Cross Justice Group on Race Data and Evidence: aims and actions - August 2024

The Cross Justice Working Group on Race Data and Evidence was set up as a short life working group in 2020 to improve our collective understanding of the experiences of different ethnic groups within Scotland’s justice system. After reflecting on our progress to date and considering our future remit and activities, the group has agreed a revised set of aims and actions to ensure that our work remains relevant and continues to add value.

The group has also agreed to broaden our remit and longevity and to transition from a short life working group and drop the word “working” from our title.

We have agreed the following set of aims and actions to guide our future work.

New aims

1. To make further strides collectively in championing and improving both the collection and reporting of race data and to continue to build the evidence base on the experiences of minority ethnic people within Scotland’s justice system.
2. To share knowledge and best practice amongst members and justice organisations to drive improvements and enhance the evidence base.
3. To champion the use of such race data and evidence in informing the activities, policy development and decision making within individual justice organisations, and across the justice system.
4. To support justice organisations to monitor the impact of such policies and consider whether they are leading to improvements in desired outcomes.

New actions

The following actions will help deliver upon the new aims:

We will:

• support justice organisations to continue to make progress around improving their ethnicity data, including ensuring that consistent terminology and collection practices are used across the justice system to enable comparability
• further develop justice organisations’ understanding of why it is important to collect and publish ethnicity data, and supporting their confidence in doing so
• continue to build on the work under taken so far, including addressing identified evidence gaps, investigating research questions arising, and publishing these findings
• improve our understanding of intersectional evidence relating to ethnicity in the justice system, and explore where it might be possible to produce analysis which explores the intersections of ethnicity with other characteristics of interest
• work with third sector member organisations to engage with minority ethnic communities in a meaningful way that aids understanding of their experiences and justice outcomes.
• facilitate knowledge exchange between justice organisations, relevant areas of the Scottish Government, academia and third sector organisations, in order to contribute to policy development and practice
• champion organisations’ use of the improved evidence base in policy activities and decision making, through clearly communicating research and data to decision makers, promoting the use of equality impact assessments, and using evidence to contribute to a better understanding of where there are differences in experiences, what might be driving those, and how policy interventions could impact on them
• support organisations to clearly articulate desired outcomes of policies, and how they can monitor whether or not these outcomes are being achieved.  Promote the use of equality evidence within monitoring and evaluation
• encourage organisations to consider what an anti-racist organisation looks like and the type of evidence they might need to collect to demonstrate progress against this. Signpost to relevant information and collate information from organisations, who are already exploring this

See the group's terms of reference.