The Community Justice (Scotland) Act 2016 states that local Community Justice Partnerships (CJPs) must adhere to two requirements around performance reporting. The first requirement is to populate an annual return template to Community Justice Scotland (CJS) outlining local activity and progress made towards national priorities. This is to allow CJS to fulfil its role to monitor, promote, and support improvement in, and keep the Scottish Ministers informed about, performance in the provision of community justice.
This is the first time local Community Justice Partnerships are reporting against the new national strategy and performance framework. During 2023-2024 the priority for the Community Justice Ayrshire Partnership (CJAP) was to develop the new local plan and baseline where the partnership sat against the performance framework. Within this annual return, the CJAP Support Team have tried to focus on joint activity rather than single agency, to show the true partnership element of working together.
The second statutory reporting requirement for local CJPs is to produce a public facing annual report focussed on the progress towards achieving the community justice outcomes. The legislation asks partnerships to refer to local activity and to use the national indicators to asses how close the partnership is to meeting the national outcomes (see image below to see what these are).
Due to the publication of the national indicator data taking place later in the year, the Community Justice Ayrshire Partnership is unable to publish a complete report until December 2024. Therefore, to ensure publication of our report is as timely as possible, the CJAP have taken the decision to split the annual report into two parts. Part one, will refer to activity and the baseline position of the partnership, part two will look at the national indicator data and local measures to assess the performance and progress towards achieving the national outcomes.
The CJAP Support Team would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who contributed to the report and to all our partners who continue to work every day to improve the outcomes for people caught up in the justice system and the wider community who are impacted by justice issues.
You can follow the Community Justice Ayrshire Partnership on twitter @CJAyrshire
If you would like a member of the CJAP Support Team to attend a team meeting or an have an informal chat to highlight the work of the partnership and explore links, then please do get in touch!