Our vision for equality and diversity

We aim to create a public prosecution service which holds the confidence of all communities, is known for its fair decision making and for engaging and valuing its diverse workforce contributions in providing appropriate services to the communities we serve.

Building on success – a lot done; a lot to do

An earlier Equality and Diversity Stocktake (CPS 2004) concluded that although CPS came to the equality and diversity agenda relatively late, it has been a considerable achiever in a short space of time. It concluded that many of the agendas have been well set in CPS in the period 2000-2004 and a key challenge then was to focus on delivery of outcomes and results. For the past four years the CPS has placed considerable emphasis on improving equalities outcomes, in particular in the areas of hate crime outcomes, and more recently violence against women outcome; community engagement; and workforce representation. Whilst a lot has been achieved in recent years there is still a lot to do.

In recent years the Service has:

• engaged diverse communities in framing key public policies on the prosecution of racist and religiously aggravated crime, domestic violence, homophobic crime, disability hate crime and crimes against older people
• engaged key stakeholders in framing its first Single Equality Scheme across all six strands and accounting for delivering through a national community accountability forum
• conducted comprehensive equality and diversity impact assessments of the CPS’s core business, including charging decisions and advocacy
• launched and implemented the results of an innovative project on Domestic Violence involving  strands on specialist courts; expert witnesses; training and Area pilots to evaluate new measures including the use of specialised DV coordinators; trained prosecutors; and performance management of Domestic Violence case outcomes and more recently built on this with a ground breaking strategy on violence against women
• secured a workforce which is increasingly representative of the communities we serve, whilst recognising the challenges of under representation at middle and senior levels
• secured a positive thematic inspection from HMCPSI on equality and diversity in employment in CPS (November 2006), and more recently
• secured a very positive Capability Review assessment on achievements on equality and diversity and community engagement (June 2007).

A continuous improvement journey

The CPS considers that it is on a continuous improvement journey on equality and diversity. The period 2000-04 was marked by agenda setting; the period 2004 to date has been marked by a focus on community informed policy making and a strong focus on performance in the wider business. In the period ahead we will sustain this performance focus and build on it to create a culture of irreversible change on equality – to further drive equality and diversity into the mainstream of the organisation.

Key priorities include:

• on equality in employment and more widely – building leadership and accountability for equality and diversity; bringing on and bringing in diverse talent as part of an overall talent management approach; supporting behavioural and cultural change and through all this, achieving workforce diversity targets. This work will be co-led with Human Resources and will be delivered through our new Diversity Delivery Plan
  
• further developing and supporting work to strengthen the prosecution and monitoring of hate crimes, keeping hate crime policies under review
  
• developing and supporting work to prosecute hate crimes in developing and ‘newer’ area including disability hate crime and crimes against older people
  
• securing consistency in performance on equality, diversity and engagement across CPS Groups
• embedding and delivering a violence against women strategy
• supporting implementation of a new Group structure including 14 new posts of Equality, Diversity and Community Engagement Officer in each Group
• steering delivery of the CPS Single Equality Scheme and lead the response to forthcoming equality duties
• delivering a step change in performance on community engagement at Group and Area level, in particular through embedding successful community scrutiny and community involvement initiatives
• developing further initiatives to enhance community responsiveness, transparency and accountability