Supporting victims of crime in England and Wales
| DOI | 10.1177/0269758017747055 |
| Date | 01 May 2018 |
| Published date | 01 May 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Supporting victims of crime
in England and Wales: Local
commissioning meeting
local needs?
Matthew Hall
University of Lincoln, UK
Abstract
This paper will focus on how support services for victims of crime have developed in England and
Wales since the advent of the 2010 coalition government of the United Kingdom. In particular, the
discussion will centre around the development of a framework of locally commissioned victim
service providers effectively replacing a previous model of central funding aimed largely at a single
national organisation, the charity Victim Support. Both the conception and the implementation of
this strategy by government and local actors – notably regional Police and Crime Commissioners –
will be critically assessed in order to test government claims concerning the utility of such a system
for victims of crime themselves. In so doing, it will be argued that in practice it has been difficult to
discern how specific local needs can be identified or catered for under these new arrangements.
The paper will also demonstrate a great deal of variance in the ways Police and Crime Commis-
sioners have approached these tasks. Ultimately, it will be suggested that what is often touted as a
general sea-change in favour of crime victims as a whole may in fact be grounded more in a neo-
liberal, market ideology. Local commissioning also, it is argued, represents a continuing prior-
itisation of certain victims of crime for attention by central government whilst keeping the support
needs of the vast majority of ‘more typical’ victims of crime at arm’s length.
Keywords
Victim support, local commissioning, public policy, impacts of crime, Police and Crime
Commissioners
Corresponding author:
Matthew Hall, Lincoln Law School, University of Lincoln, Bradford Pool, Lincoln, Lincolnshire LN6 7TS, UK.
Email: MHall@lincoln.ac.uk
International Review of Victimology
2018, Vol. 24(2) 219–237
ªThe Author(s) 2018
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0269758017747055
journals.sagepub.com/home/irv
Introduction
This paper sets out to examine the implementation of a local commissioning framework introduced
for victim services in England and Wales by its government in 2012. Whilst discussion of the
political and practical drivers behind the formation of this framework can be found in the recent
work of Mawby (2016) and Simmonds (2016), this paper aims to go one step further by beginning
to critically evaluate how the framework has been working in practice in its early years. In
particular, the paper will explore the degree to which local service commissioners have undertaken
systematic or meaningful assessment to ascertain the needs of local victims as a means of inform-
ing the commissioning process, and the apparent outcomes of that process as a result.
As such, this paper will begin by setting out some of the background behind the so-called
politicisation of the crime victim by successive UK (and other) governments since at least the early
1980s, including its international and European context. It will next chart the rise and (arguably)
fall of Victim Support as the major publicly funded provider of victim services in England and
Wales, examining the development of a more localised, market-based model of distributing public
funds to this end which developed in the mid-1990s and culminated in a position whereby locally
elected Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs)
1
became responsible for the local commissioning
of such services in their respective police areas. To this end, PCCs were required to assess the local
needs of victims in order to fully tailor their commissioning of local services. It is this exercise
which is the main focus of this paper. For this purpose, a review was conducted of materials
published by the 40 PCCs concerning victims of crime. An initial sweep was made of each PCC’s
website (which they all are required to maintain) and then a letter was sent to each Commissioner’s
office asking them for details of any reviews they had conducted into local victims’ needs before or
after commencing with their commissioning role. In sum this exercise produced reports from 10
PCC areas which had published reviews on such an exercise. Two more PCC offices reported that
whilst they had indeed conducted some degree of local needs assessment for victims, the material
was not in a format they felt able to share with outside commentators. The material obtained was
then reviewed and the themes coded. It was also combined with the material available on each
PCC’s website focussed on victims of crime. The results of this exercise are discussed in this paper,
followed by a section outlining some wider observations about how the support services for
victims of crime deriving from such exercises are now being organised and managed across the
different PCC areas. The paper will then offer some discussion and reflection, reaching overall
conclusions which attempt to shed some provisional light on the title question and signposting
ahead for future research into the questions raised.
Background to victim policies in England and Wales
When the UK’s first coalition government since 1940 took office in May 2010 victims of crime had
already attained a central place in criminal justice policy discourse (see Rock, 2004; Walklate,
2016). Within two years the EU Commission would publish its long-awaited Directive on estab-
lishing minimum standards on the rights, support and protection of victims of crime.
2
The imple-
mentation deadline for the Directive was set at 16 November 2015. Given the long historical and
political build-up to this development (see Hall, 2010), the replacement of the EU’s previous
Council Framework Decision 2001 on these issues was in one sense an incremental step: broad-
ening what could be expected of member states in relation to victims of crime rather than abruptly
presenting them with a host of new ‘rights’. Substantively the Directive did, through its definition
220 International Review of Victimology 24(2)
To continue reading
Request your trial