National Strategy for Community Justice: Review Consultation

About this response 

SASW is the professional association for social work in Scotland and the Scottish part of the British Association of Social Workers. We represent social workers across all fields of practice, including justice social work, criminal justice services, prison based social work, adult protection, mental health and children and families. 

Justice social work is social work. It is delivered by registered professionals working with people who are often among the most disadvantaged in Scotland. Our response is grounded in the values of the profession: dignity, human rights, respect and person centred practice. It reflects the views of our members working in justice social work and in the wider services on which community justice depends. 

We welcome the review. The strategy has value and we do not think it should be discarded. We do think it needs to become more specific, better resourced and more honest about the constraints partners face. 

Overview of strategy 

Q1. How would you rate the clarity and accessibility of the strategy? 

Response: Quite clear 

The strategy is short, logically ordered and written in plain language. The four aims and thirteen priority actions are easy to find and easy to quote. The length is about right. Our members can pick it up and use it. 

Clarity of expression is not the same as clarity of direction. A reader can understand what the strategy says without being able to tell what it requires. Three points explain our rating. 

• The priority actions do not have clear, measurable goals and outcomes. It is not possible to say when an action has been achieved, or by whom. 
• Responsibility is not clear. The strategy names statutory partners but does not set out who leads each action, what Scottish Government will do itself, and what it expects others to do. Section 15(2) of the 2016 Act distinguishes between action Ministers propose to take and action they consider others should take. The strategy does not make that distinction visible. 
• While  the language of the document in framed in professional terms, this makes it potentially less accessible to people with lived experience, families, victims and the wider public. We would recommend both a plain language or easy read version.  

We recommend that any revised strategy includes a short statement of roles and responsibilities, and that it is published alongside an accessible summary version produced with people who have direct experience of the justice system. 

Q2. To what extent do you agree or disagree that the strategy provides sufficient information on the following aspects of community justice? 

Definition. The explanation of community justice is clear and the statutory definition is properly reflected. The weakness is at the boundary. Most of what determines whether someone stops offending sits outside the justice system: income, housing, health, alcohol and drug support, relationships and stigma. The strategy gestures at this but does not resolve whether those services are part of community justice or partners to it. That ambiguity has practical consequences at local level, particularly when budgets are allocated. 

Evidence. The strategy asserts that community based interventions can be more effective than custody, however this should be supported by evidence which can be used to explain and support community disposals when necessary.  

Strategic context. This is one of the stronger parts of the document and the list of linked strategies in this consultation paper is helpful. The connection is descriptive rather than operational. It tells the reader that alignment matters. It does not say how alignment will be achieved or who is accountable when it does not happen. 

Delivery. This is the weakest aspect of the strategy, while the strategy sets out what should happen, there is no detail in relation to delivery models, accountabilities and resourcing. We would like to see a clear accountability line from national aims to local Community Justice Outcome Improvement Plans and back to national aims. Partners are asked to deliver thirteen priority actions with no indication of relative priority or of what they can stop doing to divert resources to achieve against these priority areas.  

Lived experience. While it is good to see lived experience appear as a principle and as priority action 12, there is no methodology to support meaningful involvement. There is a danger that without paid time, practical support, accessible information and realistic timescales, involvement of people with lived experience will be tokenistic, reflecting consultation on what has already been decided rather than a meaningful process of participation. 

Victims of crime. The treatment is brief and sits alongside the aims rather than within them. Victims and survivors have distinct needs and distinct rights. Restorative justice is important but it is not the whole of what victims need, and it is not appropriate or wanted in every case. A revised strategy should be clearer about what victims can expect from community justice partners. 

Good practice examples. There are none in the strategy. This is the single most requested addition we hear from members. Practical examples of what has worked in a partnership area, including what it cost and what got in the way, are more useful to local planning than another statement of intent. 

Aims and priority actions 

Q3 i) To what extent do you agree or disagree that, taken together, the four national aims capture the most important aspects of community justice? 

Response: Agree 

The four aims are broadly right. They cover early intervention, the quality of community interventions, access to services, and leadership and partnership. They have provided a stable shared language across statutory and third sector partners since 2022. Stability has real value and we would not support wholesale replacement. 

There are two significant gaps. 

