Putting victim’s voices at the heart of policing – Met Police and MOPAC

Providing expert guidance and support around the design and facilitation of a new Victim Voice Forum for The Met Police and the London Mayor’s Office for Police and Crime.

The Backdrop

The Mayor’s Office of Policing and Crime (MOPAC) and the Metropolitan Police Service (Met) have a shared ambition to put victims’ voices at the heart of policing. They committed to establishing a forum which would provide insights about how current ways of working across the Met impact victims of crime, and to work collaboratively with people with lived experience to identify both immediate and long-term meaningful improvements to the support and service victims of crime across London receive. 

To support them in doing this, Collaborate were commissioned, in partnership with Ideas Alliance, to provide expert guidance and support around the design and facilitation of a new Victim Voice Forum (VVF). 

The forum has begun to play a pivotal role in driving change within the Met, by giving victims a platform to influence key processes and outcomes.

What we did

The VVF was developed with a focus on inclusive facilitation, ensuring that the voices of victims, each coming with their own individual experiences, were heard and supported.

Our starting point for this was to work with forum members to co-design principles to underpin the ways in which we would all work together. We used appreciative inquiry to do this, ensuring all members of the forum, including those from MOPAC and the Met, were able to share their thoughts on what good would look like from their perspective. Taking an appreciative approach allowed people to think beyond their experience as a victim of crime and instead reflect on other, more positive experiences they were able to draw on to determine what they might need to feel heard and valued as part of the group.

The shared principles developed by forum members placed an emphasis on ensuring a supportive environment which respects the expertise of all involved,  building trust, transparency, accountability and honesty amongst the group. 

Impact and Learning

Over its first eighteen months, the VVF has explored themes including police training, reporting confidence, the need for tailored victim support, and the end to end process for victims across the criminal justice system. 

What started as a small-scale initiative has now grown into a broader model. Based on the success of the forum, MOPAC is in the process of establishing five new thematic victim forums, focusing on specific cohorts where trust and confidence in the Met is disproportionately low. This expansion is a testament to the value of creating the spaces to listen to victims of crime so that people can foster meaningful dialogue and create impactful and personable change.

The work has highlighted the importance of slowing down the process and focusing on specific issues rather than attempting to tackle everything at once. The scale of the changes forum members and the Met would like to see are wide reaching across the criminal justice system as a whole, and there is a shared ambition to deliver.

There is also, however, a recognition that the forum needs time to fully understand the challenges presented and space to develop feedback and suggestions which can serve as the catalyst for change. By slowing down, the forum has been able to prioritise so that the work they are doing is able to reach and influence the right people, ensuring recommendations can be taken on board and improvements to service delivery made.  

With victims from diverse backgrounds, each with different experiences of crime, it became clear that creating a supportive environment was essential to ensure everyone is able to participate in a way which feels accessible to them. This involved us designing sessions to offer a range of engagement approaches such as pair work, question and answer sessions, journey mapping and presentations from organisations working within the criminal justice system.  We invited feedback from participants throughout, working with them to design agendas based around their priorities. 

Clear feedback mechanisms are also essential to the way in which the forum works so that the Met and MOPAC are able to communicate the impact the forum is beginning to have on culture and practice across the Met. 

The VVF shows how inclusive facilitation that focuses on trust and honest communication can lead to meaningful change. By creating a space for victims to share their experiences and feedback, MOPAC and the Met have recognised the importance of putting victim voices at the centre of the design and delivery of their processes. This has resulted in not only immediate improvements to things such as police training and communication campaigns, but also the development of a long-term strategy to ensure victim perspectives remain at the heart of service delivery and policy change.

The innovation, professionalism and warmth Amy and Helen brought to the facilitation of the pilot VVF was a huge factor in ensuring its success. The way the group coalesced into a mutually supportive vehicle for positive change in the Met’s approach to victim care is, in no small part, thanks to their efforts.