1. Voluntary and Statutory Sector Provision: What Role Does the Type of Provider Play in Improving Outcomes?
Dr Michelle Butler, Dr Aisling McLaughlin, Dr David Hayes, Dr Andrew Percy
14 June 2018
Strengthening

2. Northern Ireland Desistance Reintegration Skills development
Voluntary and community sector (VCS) involvement viewed as key to helping with:
Desistance
Reintegration
Skills development
Repairing harm
Reducing stigma
Minimising negative impact of imprisonment on families
Some examples include:
Many other community and voluntary sector groups than those on this slide.
Desistance – addressing alcohol, drugs, mental health needs etc. to help reduce reoffending and promote desistance
Reintegration – help with housing, mentoring, support, advice in preparation for release.
Skills development – developing new skills e.g. parenting, vocational training,
Repairing harm – giving something back –raising money.
Reducing stigma – both of the criminal justice sector and those imprisoned.

3. Northern Ireland
Working in partnership with the VCS is actively encouraged by the NI government, public bodies, prison service and other criminal justice institutions.
‘Cocktail’ of VCS funders.
Diverse VCS catering to different groups in different areas.
Primarily challenge practices by pushing for change on the inside, holding events to debate practice, research and providing staff training.
Legacy of the conflict – vsc provided services when the ability of statutory services was limited, history of communities coming together to support each other so strong community grassroots network in NI, wide variety of different groups catering to different specific communities. Since the conflict continue to work with vsc to improve perceptions of legitimacy, buy in to criminal justice work and the legitimacy of criminal justice institutions as well as to encourage and breakdown divisions and stereotypes about staff as well as those in prison.
Funders – wide ranging from state (e.g. prison, DOJ, Department for communities, councils, police, probation, big lottery fund NI, Children in Need, joseph Roundtree charitable trust, businesses e.g. tesco, asda, , European funding, big lotto, philanthropies or funding streams specifically set up to tackle particular issues e.g. tackling paramilitarism, early intervention transformation fund.)
Diverse VSC (link to legacy) … ….some say too many doing similar things but in different communities. Good range of different ages, genders, religion, background….but probably limited on ethnicity, languages and LGBT. There are groups there but less prevalent than the other ones.
Opportunities they create include:
Help with rebuilding relationships
Providing information and support for people in prison and their families
Programmes designed to help address skills development to help with employment on release
To address mental health issues and addiction/substance misuse,
To help encourage further education, training
Help with providing accommodation on release
Provide an opportunity to give back and repair harm caused.
Reduce stigma and stereotypes about people in prison as well as stereotypes people in prison may hold about other groups
Attempts to build links with potential employers so they know the work that happens in prison and may be willing to employ people.
More jobs for ex-combatants than normal offenders.
Challenge the axis of penal power more limited through public media engagement.

4. Northern Ireland
Tendency to believe that VCS involvement is beneficial because:
It can prompt better engagement from those who are hard to reach, disengaged or distrustful of services.
Can provide greater flexibility in tailoring services to meet the specific needs of users.
Engagement with services can be less stigmatising.
It may be more cost effective and provide better value for money.
It can contribute to the legitimation of statutory services.
It may improve outcomes by promoting the adoption of policy and practice that better meets the needs of users.
Move towards outcomes based accountability.
Tendering process encouraging interagency collaborations
Model of delivery being pursued by contracts encouraging emotional burnout

5. Voluntary Versus Statutory Service Provision
While some of the strengths of the VCS is its ability to engage people and its flexibility, no consistent differences in outcomes or experience of accessing services was found between different types of service providers.
Instead, the culture and working practices of each individual service provider was more important in shaping outcomes than type of service provider.
Rapid Review of the international literature to see if VCS service provision can result in improved outcomes compared to statutory services.
The second rapid review consisted of a final sample of 71 papers and again the majority of papers originated from the USA and the UK, although there were also a number of papers drawn from other countries throughout the world (see Table 5).
In the papers included in the second rapid review, there were 230 different types of needs referred to, resulting in an average of 3.2 different types of needs being referred to in each paper. The majority of these papers focused on child protection, family support, mental health and substance misuse needs (see Figure 3).
Predominately qualitative studies (20), theoretical/overview (17), mixed methods combing quant and qual (14), quant (13), self-reflective (6), systematic review (1).

6. Improving Outcomes Outcomes were improved by:
Effective interagency collaboration
Reviewing the commissioning process used
Employing case coordinators when multiple different providers involved in providing services.
Factors that were linked to effective interagency collaboration included the co-location of services, sharing of resources between different service providers, basing services in local communities, providing ‘drop-in’ services without a prior appointment, involving service users in decision-making, sharing information and referral systems, positive interagency staff relations, shared decision-making and using combined funding streams.
A commissioning process which made effective interagency collaboration more difficult, used inappropriate performance measures and had insufficient governance mechanisms negatively impacted on outcomes and caused significant disruption to service provision. Consequently, there was a tension between the potential cost-savings that may be achieved by encouraging service providers to compete over service delivery and the negative impact this could have on the outcomes experienced by children and families, as well as their experiences of accessing these services. Often funding was short-term, insufficiently costed, providers given limited time to establish services, develop relationships or set up referral pathways. Insufficient attention was paid to ensuring that structures to promote interagency collaboration were built into the commissioning process to combat service fragmentation and the appropriateness of performance measures and how they may impact on service provision was not always considered. Consequently, unless these issues were addressed, a competitive tendering process of commissioning services did not result in a more cost-effective or efficient service provision, compared to the use of a non-competitive process, and could make the achievement of effective interagency collaboration more difficult.
This also negatively impacted on the users experiences of accessing services and they constantly had to retell their story to different providers, did not have time to develop trusting relationships and were left to traverse between different providers to meet their needs on their own….designed from the ease of administration rather than the viewpoint of users. Increased the probability of people falling through the cracks.
(see Butler, Aisling, Hayes & Percy (2016)