The Parole Board. Working with others to protect the public.
About the Parole Board
During the course of the year the Parole Board engaged in a
constructive and open dialogue with some of our key stakeholders
that could lead to real change in the way that we do things as an
organisation.
A full day workshop was held with Chief Probation Officers, hosted jointly by the Board and NOMS, at which a real sense of working together to solve shared problems was in evidence from all participants.
A number of stakeholder consultation meetings were held, during the planning for the implementation of the new Intensive Case Management process. These were well received by those who took part.
A seminar was also held at Grenadier House on the subject
of prisoners who maintain their innocence. Jointly hosted with
Bruce Kent from PPMI, we were delighted to welcome senior
attendees from the Howard League and NOMS, as well as solicitors,
academics and Parole Board members with a special interest in
the subject. Whilst differences did emerge there was also a meeting of minds on many issues and there is every prospect that real changes will take place, both at the Board and more widely within NOMS, as a result.
The Chairman and Chief Executive maintained the profile of the
Board during the course of the year by fulfilling a number of public
speaking engagements and writing articles for publication.
The Chief Executive, Christine Glenn, gave evidence on behalf of the Board to the Constitutional Affairs Select Committee. The evidence focused on the subject of sentencing policy and the impact on the Board of Indeterminate Sentences for public protection.
The Chairman, Sir Duncan Nichol, spoke to the All Party Parliamentary
Group on Penal Affairs about the work of the Board. He concentrated
on the Boards constitutional position, release and recall rates
and deferrals.
Christine Glenn spoke at the 850 strong Youth Justice Convention in
Bournemouth in November and at a Symposiumon Sentencing at the
Law Society in May. Christine also authored articles for Benchmark, the in-house magazine for the Judiciary of England and Wales, Criminal Justice Management magazine and the Justice of the Peace journal about the work of the Board during the year.
The media tends to be most interested in the work of the Parole
Board when there has been a high profile case of serious further
offending. Such cases have fortunately been notable by their
absence this year.
Instead the media has taken more of an interest in policy issues such
as the difficulties caused by the growing group of IPP prisoners
and the series of court cases that have continued to hand greater
responsibilities to the Parole Board.
Also of interest to the media was the report by the National Audit
Office into the work of the Parole Board that was published in March
2008. The report, whilst searching, was constructive for the Board
and there was little criticism of the Board in the media. The Chief
Executive still has to appear before the Public Accounts Committee to
be questioned about the findings of the report later this year.
The new Parole Board website, together with a redeveloped
members and staff area was unveiled to the Justice Secretary,
Jack Straw, before the Sir David Hatch Memorial Lecture and went
live in January.
Making the site more accessible and user friendly was one of the
briefs that we gave to our design agency. Another was the aim of
targeting the sitemore directly at our main audiences which include
victims, prisoners and practitioners. The home page was redesigned
with these audiences particularly in mind. New content was also added specifically for these groups.
However, the most frequent group of site users is members and staff
and we redesigned the members and staff area to make it more
accessible to these groups. We also added some new content here,
including the Members Handbook, the Oral Hearings Guide and the
Staff Handbook and created a more secure password access system
with unique usernames and passwords.
The first month's site statistics for the new website were very
encouraging with a 49% increase in hits and a 127% increase in page
views and the site was short listed for an award in the prestigious
Chartered Institute of Public Relations Excellence Awards for 2008 in the website or microsite category. The CIPR Excellence Awards recognise and reward best practice in public relations throughout the UK and acknowledge personal and team achievement at the highest
professional level.
Grenadier House, 99-105 Horseferry Road, London, SW1P 2DX
Telephone 0845 251 2220