HELEN LENEY

23 OCTOBER 2007

  Q40  Dr Whitehead: Yes?

  Helen Leney: No, not at all. We started off as part of the JRC research as a multi-agency partnership to deliver the research. I was just a sessional facilitator then, so I cannot speak with too much authority, but it took a good year to get all the systems in place so that we could operate effectively and efficiently and then, when the research came to an end, we carried on with all those systems in place. We have very close links with the police, with the Probation Service, who are the lead agency; so we are linked into the probation computer systems, we have access to all the offender information we need, we have a very good relationship with the victims unit, with victim support, with all the agencies that we need to deal with, and there is no reason why every other probation area in the country could not have a restorative justice service tied in with it.

  Q41  Dr Whitehead: You mention that you are linked in, for example, to the Probation Service's computer. Would you say that was a relationship that has emerged on the basis of an understanding by those probation officers and probation services of the potential of what you are doing or was that a relationship that had to be built? What were their perceptions initially of your service and what would you say their perceptions are now?

  Helen Leney: Thames Valley was in the vanguard of delivering restorative justice through Thames Valley Police, so I think there has been a culture for quite a few years in Thames Valley about RJ, and I think there is very strong support from the local Criminal Justice Board—in fact I know there is, I have it in a letter from them—to encourage the use of restorative justice. I think initially it was a bit of an unknown quantity when it came to actually delivering it on the field, talking to probation officers, prison officers, whatever, but over the last six years we have developed a very close relationship and I think we are accepted as a very useful part of the system now.

  Q42  Dr Whitehead: Local magistrates?

  Helen Leney: Magistrates are very supportive. I have brought a letter. I should say that Thames Valley Restorative Justice Service has been fighting for survival for the last year because of budget constraints and we actually only have enough money for the next two weeks, I think, so I got here just in time.

  Q43  Chairman: You say you have got enough money just in time.

  Helen Leney: No, I have got here just in time because our funding runs out next month.

  Q44  Chairman: Oh, I am sorry.

  Helen Leney: The Chair of the Thames Valley Bench Chairman's Forum has written to Lord Faulkner saying, "As sentencers in the Thames Valley, we are extremely concerned that we are about to lose a much valued option in our courts to make restorative justice a specified active requirement also, as a consequence, denying the wishes of victims in a significant number of cases." About two-thirds of our cases are referred from magistrates' courts and about a third from crown courts. The community sentence ones are about two-thirds community orders and about a third suspended sentence orders. So we get quite a number of cases referred.

  Q45  Chairman: This funding problem remains unresolved, does it?

  Helen Leney: It does remain unresolved.

  Q46  Chairman: I think we might inquire of the new Lord Chancellor whether he has seen your letter or heard your evidence to us today.

  Helen Leney: We have had a letter from Jack Straw, who states, "There is currently no specific funding available for adult restorative justice. It is for the local criminal justice boards and criminal justice agencies to consider how to use their funding to best meet their targets and local needs." Coming back to what you were saying about restorative justice being able to be used nationally, yes, there is absolutely no reason why restorative justice cannot be rolled out across the whole country, indeed I think it should be, but it has got to be funded, and that is a big problem.

  Q47  Dr Whitehead: In your estimation there are not, I do not think, accurate statistics available on the impact of reoffending rates where restorative justice has been undertaken. What is your impression of that and how the future behaviour of offenders might be affected?

  Helen Leney: We are waiting for the reoffending results of the JRC research, which I am told will be at the end of this year, and that will go across the randomised control trials in Northumbria, Thames Valley and London.

  Q48  Chairman: I did not hear precisely what you said then about the trials in Northumbria and London?

  Helen Leney: The JRC (Justice Research Consortium) research carried out for the Home Office was across the three sites, and those results will be published by Sheffield University via the justice ministry hopefully at the end of the year. I have no idea, I have no inside information, I am afraid, about what those results are going to show, but the other significant report that came out earlier on this year is from Professor Sherman and Dr Strang, who have looked at all the studies that have been done worldwide and have done a meta-analysis on them, and of the studies on violent crimes that met the strict research criteria six showed a reduction in reoffending, four showed no change in reoffending, none of them showed an increase in reoffending. They also did some research on property crimes and other things, but those are the figures for violent offences. So, the evidence from elsewhere in the world would tend to suggest that you do, on balance, get a reduction in reoffending rates. Some of these reductions were huge and others were fairly minor; so it varies. We will have to wait and see what happens in the UK results. My own experience of offenders taking part in restorative justice is that they are much more motivated to do something about the problem that causes them to commit the offence.

  Q49  Chairman: As a result.

