A top priority for the Office of the Humberside Police and Crime Commissioner is to improve the delivery of support services to victims of crime in their area. The Victims' Code sets out national standards for the delivery of those services, so it was also important to understand the extent to which the Criminal Justice agencies in Humberside were meeting those standards.
To develop our understanding of how services could be improved, the first stage was to investigate and evidence local agency compliance with the Victims’ Code. This meant working with all Criminal Justice Services and victim support organisations in Humberside. We also engaged with a number of Police and victims’ services organisations across England and Wales to benchmark performance in Humberside and seek out good practice. This enabled Agencia to identify and share with the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner how compliance against the Code could be improved, and to develop an action plan to achieve this.
Being aware that any recommendations that would simply increase workload would be unlikely to be sustainable, we sought to find more innovative ways of improving services. A key aspect of our work was to seek the views of victims, and we achieved this through a combination of local surveys and focus group interviews. This ensured that any proposed changes were designed around the needs of victims and would achieve the greatest positive impact upon their experiences. Key was improving co-ordination across the agencies, and we identified that there was an opportunity to strengthen this through the development of a Victims’ Services Hub led by a local co-ordinator.
The Office of the Humberside Police and Crime Commissioner benefitted from an independent and unbiased full report which:
