Case study
A major criminal justice agency
Applying performance improvement expertise to speed up youth justice
The Youth Justice Board for England and Wales (YJB) was established with the overall aim of reducing youth offending. A key objective is to reduce delay in the youth justice process to support the Government's pledge to halve the time from arrest to sentence for persistent young offenders.
Delivering the pledge requires significant local improvements in practice, and the structure of the criminal justice system complicates matters. The situation is further complicated by the devolved nature of criminal justice in England and Wales.
The challenges for PA's team were to identify what changes will speed up youth justice, and to make sure they were adopted on the ground. The team's key activities included: Formulating best practice: in the form of a guide now being used by over 5,000 practitioners to disseminate good ideas Providing hands-on support: to enable 120 inter-agency groups to take joint ownership of issues and allocate responsibilities for improvement Developing an IT solution: to enable local areas to analyse information rapidly, assess performance and determine improvements Creating a knowledge sharing Web site: to update local areas on policy development, current performance and new ideas.
The PA team then moved from advice to practical implementation, helping to manage milestones, risk and communications while contributing to policy development. When PA began the project in 1993 - almost two years after the target had been set - average arrest-to-sentence times were 120 days. The target was delivered in June 2001, 11 months ahead of schedule. The work won the Strategy and Business Transformation category at the UK Management Consultancies Association Awards in 2001.
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