Community Engagement

The CPS is committed to community engagement at both national and local levels. For us, community engagement starts from basic information giving about the CPS, through to more active consultation on existing policies or practices. Engagement in its most developed form involves communities working as partners with the CPS to improve the way we work, e.g. community groups being invited to contribute to staff training. By opening up the CPS and acting on input from diverse communities, we aim to inspire greater trust in the CPS, which in turn will lead to greater confidence amongst witnesses and victims, resulting in improved prosecution outcomes.

National engagement is undertaken through our Community Accountability Forum (CAF) which is made up of community representatives, representatives from our staff networks and staff. CAF is chaired by the Chief Executive, Peter Lewis. A range of other national engagement is also undertaken on national policies and programmes. The involvement of communities, through engagement, also helps us to improve CPS effectiveness by developing policies that address community concerns, for example, a range of diverse communities have been involved in developing our policies relating to racial and religious hate crime, homophobic and transphobic hate crime, domestic violence and disability hate crime. At local level, our Areas engage through Local Scrutiny and Involvement Panels (LSIPs). These are made up of community representatives and staff. LSIPs scrutinise closed hate crime and Violence against Women cases in order to provide feedback to enable the CPS to improve prosecutions on these cases. They are also a forum for local consultation. A range of other engagement is undertaken at a local level both independently by the CPS and in partnership with our criminal justice and other statutory agency partners. CPS Core Quality Standard 12 outlines the CPS standard for community engagement through which performance against the standard is assessed on an annual basis.

Policy and Guidance