First, there is no aim about the workforce. Every other aim depends on having enough registered social workers, social work assistants, unpaid work supervisors, prison based social workers and third sector staff, properly supported and appropriately supervised. Justice social work faces recruitment and retention pressure, rising caseloads and increasing case complexity. A strategy that is silent on the workforce is silent on its own principal delivery risk. 

Second, prevention is framed too narrowly. Aim 1 begins at the point of police contact or report to the Procurator Fiscal. The drivers of offending begin much earlier: poverty, adverse childhood experiences, care experience, exclusion from education, trauma, mental ill health and problem substance use. The strategy should acknowledge that community justice cannot reduce reoffending on its own, and should connect explicitly to child poverty, care reform, education and public health. 

We also note that the aims are silent on disproportionality. People who are care experienced, people with mental ill health, people with learning disability or neurodivergence, and people living in the most deprived communities are heavily over represented in the justice system. A revised strategy should say so and should require partners to act on it. 

Our recommendation is to retain the four aims and add a fifth on workforce capacity and sustainable delivery. If a fifth aim is not accepted, workforce should be made an explicit priority action under Aim 4. 

Q3 ii) Of the four aims, are there any that you consider to be either particularly important, or unimportant? 

We would not describe any of the four aims as unimportant. They differ in weight and in how well they are currently expressed. 

Aim 3 is the most important. Access to health and social care, housing, income and employment determines whether anything else in the strategy works. A well delivered community sentence will not hold if someone leaves prison to homelessness or loses continuity of prescribing on release. Aim 3 is also the aim over which community justice partners have the least direct control, which is precisely why it needs the strongest national backing. 

Aim 1 is next in importance. Diversion and early intervention prevent harm, avoid the damage caused by prosecution and conviction, and are the most cost effective point of the whole system. Progress here is real but modest and inconsistent. 

Aim 4 is important but is currently the weakest expressed. Leadership, governance and partnership working are means, not ends. As drafted, this aim describes process rather than change. 

Aim 2 is important and contains the core of justice social work practice in priority action 5. It also contains the least well evidenced action in the strategy, priority action 4 on electronic monitoring, which is discussed at Q5. 

Q4. How useful are the current priority actions in contributing to national Aim 1 (diversion and early intervention)? 

Response: Quite useful 

Priority action 1. The action is correctly identified and diversion from prosecution has grown. The consultation paper reports a rise to 3,600 cases in 2024 to 2025, the highest in ten years. That is welcome. It remains a small proportion of cases dealt with by the courts, and use varies considerably between local authority areas. 

The action attributes the problem mainly to consistency, confidence and awareness. Those are real factors. The main constraint however is justice social work capacity to assess and to deliver the intervention once a referral is made. Where teams cannot absorb more diversion assessments, referral rates fall regardless of awareness. Diversion is only genuinely available where there is something to divert people to, and the local service offer is uneven, particularly for mental health, trauma support and women specific services. 

We recommend national minimum expectations for what diversion should involve, funded assessment capacity, and published local level data so that variation is visible. 

Priority action 2. Police custody is a critical and under used point of intervention. People are frequently in custody at a moment of acute need, including withdrawal, distress and risk of suicide. The action is right in principle. Delivery depends heavily on local arrangements between Police Scotland, health boards, alcohol and drug partnerships and third sector services, and it is uneven across Scotland. Coverage of arrest referral, distress interventions and same day access to substance use treatment differs significantly by area. 

We would strengthen this action by making it explicit that identification of need is of limited value without a service to refer into, and by linking it to the near fatal overdose and drug death prevention work already underway. 

Q5. How useful are the current priority actions in contributing to national Aim 2 (robust and high quality community interventions and public protection)? 

Response: Quite useful 

Our overall rating masks considerable variation between the four actions. 

Priority action 3, bail. This is the right priority and it has become more important since the strategy was published. The Bail and Release from Custody (Scotland) Act 2023 raised expectations of bail supervision and support. Bail supervision cases rose by 17 per cent to 1,500 in 2024 to 2025. Scotland continues to hold a high remand population by comparison with other European jurisdictions. Our concern is that expectations have risen faster than capacity. Bail supervision is skilled work. Where it is delivered from within already stretched justice social work teams, growth in bail supervision displaces other statutory work rather than adding to it. 

Priority action 4, electronic monitoring. This is the least well evidenced action in the strategy and the one we would most want to see rewritten. It is framed as expansion. Increasing and widening the use of electronic monitoring is presented as a good in itself. Electronic monitoring is a control measure, not an intervention. It can support a community disposal when combined with social work supervision and practical support. On its own it does not address the causes of offending and it does not build the relationships that support desistance. 

