Mr. Philip Bowen:

Moving to north Liverpool, it is important to put on record is that its success or failure is not binary. Very few social innovations are total successes or total failures. Even though it has shut, there were some notable successes. The evaluation, which came out in 2012 from the Ministry of Justice, suggests that when the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre opened in 2005, there was a fall in crime in north Liverpool and it fell to a greater degree over that period than across England and Wales more generally and, indeed, over the whole of Liverpool. We are not quite sure of the association between what the court was doing and the relationship that had to crime. Although it shut, there were things around re-offending that did not quite work but there were other really positive results.

The question is, why? If I was to offer one observation as to why north Liverpool has not quite been able to translate into a sustainable court, it is that community courts require good thorough planning which understands the local make-up. That can be hard to pull off when one has a national pilot being driven from Whitehall, London that is trying to make a difference to something in north Liverpool. That is a very important part of the picture as to why north Liverpool is not currently running.

When the Ministry of Justice set it up, it put within the courts relative high fixed costs but when one has a declining caseload, that makes every case look very expensive. That was part of the model created in 2005 when times were slightly better. When one moves to 2012 and court budgets are being cut by 37% over the next five years, I totally understand where the Courts Service is coming from when it has something which, in cash terms, is quite expensive. The other community courts in which I have been lucky to work and observe, seem to have had a more sustainable financing model around their operations.

For many reasons, north Liverpool remains the outlier. The point made by somebody earlier was that learning lessons is not just something one does from total successes or total failures but also from things that have mixed messages.