Yesterday I attended an event organised by NOMS East Midlands and held at the Salvation Army‘s centre in Leicester South. The event saw a large number of organisations local to the East Midlands attend to discuss and share perspectives on working with offenders.

The day began with an introduction and welcome from Beverley Shears, the East Midlands Director of Offender Management, and set the scene for a day in which many connections were made and fruitful discussions were had about the future role of social enterprise, faith groups and others in the provision of services, as part of the regional commissioning plan which, in turn, forms an integral part of the Reducing Re-offending Delivery Plan.

I had the good fortune to meet and speak with representatives from BAC-IN: Black & Asian Cultural Identification of Narcotics, an organisation that provides culturally-specific support, guidance and education to help address substance misuse and related psychological issues. The organisation is peer-led and actively seeks to address what they identified to be a clear gap in the services provided to individuals and families seeking to address substance misuse and related issues.

A number of workshops took place over the course of the day, with the first focusing on education, training and employment (ETE) and run by Lincolnshire Action Trust. The workshop saw groups asked to address a number of questions relating to different scenarios in an attempt to get participants to think about the problems from the perspective of the individual / service user.

This workshop raised a number of interesting issues around the importance of user-oriented and user-centric services that take full account of the information needs, risk factors, barriers and emotions experienced by offenders. This point was further reinforced by a presentation made by an ex-offender who described her own experience of the criminal justice system.

The young woman described how, from an early age, she had become involved with drugs and begun to shoplift. She eventually ended up in prison, before being moved to a bail hostel. She described how seeking to ‘get clean’ was virtually impossible with the constant temptation, in the form of open drug use, that was present within the hostel.

On a subsequent return to the community, following a period in custody, she was fortunate enough to secure ‘dry’ accommodation away from drug-taking, although she was on this occasion required to live in a two-bedroom flat with an alcoholic male. She subsequently managed to gain employment and appeared to be doing well. Her story, which I am sure is likely to be replicated across the criminal justice system, highlighted the fact that it is all too easy for the system to fail those it seeks to reform, and the ‘dry/clean’ / ‘wet’ hostel issue reminded me of the BBC Panorama documentary aired in 2006.

Conversations with professionals over the remainder of the day reinforced the enormous challenge experienced by offenders during the resettlement from custody back into the community, an issue that extends, like many others, right across the criminal justice system. Practitioners from the public, third and private sectors also shared their frustration around public sector procurement, with the third sector also highlighting the immense cost associated with responding to tenders and applying for grants.

In summary the day provided an excellent opportunity for local providers to meet and network and also did a lot to raise awareness of a number of issues. The top issues, from my perspective, were around ensuring services met the needs of users in an efficient and effective manner, the need to apply these principles to the issue of effective resettlement and the challenges posed by the public sector procurement process.

These are all issues that I am confident we will return to in the coming months, as we embark on our journey to do all that we can to help support public service improvements at a time of incredible pressures, in terms of both supply and demand.