopted, with shared indicators for Justice Social Work performance linked to the National Performance Framework. Finally, it is important that when there are recommendations from an inspection that these are acted upon and monitored.

Recommendation 9.4: Improve collaboration between existing Inspectorates on community justice inputs and outcomes. Action on Inspectorate recommendations must be monitored by the Inspectors with compliance followed up and reported upon. Lead partner – Scottish Government.

Inspection arrangements for policing, prisons, and prosecution are established, statutory, and transparent. Administrative performance of the criminal courts should be independently scrutinised without encroaching on judicial independence of decision making on criminal charges. This would be complementary with inspection of community justice service delivery. System wide inspection should focus on justice social work, CJPs and cross-agency delivery, while an Inspector of Criminal Justice Courts could scrutinise the administrative performance of the courts including reasons for trial delays, digital transformation, effective implementation of court orders etc both in regards to areas with community justice implications and more broadly given the impact all types of cases have on the efficiency of others.

In coming to this view we note the existence of Criminal Justice Inspection in Northern Ireland an independent, statutory Inspectorate created in 2003 to independently assess and improve the efficiency, effectiveness and fairness of Northern Ireland’s criminal justice system. While we acknowledge that the genesis of this body lies in the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement and a different political context, we believe that Inspectorates with the ability to identify issues and barriers to effectiveness, efficiency and fairness to victims and accused that are common to some or all justice organisations and identification of collaborative working and best practice would have value in Scotland too.

Recommendation 9.5: Consider the establishment of a new inspectorate to provide scrutiny of the administrative performance of the criminal courts, without encroaching on the judicial independence of decision making on criminal charges. Lead partner – Scottish Government.

A coherent and transparent inspection regime for community justice delivery and the administration of criminal courts would strengthen accountability, improve the evidence base for sentencing policy, and enhance public confidence in both custodial and non-custodial sanctions. It would ensure that local government and national agencies work together in a continuous cycle of inspection, improvement, and learning, underpinned by respect for the necessary constitutional independencies and a shared commitment to high standards of delivery of community justice by all the organisations which play a part in Scotland’s justice system.

Restorative Justice

Restorative Justice (RJ) is a voluntary, facilitated process that engages those responsible for and harmed by a criminal offence having a constructive dialogue about the harm caused and what can be done to set things right. Evidence shows that restorative justice can “reduce the likelihood of further offending, assist people to recover from the harm of crime, and provide greater satisfaction with the justice process.”³⁷³ It can reinforce or accelerate a decision to desist from offending behaviour.

To ensure that victims are not inappropriately pressured, or even contacted where this may be distressing or inappropriate, victims organisations must have a role in facilitating this contact. RJ must only take place voluntarily and be facilitated independently from the police or COPFS. The process must be victim-led, and the accused person must also be willing to participate.³⁷⁴

“…trained restorative justice facilitators can facilitate safe, voluntary, constructive communication between a person responsible for an offence and the person they have harmed (Kirkwood, 2022). Such processes have been found to result in higher levels of satisfaction than standard criminal justice procedures, on average result in a cost effective reduction in re-offending, and can have a range of other benefits such as reducing post-traumatic stress.” – Dr Steve Kirkwood, Academic, University of Edinburgh, Call for Evidence.

As set out in Chapter Five, one of the main purposes of sentencing is “reparation” yet when it comes to restorative justice and mediation, Scotland is behind some of its European counterparts³⁷⁵. Like many current community justice services, RJ services in Scotland are fragmented and not universally available. Availability and nature varies geographically, dependent on whether restorative justice has been historically established in an area, whether services still exist, and whether local authority criminal justice social work departments have trained in-house facilitators or experience referring cases to third-sector providers and the crime types covered.

The Scottish Government Restorative Justice Action Plan was launched in 2019³⁷⁶ and supports the commitment to have RJ services widely available across Scotland by 2023. Community Justice Scotland (CJS) and the Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice (CYCJ) are currently working together to lead on implementation of its main parts. We understand the Scottish Government has overall responsibility for policy roll out, the funding of necessary work and pace of progress.

