Community justice outcomes - improvement planning and reporting: statutory guidance

3. Leadership, governance and accountability

The partners must work together to prepare a CJOIP for their local authority area and will be jointly responsible for the plan's development and implementation.

It is vital that partners collaborate throughout the preparation, publication, and annual reporting of their CJOIP and actively engage in its delivery. Co-operation on community justice matters for the area may include, but is not limited to, the following:

• Sharing information
• Providing advice and assistance
• Co-ordinating activities (and seeking to prevent unnecessary duplication)
• Funding activities together

The partners' governance arrangements for the planning process are to be agreed and developed locally, and they may set up a local governance arrangement to assist them as they develop and agree their CJOIP. All statutory partners will be jointly responsible for the CJOIP.

The Act does not change the accountability arrangements for the partners, who are accountable to their own individual governance bodies for oversight of the development and delivery of the CJOIP and through any additional governance arrangements they may have jointly developed locally for community justice planning purposes. They may also wish to specify in the CJOIP how they will reach agreement on local priorities.

The expectation is that those who hold public bodies to account, principally elected members (local and national) and Scottish Ministers, will scrutinise partners on how they are working effectively in partnership to improve outcomes. By the same token organisations' boards, the Scottish Police Authority and Scottish Fire and Rescue Service Board would hold partners to account on these issues within the context of their regional or national remit and responsibilities. The partnership arrangement itself should make clear how it is using collective resources to improve local outcomes on its priority themes, as part of how it reports to its local communities.

Where the partners decide to work across local authority boundaries to plan for a larger geographical area this is acceptable, and may well be preferable in some instances, provided that such an approach has the support of all the statutory partners in the relevant local authority area/s. Where CJOIPs are developed on a multi-local authority area basis, the content of the CJOIP must make clear which local authority areas relate to the activities or services that have been identified. The partners for each local area have a duty to publish the CJOIP.