  Helen Leney: As a result of meeting the victims. Can I give you another example? I have to be scant on the details of cases to preserve anonymity, but this was a young man who assaulted another young man. When I saw him after sentence he said he realised he should not have done it, and he wanted to apologise to the victim, but it had not been that bad really, because he had only hit him twice and, if the other one had not elbowed him in the groin, he would not have lost his temper anyway, so minimising and justifying to a certain extent. When they met, the victim's mother came along and the offender said this at the beginning of the meeting and she whipped out of her handbag the Polaroid photographs that she had taken of her son in hospital. These photos had been available in court and the offender said he had chosen not to look at them but, faced with the victim's mother waving them under his nose, of course he could not avoid them. He looked at them and he crumpled and said, "I could not possibly have done that, I only hit you twice", and the victim said, "No, I had a bruise here, one there, one there, one there." He went all over his head and shoulders and neck pointing out where the bruises were and said, "And my nose was not just broken, it was smashed and the doctor said somebody had been doing this to it (hand gestures)" There was quite a long silence while the offender took all this in, broken by the offender, who said: could I record the first item on the conference agreement as a request to his probation officer to get him on the first available anger management course that there was because he said, "I have suddenly realised I have got a problem and I need to do something about it." He has completed the course and he has reported that he is using the techniques that he learned in that to control his temper.

  Q50  Mrs James: What support do you think needs to be put in place and by whom to make restorative justice available to sentencers more widely across the country?

  Helen Leney: I am not sure that I am qualified to answer that really. I think restorative justice sells itself. Once people become aware of what it is like and what it can do, I think then people start to become more accepting of it.

  Q51  Chairman: Criminal justice boards have got to divert some of their funds into it for it to happen, have they not?

  Helen Leney: Well, yes. One of the things that could help was if restorative justice became a target. The letter from Jack Straw saying it is up to the local criminal justice boards to decide how best to meet their targets: restorative justice is not a target and the criminal justice agencies in Thames Valley, the probation and the police, have both had huge cuts in their budgets for this year, which is why they cannot support us any longer financially. They are struggling to keep their core services going; so to fund something which they do not have a target set for, it is not going to happen, is it?

  Q52  Mrs James: We have already heard previous evidence about the problems of the media exacerbating things, making things bigger than they are. What work do you think needs to be done and by whom to explain to the public, media and sentencers about restorative justice to try and spread it out a little more?

  Helen Leney: I think one of the problems with the media coverage of restorative justice is that it is largely focused on the offender and you get these headlines like, "Say sorry and get off", which, as Cindy Barnett said, are completely misleading and very unhelpful. I do not think there has been very much media attention on the benefits to victims, which is unfortunate, because if certain newspapers had the welfare of victims at heart they would go for restorative justice whole-heartedly and they would be pushing for it. The Joanna Shapland Report, for instance, some of the outcomes: 72% of victims found some closure, 79% of offenders—these are cases that took part in a restorative justice conference as opposed to the control group—thought it lessened the chance of reoffending, most victims felt the conference lessened the negative effects of the crime, 83% of offenders felt that restorative justice had made them realise the harm done by the offence, 80% of offenders and 69% of victims have more understanding of how the offence came about, 61% of offenders felt restorative justice made him or her address the problems behind the offence. We do not know whether that is going to translate into reduced reoffending. Overall 85% of victims and 80% of offenders were satisfied with the restorative justice process. Compare that with satisfaction with the criminal justice system in the December 2003 Audit Commission Report: over two-thirds of the public not at all, or not very, confident that the criminal justice system meets the needs of the victims, confidence is lower with those people who have been the victim of crime—so it goes down when you become a customer, so to speak—and two in five witnesses, because of their experience, would not be prepared to go to court again. So the satisfaction rates for restorative justice are just off the scale compared with that. The other, I think, interesting thing from this report from Joanna Shapland is that victims of offenders are more satisfied with the criminal justice system having taken part in a restorative justice conference.

  Q53  Chairman: I think a few more articles from one or two of your victims, perhaps with names changed, instead of the press making things up.

  Helen Leney: Yes, absolutely. I did take a victim along to the international conference—it sounds terribly grand—at Winchester two weeks ago and she spoke about her experience as a victim. She came into prison and met her offenders there and she spoke very eloquently about how meeting them lessened her fear of coming face to face with them when they were released and all her questions answered and she just generally felt so much better about what that happened to her, so much so that she changed careers and she is now a trainee probation officer.

  Chairman: Ms Leney, thank you very much indeed. You will have sensed from our questions that we greatly value what you and your colleagues do and I, for one, would very much like to see your idea extended and made widely available to the courts. Thank you very much indeed.