The Action Plan states the Scottish Government ambition to be: “Restorative Justice is available across Scotland to all those who wish to access it, and at a time that is appropriate to the people and case involved.” More than five years later this has not been achieved although we appreciate the pandemic will have played a role. We understand that there are significant building blocks that need to be in place to realise the RJ ambition – a policy, practice framework and guidance, trained practitioners, awareness of RJ as an option, funding for services, an agreement on a delivery model that works etc as well as a wider cultural shift.

RJ has particular benefits to victims and those who have offended, including reaching a resolution much quicker than proceeding via the court system; enhanced perceptions of procedural justice and feeling heard; and helping reduce the accused person’s risk of reoffending.

“There is considerable evidence that restorative justice (RJ) can improve victims’ feelings of safety and reduce reoffending, yet progress on this has been really poor.” – Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, Call for Evidence.

“Victim Support Scotland has raised concerns regarding the current model of Restorative Justice in Scotland. We are open to use of Restorative Justice where it is victim led, and not likely to cause further trauma to the victim” – Victim Support Scotland, Call for Evidence.

We are mindful that some have concerns about RJ in particular contexts, for example as an alternative to prosecution, where a person who is not truly committed to the approach could be incentivised to participate to receive a more lenient disposal. There may also be particular offence types that are not well suited to the RJ approach, for example crimes that involve coercive control. However, we consider the key is to have RJ available but also ensure the relevant organisations take a flexible and person-centred approach, mindful of the particular nature of each case, and sensitive to victims’ views.

In our Call for Evidence and engagement we heard some suggestions that Scotland should be making greater use of restorative justice (RJ) measures and its benefits were highlighted as reducing reoffending, reducing negative emotions among victims and generating economic savings.

Recommendation 9.6: Continue work to ensure that Restorative Justice processes are made consistently available throughout Scotland. Lead partners – Scottish Government, justice partners, and third sector.

The Risk Management Authority

Managing individuals who pose a serious risk of harm to the public is one of the most significant challenges in criminal justice policy and delivery. We recognise that victim support organisations and the wider public are deeply concerned about those who present such risks.

In Scotland, responsibility for setting national standards in this area and overseeing the management of those who pose the greatest risk rests with the Risk Management Authority (RMA). Established in 2005, as an independent non-departmental public body, the RMA has specialist responsibility for risk assessment and risk management. Its core statutory role is to ensure that individuals subject to statutory orders who may pose a serious risk of harm to others are properly assessed and managed. This includes work connected to the Order for Lifelong Restriction (OLR), a sentence imposed by the High Court for an indeterminate period on people who have offended that are assessed as posing a serious risk of harm to the public. Currently, there are just under 300 people subject to an OLR in Scotland. In fulfilling this role, the RMA works closely with key partners, including the Scottish Prison Service, Police Scotland, local authority justice social work services, forensic psychologists, and the Parole Board for Scotland.

Through its work in relation to risk of serious harm, the RMA has identified recurring challenges that affect the quality and timeliness of risk assessment and management for those who pose a risk of serious harm, but are not subject to OLR, and impacts professionals and agencies involved in decision-making at every stage of the justice process, from pre-trial and sentencing to release decisions and community supervision.

In addition, the RMA sets and maintains national standards and guidance for risk management practice. It is responsible for the Framework for Risk Assessment, Management and Evaluation (FRAME), which provides shared principles and approaches for all criminal justice agencies. The RMA also accredits and oversees specialist risk assessors whose expertise informs the High Court when considering the imposition of an OLR. Furthermore, the RMA commissions and disseminates research on effective approaches to assessing and managing risk, contributing to a stronger evidence base for practice.

The Commission believes that to continue to address these issues effectively, the RMA should have stronger powers to act where it identifies departures from effective, evidence-based risk assessment and management practice. If FRAME standards are not met, the RMA should be able to enforce compliance or sanction justice bodies where standards are not being upheld. This could include powers of review, issue directions, and applying financial penalties.

