INTRODUCTION

1. BRIEFING FOR CRIME AND DISORDER POLICY & SCRUTINY COMMITTEE OF WESTMINSTER CITY COUNCIL15 JUNE 2009

2. INTRODUCTION The Crown Prosecution Service welcomes this opportunity to present to the City of Westminster Council how the CPS seeks to work with the local authorities in London to ensure that Community Concerns are addressed and that decisions to prosecute (or not to prosecute) are fully explained and understood.

3. How the CPS will seek to understand local community priorities and concerns 1. The Crown Prosecution Service has been committed to increased information sharing and this has in large part focused on providing communities and members of the public with information about our activities and how we operate. This takes place through a number of fora, formal and informal, and also involves greater use of the media.

4. The CPS has started opening up its files to a Scrutiny Panel made up of members of the community which is independent of the CPS and which enables these community members to explore how decisions have been made and how cases have been progressed and to feedback so that the learning can be embedded in future cases. The CPS has focused in large part on Hate Crime in relation to these scrutiny panels and this will broaden once the panels are more established. The CPS has set up a community involvement panel pan-London upon which members of the community are able to comment on strategy and policy through consultation and co-operation. The CPS now wishes to broaden our engagement with communities to involvement in local priority setting and to addressing concerns in a more structured way. In this regard, the concept of the local community prosecutor is key.

5. CPS London Area Delivery Action Plan 2. The Crown Prosecution Service publishes an annual Area Business Plan which summarises its key aims and objectives and has focused:  on how we become more effective in the courts  how we intend to increase in-house advocacy  how we can improve victim and witness care  how we intend to ensure that public confidence is improved in the criminal justice service  what structural reforms are required in order for us to deliver better service  how we ensure that we lead, manage and engage with our partners and communities

6. The local authorities will be interested particularly in our plan to increase community stakeholder engagement at both an area and borough level and to increase satisfaction levels. To this end, the Community Involvement Panel and Hate Crime Scrutiny Panel referred to above are key planks. We have focused on sharing the learning across the area and increased engagement with those communities which have had the least confidence in criminal justice which we have previously identified as travelers, refugees, immigrants, the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender communities, older persons, young people and those with mental health disabilities. We wish to promote greater engagement with community justice centres and they already exist in Haringey, Newham and Wandsworth. We want to engage in a more formal and less ad hoc way with crime and disorder reduction partnerships but not to build new structures to enable this engagement to take place.

7. National Policy 3. The Crown Prosecution Service is a national organisation and as such adheres to national quality standards and national policies. In the last year we have issued our very first policy on Crimes Against Older People, we have refreshed our policy on Racial and Religiously Aggravated Crime, on Rape and Sexual Offences, and on Violence Against Women in particular Domestic Violence. We will develop consistency using national policy.

8. New Criminal Justice Service Initiatives 4. CPS London is an innovative organisation and working with the London Criminal Justice Board and our Criminal Justice Partners we have been quick to develop new ways of working which have been adopted nationally or will be adopted nationally. We have been rolling out integrated prosecution teams across London to ensure that prosecutors are based within their boroughs jointly co-located with our police colleagues. We have initiated the virtual court pilot which will impact on Westminster work as it rolls out from the end of May 2009.

9. We have developed a Complex Casework Centre to which we will add a substantial amount of Metropolitan Police Squad work to ensure that we focus our performance on the most serious cases in the most effective way. We are piloting and delivering a number of processes to improve the progression of cases through court through what we call the Optimum Business Model together with streamlined process for a more proportionate approach to simple cases. We intend to increase our use of conditional cautioning which has the ability of reducing offending behaviour. We have a number of strategies to deal with victims and witnesses which we will integrate to enable us to meet our obligations under the Victims' Code.

10. The Community Prosecutor 5. Following the policing Green Paper, from the neighbourhood to the national: 'policing our communities together' and the most recent Green Paper on local community justice in April 2009, it is our view that we should reinforce the police's approach to engage with the local communities to understand and address their priorities. This is achieved by employing a problem solving approach and working in partnership with a wide range of local public and voluntary sector agencies.

11. The government's crime strategy "cutting crime: a new partnership 2008-11" recognises the importance of raising public confidence by ensuring that public services are accessible and accountable to all sections of the community and that communities are increasingly engaged in its activities and feel they have shaped their decision making process and the setting of priorities. This strategy is also reflected in the Criminal Justice Service Strategic Plan: "working together to cut crime and deliver justice".

12. The most recent Green Paper concluded that radical change is needed to help the public to become more engaged in tackling crime and to halt the erosion of community spirit. Building on the setting up of neighbourhood policing teams and our relocation to borough based Crown Prosecution Service units, we have established a means by which we can negotiate priorities for action and identify and implement solutions with our police colleagues. The police as you know, use an intelligence led proactive problem solving approach to focus and to tackle local issues and this requires a two way flow of information with the community to build trust and cooperation. The police teams are encouraged to concentrate on "signal" or "quality of life" crimes – most people's concerns about neighbourhood security are triggered by issues such as anti-social behaviour, criminal damage, and minor disorder.

13. The Diamond Initiative in London is one of 5 integrated offender management projects that will be developed across the country. In London, it aims to break the cycle of re-offending and thereby reduce the demand for prison places by targeting resettlement resources on identified neighbourhoods with high volumes of resident offences. It is currently being piloted in Lambeth, Lewisham and Newham over a 2 year period. To date, CPS engagement with communities on casework issues has been generally "after the event" as there has been no mechanism for community priorities to have any real time influence on decisions to prosecute criminal offences taking place within the community on a daily basis. In this sense, the community prosecutor needs to react to and adopt the communities concerns as they consider the cases from that community on a daily basis, thereby incorporating those concerns in the decisions whether to prosecute.

14. The community prosecutor will focus on geographical communities recognising that within those communities there are likely to be a variety of views, needs and priorities, but that they will also be shared concerns and problems. In this way, the community prosecutor would contribute the overall effectiveness of the neighbourhood strategy by providing advice to the police on the range of offences available to tackle identified priority problems in particular neighbourhoods. The community prosecutor role would also support the expanding role of the prosecutor in non-court disposals. This would mean that they need to know what type of diversions are available locally, including any reparative or restorative justice schemes. We will work closely with our partner agencies including local authorities and engage with them to take their views on how certain offending might be dealt with.

15. This is a two-way process: not many people will be familiar with disposals such as the conditional caution or restorative justice and those who do may be skeptical of their benefits and see them as a soft option. However the process of engagement feedback on casework decisions will allow the community prosecutor to explain why such disposals are effective and deemed most appropriate in certain cases. Community prosecutors should also be prepared to take a proactive role by suggesting alternatives approaches in relation to tackling neighbourhood priorities, where they had concerns that a particular strategy was not working.

16. Perhaps most importantly, the role of the community prosecutor would therefore provide an identifiable contact for our partner agencies, for public sector agencies, for community groups and voluntary sector organisations in dealing with neighbourhood issues. It will involve a more proactive public facing role that has hitherto been the case for prosecutors. This will increase confidence and trust and improve relations with the communities and also help to reduce crime and to prevent re-offending.

17. Nazir Afzal OBE Legal Director Crown Prosecution Service, London Tel: 020 8901 5906 Fax: 020 8901 5911 Email: Nazir.Afzal@cps.gsi.gov.uk