Detailed Information
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What is the Surrey Criminal Justice Board?
Who is on the Board?
What does the Board aim to do?
What are the local priorities for the Board?
What are the targets for the Board?
How can you help?
What is the Surrey Criminal Justice Board?
A local body made up of chief officers from the main criminal justice agencies. They work together to provide a better criminal justice system in Surrey.
The local chief officers of:
- Surrey Police
- The Crown Prosecution Service
- National Probation Service
- HM Courts Service
- Surrey Youth Offending Team
- HM Prison Service
- Legal Services Commission
What does the Board aim to do?
- To increase the number of offences brought to justice
- To increase public confidence in the local criminal justice system
- To increase victim and witness satisfaction
- To meet the Government pledge to deal with persistent young offenders within 71 days from arrest to sentence.
What are the local priorities for the Board?
- To improve local services to victims and witnesses by making the process as easy as possible for them, and to encourage more victims and witnesses to come forward.
- To target persistent, prolific and potentially dangerous offenders in Surrey.
- To increase the number of domestic violence cases that are prosecuted by ensuring an effective, quick and safe procedure is in place.
- To ensure the right charges are brought against offenders, and at the right time.
- To increase the number of court trials that proceed on the day they are listed.
- To increase the number of warrants that are enforced.
- To involve staff from all the criminal justice agencies in the Board’s work, to help ensure that the local criminal justice system gives high quality service.
- To find out what matters most to local people and to effectively engage with the local community, particularly black and minority ethnic communities and other minority groups.
What are the targets of the Board?
Narrowing the Justice Gap (NJG) Narrowing the Justice Gap (NJG) is to improve the delivery of justice by increasing the number of crimes for which an offender is brought to justice. The justice gap is the difference between the number of recorded crimes and the number of offences that result in the offender being brought to justice. Narrowing the Justice Gap is reliant on other targets and priorities being met by the SCJB. It is a culmination of executing more warrants, improving effective trial rates, building strong files, prioritising persistent offenders and young offenders and improving timeliness and throughput in the courts.
Ineffective Trials Far too many trials do not go ahead when they are supposed to, this can lead to an offence not being brought to justice or a victim not experiencing justice. An ineffective trial is a trial that is unable to proceed on the day it was scheduled to start and consequently requires an alternative listing. There are various reasons for this, including the non-attendance of a prosecution or defence witness, the failure of the defendant to appear, either the prosecution or defence not being ready for trial or a courtroom or judge not being available.
Persistent Young Offenders (PYOs) A Persistent Young Offender (PYO) is a young person aged 10-17 who has been sentenced by any criminal court in the UK on 3 or more separate occasions for one or more recordable offences and within three years of the last sentencing occasion is subsequently arrested or has information laid against hime for a further recordable offence. The calculation of the national pledge target of 71 days, and performance against that target, uses data from the Police National Computer and police forces. The data covers those individuals who fell within the definition of persistent young offender at the date of arrest, and also those who were brought within the definition by further convictions before the time of sentence.
Some very significant players in the criminal justice system fall outside of the Board membership, so it cannot deliver its’ targets and priorities on its own. Views from the wider community and other players in the criminal justice system will be crucial in order to deliver these targets, ensure the Board is aware of local concerns and that everyone involved in local criminal justice has a real input into the work that is being taken.
A consultative group has been put in place to enable the Board to seek regular two-way communication. If you are interested in joining, please let us know.