Renfrewshire Council

Effective Community Justice can benefit whole communities. 

A strong Community Justice approach depends on effective engagement, creating opportunities to have conversations with our communities - including those who commit and fall victim to crime - to understand their thoughts, feelings and opinions on what justice should look and feel like in Renfrewshire.

This insight helps us identify the work we need to do to educate and inform what Community Justice is and the benefits it can bring.

Community Justice is about providing preventative activities to address some of the issues around health and wellbeing, employment, accommodation, and substance misuse that we know are linked to offending behaviour. 

A Community Justice approach also requires lots of different groups and organisations to work together. This means we can draw on the skills, knowledge, and expertise of individuals across different sectors.

Our Community Justice priorities

We'll support the national aim to prioritise early diversion and intervention, where safe to do so, by improving our understanding of how many people receive alternative measures to prosecution. 

We'll make progress to make sure that robust, high-quality interventions and public protection arrangements are available in Renfrewshire. We'll develop proposals for early intervention services with appropriate referral pathways.

We'll review the services we have to offer individuals accused or convicted of an offence to make sure information sharing and transitions between services are as best they can be.

We'll work together to strengthen our leadership, engagement, and integrated approach by looking at who we are, what we do and how we do it. 

Our Community Justice Outcome Improvement Plan and Annual Report

Community Justice Scotland oversees the work being delivered in each council area. 

Every Community Justice Partnership is required to have a plan which explains what they intend to do to reduce offending and re-offending in their local area.

Community Justice Scotland will give us feedback on the plan and give us support with things that we want to improve.

We'll write a new plan every three years, but there will be annual reviews so that we can check our work is on track and that the priorities are still the right ones for Renfrewshire.

Our performance against national outcomes will initially be measured against national indicators and then - once agreed by our partnership - appropriate local evidence. 

We'll develop a detailed action plans for priority areas. Progress against action plans will be reviewed by our Community Justice Renfrewshire Strategic Group and submitted to Community Justice Scotland as part of the national reporting mechanism.

We understand that circumstances can change quickly, and our partnership will remain open to emerging needs and opportunities and take steps to re-align our focus as necessary.

You can see our Community Justice Renfrewshire Outcome Improvement Plan 2023 to 2026 [201KB] . 

You can also see a copy of the Renfrewshire Outcome Activity Annual Report 2023-2024 [485KB] .