Blog

Happy New Year and welcome to my first blog of 2016. I hope that you all had a good Christmas break, which in my case brought countless opportunities to practice restorative parenting as my children squabbled over their presents.

It was also an opportunity to reflect – as we develop our work programme for next year – on where the restorative practice field has got to and what the future will bring. 

Last week’s spending review was expected to herald unprecedented cuts across the justice system. Police budgets were expected to be slashed, while cuts in the Ministry of Justice’s budget of 30% or more were widely predicted. In the end, what emerged was nothing like as bad as many in the criminal justice world had feared.

A decade or so ago I worked at the Fawcett Society, a charity that campaigns for gender equality, leading their work to improve the criminal justice system for women who offend. It was a topical issue – Baroness Corston was in the process of conducting her government-sponsored review on this issue – and there was an emerging political consensus that the justice system simply did not work well enough for women. It was broadly agreed that prison, and particularly short prison sentences, were overused, with serious effects on the women’s own wellbeing as well as that of their families.

I recently had an informal meeting with the Cabinet Office to discuss social impact bonds. It was purely an exploratory discussion, as part of our work to help the restorative practice field develop and grow.