There are also risks that the strategy does not acknowledge. Expanding the technology creates a risk of net widening, where monitoring is applied to people who would otherwise have received a lower tariff disposal or none. There are equalities and human rights considerations, including the effect on other household members, on children living in the home, and on people in unsafe or unstable housing. Monitoring can be actively harmful where there is domestic abuse. 

We recommend that this action is redrafted around appropriate, proportionate and evidence led use of electronic monitoring, integrated with social work support, rather than increased use. 

Priority action 5. This is the core of justice social work and the action our members regard as most important in the entire strategy. It is correctly framed around high quality, consistently available, trauma informed services. The constraint is capacity, not commitment. Community payback orders in existence reached 18,300 at 31 March 2025, the highest in ten years, and unpaid work hours imposed have returned to pre pandemic levels. Staffing has not grown at the same rate. Completion rates of 71 per cent are creditable in that context. 

Trauma informed and relationship based practice takes time. It requires manageable caseloads, reflective supervision, continuity of worker and access to specialist services. These conditions cannot be assumed. If the strategy is serious about this action it must say what caseload and workforce conditions are required to deliver it. 

Priority action 6, restorative justice. This action has not been delivered. The commitment to make restorative justice available across Scotland has been in place for several years without being achieved, and provision remains partial and dependent on time limited funding. Restorative justice is valuable where it is wanted, well facilitated, properly resourced and safe for the person harmed. Repeating an unfunded commitment damages the credibility of the strategy. Scottish Government should either fund national availability and set a realistic timescale, or state plainly what level of provision it intends and by when. 

Q6. How useful are the current priority actions in contributing to national Aim 3 (accessible and available services)? 

Response: Quite useful 

The four actions identify the right things. They are also the actions least within the control of community justice partners, because they depend on health, housing and employability systems with their own pressures, priorities and accountability lines. That is the central weakness of this aim. 

Priority action 7, health and social care. Information sharing has improved in places. Continuity of care on release remains poor and inconsistent, particularly for mental health support, opioid substitution treatment and prescribed medication more generally. Short notice releases, including emergency early release, have exposed this. People have been released without a registered GP, without a prescription in place and without an appointment. Improving information sharing and partnership working is necessary but too weak a formulation. What is needed is a clear expectation that health boards plan for release as part of their core business, with accountability through health governance and not only through community justice partnerships. 

Priority action 8, housing. The SHORE standards are sound and the action is correctly targeted. Implementation is inconsistent between local authority areas and often depends on individual relationships rather than embedded process. The binding constraint now is housing supply. In the context of a declared national housing emergency and high levels of temporary accommodation use, standards alone cannot deliver settled housing on release. The strategy should acknowledge this directly and connect to homelessness prevention duties, including the new prevention duties on public bodies. 

Priority action 9, employability. The link to No One Left Behind is right. The action does not address the structural barriers that people with convictions face: disclosure rules, employer attitudes, insurance and regulatory exclusions, and the interaction between low paid insecure work and social security. Improving access to support does not address the point that support alone does not create employment for this group. National work with employers is required. 

Priority action 10, throughcare. The launch of Upside in 2025 is the most significant development under this aim and we welcome it, particularly the decision to make people released from remand eligible. Remand has long been an accountability gap, with people released with no plan, no support and often no accommodation. Two points follow. First, the strategy should be updated to reflect this and to set out how Upside interacts with statutory throughcare and with existing local third sector provision, so that services are complementary rather than duplicated or displaced. Second, sustainable funding matters. Third sector throughcare providers cannot retain skilled staff on annual funding settlements. 

Q7. How useful are the current priority actions in contributing to national Aim 4 (leadership, engagement and partnership working)? 

Response: Neutral 

These three actions are difficult to disagree with and difficult to act on. Two of them describe process rather than change. 

Priority action 11. Effective leadership, governance and strategic planning are necessary. The action does not address the structural problem, which is that community justice partnerships hold duties but limited authority and, in most areas, no dedicated budget. Governance is spread across community planning partnerships, integration joint boards, local authorities, health boards and Community Justice Scotland. Accountability is diffuse. When an outcome is not achieved, it is often not clear who is answerable. Strengthening leadership arrangements will not fix a problem that is fundamentally about authority and resource. 

