Evaluation of Sheffield Community Justice Panel

Community (or Neighbourhood) Justice Panels are an innovative community-based model of restorative justice being used in Sheffield, Somerset and Manchester.

Community Justice Panels are community-based, using local volunteers to facilitate restorative meetings, building community ownership of solutions without recourse to the criminal justice system.

They are highlighted in the sentencing green paper Breaking the Cycle as an effective model that the government wants to pilot more widely.

This 2010 research by Sheffield Hallam University compared the cost of community mediation with interventions by statutory agencies. It found that the average cost of mediating a neighbour dispute across three mediation services varied from £160 to £430 (depending on throughput of cases); whereas local authority interventions could cost £1,240 – for example to go to court for an injunction.