In shaping its future policy and research functions, the RMA should ensure that risk management approaches are balanced with considerations of unmet needs, human rights, desistance, responsivity, and diversity. Embedding these principles can help prevent a “risk tunnel” mindset, where an excessive focus on identifying risk overshadows efforts to promote change, progression, and reintegration.

Recommendation 9.7: The Risk Management Authority (RMA) should have stronger powers to act where it identifies departures from effective, evidence-based risk assessment and management practice. If FRAME standards are not met, or if staff are not appropriately trained, the RMA should be able to enforce compliance or sanction justice bodies, potentially including review, direction, and financial penalty. Lead partners – Scottish Government and Risk Management Authority.

Long-term decarceration strategy and achieving change

In recent years, there has been too much focus on managing overcrowding crises in the prison system with short-term answers such as emergency release. Short-term measures may ease immediate pressure but they do not prevent the same problems from recurring and can negatively impact public trust. The Commission has been tasked with taking a strategic view.

Should local and national government choose to implement our recommendations, there will still be a need for long-term thinking about the justice system to prevent a similar crisis from arriving in years to come. To ensure focus on this issue is maintained, recommendations are implemented, and further policies are developed over time, there must be regular planning and accountability to ensure Scotland is moving in the right direction.

Adopting a long-term perspective on justice is necessary to meeting the recommendations and ambitions set out by this Commission, and those by inquiries and reviews that have gone before us. A long-term plan will help make progress on relevant goals while also seeking to address (and prevent) concerns raised by Audit Scotland regarding spiralling public spending by making progress on reducing pressures, delays, or demand.

Our justice system is interconnected and interdependent. Policies and decisions made by one organisation have consequences across the system, both intended and unintended. Justice partners have told us about being surprised to not be consulted about policies intended to improve one part of the system, which can then impact on their organisation further down the line. Similarly, what happens in services and sectors like health and welfare, affect Scottish justice. Inequalities and social policy decisions affect uses of imprisonment,³⁷⁷ and they affect lives, livelihoods, and life chances. Clear, early engagement and collaboration combined with improved communication and strategic planning across agencies is essential to avoid such unintended effects.

As we have set out in Chapter Ten, there is a need to improve capacity for longer term modelling by addressing data gaps and use futures and foresight methodologies. These approaches allow organisations to test different scenarios and plan more confidently for long-term pressures and would help justice organisations to collaborate and plan for long-term futures. We are aware that the recent Future Trends horizon-scanning and foresight project³⁷⁸ had very little to say about future trends and strategies for criminal justice, beyond noting longstanding issues. A national decarceration plan based on long-term foresight could help to rectify this.

Modelling needs to be regularly discussed and actively utilised by key players across the system, including through multi-agency collaboration, to enable a strategic, “whole system” view of the health of the system and the impact of particular policies. This approach ensures that appropriate risks and downstream impacts are considered collectively, fostering shared accountability and coordinated responses. This in turn would facilitate forward-looking consideration of the likely impact of policies and legislation on the prison population and how the prison estate can evolve over time to address these. Forward-looking consideration should not be limited to justice and requires engagement with social work, third sector, victims’ groups, and related policy areas such as housing and health. Decarceration strategies and efforts in other places may extend wider than a focus on what happens in sentencing and criminal justice,³⁷⁹,³⁸⁰ for example, solutions and better support for areas like mental health, drugs, and the welfare state.

The Scottish Government should be transparent about the modelling and policies they have developed in response as part of their long-term planning, as well as the opportunity costs, and risks of failing to act. For example, if penal policy has not worked towards decarceration, why? What leadership is needed? If further prisons are to be built, where will the budget be taken from? Parliament should have a role in these discussions to ensure democratic accountability and opportunities for cross-party consensus-building. Decarceration and justice transcend the political interests of any one party or one parliamentary term. The nation’s leaders and elected members should plan for and work towards better, safer and more just futures, for the sake of future generations.