Priority action 12. This is the most important of the three and the least well delivered. Involving people with lived experience, victims, survivors and families is right. In practice, involvement is too often late, unpaid, unsupported and without feedback. Genuine coproduction requires that people are involved in defining the problem, not only in commenting on a proposed solution. It requires paid time, expenses, accessible materials, support before and after difficult conversations, and a clear account of what changed as a result. None of that is set out. 

We also think it is a mistake to group victims of crime, survivors, people with convictions and families in a single action. Their interests overlap in some places and conflict in others. Each group needs a distinct and properly resourced route to influence. 

Priority action 13. Public understanding of community sentences remains low, and public debate since 2022, particularly around emergency early release, has made this harder rather than easier. There has been little visible national activity under this action. Reducing stigma is not something individual partnerships can achieve locally. It requires sustained, funded, national communication led by Scottish Government, alongside work with media. As drafted, the action places responsibility on the partners least able to discharge it. 

We also draw attention to a structural point evident in Annex A. Priority actions 4, 6, 11 and 12 have no corresponding nationally determined outcome. Two of those, restorative justice and the involvement of people with lived experience, are among the areas where progress has been weakest. What is not measured is not reported, and what is not reported does not get resourced. This gap should be closed as part of the strategy and performance framework reviews. 

Q8. Do you think the current number of priority actions is too low, about right, or too high? 

Response: About right 

The number is not the problem. Thirteen actions across four aims is manageable and each of them addresses something that matters. Reducing the number would mean losing areas such as restorative justice and lived experience involvement, which are already the weakest. Increasing the number would dilute focus further. 

The problem is specificity, sequencing and resourcing. Partners are asked to progress thirteen broadly framed actions simultaneously, with no statement of relative priority and no indication of what resource is assumed. In practice, partnerships concentrate on the nine actions that carry a nationally determined outcome, because those are what they report against. The strategy is therefore being prioritised by the performance framework rather than by Ministers. 

We recommend that any revised strategy retains a similar number of actions but that each one is accompanied by: 

• a measurable outcome, closing the gap between the thirteen actions and the nine nationally determined outcomes 
• a named lead, distinguishing what Scottish Government will do from what it expects partners to do 
• an indicative timescale 
• a statement of the resource assumptions on which delivery depends 
• a clear indication of sequencing, so that partners know what to do first when they cannot do everything 

Impact 

Q9. Which elements of the strategy do you find most useful relative to your interest in community justice? 

Four elements are most useful to us and to our members. 

The four national aims. Their main value is as shared language. They give statutory partners, third sector organisations and social workers a common vocabulary for local planning, funding applications and partnership discussion. Because they have been stable since 2022, that language has bedded in. 

The definition of community justice. Framing community justice as broader than a set of court disposals is important. It supports the argument that housing, health, income and employment are justice issues, which is the argument our members most often need to make locally. 

Recognition of trauma informed practice, women in justice, and the impact on children. These sections align with professional social work values and with the direction of Scottish policy. The reference to the disruption caused to children when a parent is remanded is important and should be developed further. 

Its use as an advocacy document. This is perhaps the strategy’s most practical function. When social workers and third sector organisations argue locally for investment in community justice, a national statement of Ministerial priorities is something they can point to. That function is worth protecting, and it argues for revision rather than replacement. 

Q10. Which elements of the strategy do you find least useful relative to your interest in community justice? 

Descriptive policy context without consequence. The sections setting out the wider policy landscape explain what else exists but not what will change as a result of alignment, or who is accountable when strategies pull in different directions. As written they inform rather than direct. 

The Aim 4 priority actions as currently drafted. For the reasons given at Q7, actions 11 and 13 cannot readily be operationalised or measured at local level. 

The delivery plan updates. These report activity rather than outcome. They tell the reader what has been done nationally but not what difference it made, and they are not structured in a way that local partnerships can use in their own planning and reporting. 

The most significant weakness is not a section but an absence. The strategy does not address resourcing or workforce. Partners are making decisions under severe constraint, choosing between statutory duties. A strategy that does not engage with that reality is of limited use at the point where decisions are actually made. We would rather the strategy stated openly what cannot be delivered within current resources than remain silent. 

Looking forward 

Q11. Taking into account the likely resources available over the next 5 years, what do you believe are the three main community justice priorities over the next 3 to 5 years? 

