Lesley Simmonds

Lost in transition? The changing face of Victim Support

This article examines how Victim Support in the UK has developed over time, from its early beginnings as a voluntary sector organization operating in a less formal manner than is the case today, to becoming ‘the’ major professional key agency working for and on behalf of victims of crime. Victim Support began life as a developing network of support schemes, essentially responding to victims on the basis of local ‘need’. Whilst by 1979 a national office had been created, its role was to act more as an umbrella body rather than as a regulating and standardizing agent. Local schemes were affiliated to this body, but continued to work and be managed independently within their own geographical areas. This situation changed over time as the managerialism that was introduced originally into the public sector pervaded the voluntary sector also. Thus, for Victim Support, services became increasingly more centrally ‘managed’, professionalized and standardized. In this sense it may be argued that Victim Support has undergone a ‘transition’, transporting the agency beyond all recognition from its early beginnings as a more generalist victims’ service to an increasingly targeted one. Part of the transition also has been the shift to a more case-managed approach whereby there is much greater emphasis upon the role of professional staff in assessing victims’ needs, and the filtering of work to volunteers. These shifts have taken place against a changing political backdrop wherein the voluntary sector has been drawn much more into the work of the state, and where for agencies such as Victim Support there have been tremendous rewards in taking on this role.

The potential impact of local commissioning on victim services in England and Wales

This article looks at the shift that has taken place in the funding of victim services in England and Wales, following the decision to appoint Police and Crime Commissioners, and give them the responsibility to commission such services at the local level. Over the past 40 years or so the voluntary sector agency Victim Support was ‘the major victims’ agency’ to which the majority of victims who reported crime to the police were referred. Victim Support therefore enjoyed reliable and consistent funding from the state, whilst its more ‘independent peers’ in the form of specialist services, had to contend with often less generous and less stable sources of funding. The shift to local commissioning chimes with the neo-liberal ideology which has permeated Conservative government policy since 1979, and which the Coalition government of 2010, and the Conservative government of 2015, have continued to champion. Thus the economy and the commissioning of victim services are increasingly subject to ‘the market’, as the best way to achieve efficient, effective and economic service provision. An array of government documents have talked about the importance of introducing competition into victim service provision, both as a political goal but also as a way of meeting the challenges that the current era of austerity poses. This paper then explores the potential implications for victim services in devolving funding to elected Police and Crime Commissioners in England and Wales.

Homesafing Keyham: an evaluation

The impact of a target‐hardening initiative on residents of an inner city area of Plymouth, England, was assessed by comparing the perceptions of those included in the initiative (experimental group) with other local residents (control group). While the former felt that target hardening had improved their sense of security, differences between the two groups were minimal on standard ‘fear of crime’ questions, leading us to question whether this was because the project failed or due to the evaluation design. One aspect of the latter is whether ‘fear of crime’ questions are valid measurements in this context. Another relates to differences between the experimental and control groups. A further valuable lesson from the research in this respect was that even where initiatives locate impoverished groups, they may still miss other, even more disadvantaged sections of the community living in the same area.

The impact of local commissioning on victim services in England and Wales: an empirical study

This paper follows on from earlier work in which I discussed the potential impacts of the local commissioning of victim services by Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) in England and Wales. The introduction of this elected role and the devolution of responsibility to local PCCs was said to raise a range of issues for both victims and the voluntary sector, given that agencies within this sector are major providers of support for those affected by crime. Before 2014 the approach to the funding of victim services was not particularly of concern, save for questions being asked in the ‘audit culture’ of the early 2000s, around the extent to which the government-funded agency Victim Support could be said to be providing ‘value for money’. However, these concerns gained momentum with the incoming Coalition government of 2010, and by 2014 local commissioning by PCCs had been implemented. This meant the previous mixed economy of victim services provision via the largely centrally funded organisation ‘Victim Support’ as a ‘national victims’ service’, and an array of smaller and more financially independent victim agencies who had to bid for pots of funding much more competitively, has given way to the political appeal of a free market for all. In order then to explore the reality of this shift, a piece of empirical research was undertaken with voluntary-sector agencies in the far southwest of England. Essentially the research provides evidence that the issues raised in my earlier work have indeed come to fruition.