Long-term national planning on justice is not necessarily centralising and standardising in nature. Foresight experts, like those in the Heywood Fellowship,³⁸¹ emphasise how long-term national planning can be sensitive to place and localism. Indeed, justice is mostly delivered locally, so a national plan needs to have regard to place.

If other nations and places can realise lower prison populations and improve community-based responses, why can’t Scotland? We recognise that the Scottish context has some similarities and some differences from international examples; any national plan here will need to be bespoke to Scotland. What international examples show is that decarceration efforts do not dismantle or destroy prosecutorial or judicial independence; judges and prosecutors remain vital parts of democratic nations with lower prison populations. It is time now that we had a long-term plan for Scotland, setting out step by step how to get to a safer, better and more just future.

Recommendation 9.8: Publish a national decarceration plan within 12 months, setting out clear milestones, modelling, and annual reporting plans, with a view to substantially reducing the prison population to that of the average Western European country. Lead partner – Scottish Government.

Strategic oversight of criminal justice

Scotland’s criminal justice system lacks the strong and coherent strategic leadership necessary to guide a complex, interdependent set of organisations. Audit Scotland has described the system as difficult to manage because of the number of bodies involved, noting that “the criminal justice system is complex… which makes it difficult to manage processes as a whole system”³⁸² and that “there is no single organisation with overall responsibility for the criminal justice system.” Each part of the system influences the others: court delays increase the remand population, pressures in prisons affect access to rehabilitation, and inconsistent community justice provision undermines policy aims to reduce the use of custody. Yet despite repeated policy commitments, progress has stalled. Audit Scotland has highlighted that “the ambition to increase the use of community sentences has not yet been realised,”³⁸³ reflecting a wider challenge in translating strategic aims into operational delivery. In the absence of a single accountable body with authority for the system as a whole, it remains difficult to align resources, set shared priorities or manage risks coherently across policing, prosecution, courts, prisons and community justice.

These challenges are reinforced by structural weaknesses in the existing Justice Board, which, although valuable for dialogue, is limited to influence rather than direction. Audit Scotland’s finding that “it is not clear that all stakeholders share a common understanding of lines of accountability and areas of responsibility”³⁸⁴ illustrates the operational consequences of this arrangement, while its conclusion that “there is no single body responsible for coordinating system-wide recovery”³⁸⁵ during the court backlog crisis highlights the limitations of the current governance model. Moreover, the Board’s membership omits key voices such as Justice Social Work, defence representatives, the NHS and the third sector. These gaps make it difficult for the Board to anticipate system-wide consequences of operational decisions or to ensure coordinated implementation of reforms.

When reflecting on how improvement across the system might be better supported, the Commission noted that it may be helpful to explore whether a new group should be established with responsibility for providing strategic oversight of improvement across the whole criminal justice system. Audit Scotland’s earlier analysis in 2013 identified the risks inherent in relying on partnership working where participating bodies have distinct roles, responsibilities and constitutional constraints, and the Commission observed that these issues seem largely unchanged twelve years later. Examples include the fact that agencies did not always recognise their shared responsibility for preventing failures such as non-attendance at court, despite each contributing factors that influence it.

The Commission also recognises that constitutional requirements for independence in policing, prosecution and judicial decision making can make collaboration more challenging, but noted that this does not eliminate the need for coordinated planning and shared responsibility for system performance. A separate oversight body could work alongside the existing Justice Board but bring a wider perspective, including the interests of victims, those accused or convicted, and the wider public. Such a body could seek consensus on which organisations should contribute to improvements in areas where responsibilities overlap, such as ensuring higher levels of court attendance, sharing data or improving outcomes for victims and witnesses. Although the Commission did not have sufficient time to explore this proposal in detail, it considered that it may merit further exploration by the Scottish Government.

Recommendation 9.9: Consider alternative models for strategic oversight of Scotland’s criminal justice system, to deliver a more efficient and effective system. Lead partner – Scottish Government and justice partners.