We have chosen three priorities on the assumption that resources will be broadly flat in real terms and that demand will continue to rise. On that basis the strategy should do fewer things properly rather than many things partially. 

Priority 1: Workforce capacity and sustainability in justice social work and the third sector 

This is the precondition for everything else. Justice social work is carrying a rising volume of community payback orders, expanded bail supervision, increased throughput from emergency and early release, and greater case complexity. Recruitment and retention are difficult in several areas, and experienced practitioners are leaving. Newly qualified workers are carrying complex caseloads early. 

A meaningful commitment would cover workforce planning data for justice social work, funded training and continuing professional development, protected reflective supervision, realistic caseload expectations, and stable multi year funding for third sector partners so that they can retain skilled staff. Without this, every other priority is aspiration. 

Priority 2: Shifting the balance from custody to community, delivered consistently across Scotland 

The prison population remains high and the Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission reported in February 2026. The strategy should be aligned to that work rather than developed alongside it. The practical content of this priority is diversion at scale, robust bail alternatives to remand, and community sentences that courts and the public have confidence in. 

Consistency is the key word. National availability of diversion and bail services to a defined minimum standard, with published local data, would do more than any further statement of ambition. Courts will use community disposals when they trust that the service exists, is available quickly and is delivered well. That trust is built through capacity, not communication. 

Priority 3: Continuity of housing, health and income at the point of release and on remand 

This is where the system most visibly fails. People continue to be released without settled accommodation, without continuity of prescribing, without a GP and without benefits in place. The consequences are immediate and include drug related death, self harm and rapid return to custody. Remand remains the largest gap, because people on remand fall outside statutory throughcare and can be released from court without notice. 

This priority requires joint accountability with housing and health portfolios, not partnership working alone. We would want to see release planning recognised as core business for health boards and local authority housing services, with reporting against it in their own governance, alongside continued investment in Upside and in third sector throughcare. 

We recognise that early intervention beyond the justice system, restorative justice and stigma reduction all matter. Our judgement is that within likely resources these three priorities give the greatest reduction in harm. 

Other 

Q12. Do you have any other comments on the National Strategy for Community Justice that were not captured in the previous questions? 

Our clear view is that the strategy should be revised rather than a wholly new strategy produced. The aims are sound and the shared language has value. A new strategy would consume partner capacity in re planning at a time when that capacity is needed for delivery. 

Align the strategy and the performance framework. Community Justice Scotland is reviewing the performance framework in parallel. The two documents should be revised together and published together, with the priority actions and nationally determined outcomes mapped one to one so far as possible. Sequential publication would require partnerships to revise local plans twice. 

Funding cycles. Annual funding settlements are one of the most damaging features of the current landscape for third sector and lived experience organisations. They prevent recruitment, cause staff loss, interrupt relationships with people being supported, and waste money. Multi year funding would improve delivery at no additional cost. 

Data and equalities. The strategy should require data disaggregated by sex, age, ethnicity, disability, care experience and deprivation, and should require partners to act on what it shows. Care experienced people in particular remain heavily over represented and this is not visible in the current strategy. 

Women in justice. The strategy recognises this but does not carry it through into the priority actions. Provision of women specific services, and of alternatives to remand for women, remains inconsistent. Progress on the women’s custodial estate has not been matched by consistent community provision. 

Children and families. Children affected by parental imprisonment and remand are directly harmed and are not offenders. The strategy should connect to child poverty and children’s rights commitments, including the incorporation of the UNCRC, and should recognise family support as part of community justice. 

Digital delivery. The reference to active use of digital technologies should be qualified. Digital exclusion is high among people in contact with the justice system, particularly on release. Digital should extend choice, not replace face to face contact or become a precondition of access to services. 

Rural and island delivery. The strategy assumes a delivery model that is difficult to apply in rural and island areas, where travel, small teams, single worker services and the absence of specialist provision all affect what is possible. Consistency across Scotland cannot mean uniformity of delivery model. 

Language. The strategy should use person first language consistently. Terms that define people by their offending work against the aim of reducing stigma set out in priority action 13. 

Professional identity. Justice social work must remain part of social work. Any structural reform of social work in Scotland should keep justice social work connected to the wider profession, to its ethical framework and to its registration and professional standards. Separating it would weaken practice on both sides. 

SASW would welcome the opportunity to contribute to the planned workshops and to bring members with direct practice experience into that engagement.