Increasing Public Confidence
Confidence in the CJS
Raising public confidence in the Criminal Justice System (CJS) is one of the Government's key Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets. Improving confidence is a priority because the CJS relies on public co-operation and involvement to function effectively.
The level of public confidence in the CJS is measured through the British Crime Survey (BCS). The BCS is a continuous survey of adults aged 16 or over living in private households in England and Wales. The findings are based on face-to-face interviews with adults aged 16 or over living in private households in England and Wales (annual sample size of approximately 48,000). As well as providing an indication of crime levels in England and Wales, the BCS also provides attitudinal measures such as public perceptions of changing crime levels; worry about crime; perceptions of anti-social behaviour; and public confidence in the criminal justice system.
There are currently sixteen questions relating to confidence in the CJS, and two of these have been chosen as the key measures:
- How confident are you that the CJS as a whole is effective?
(baseline: 37%) - How confident are you that the CJS as a whole is fair?
(baseline: 56%)
The level of public confidence for each of these measures is defined as the proportion who say that they are 'very' or 'fairly' confident.
The PSA24 confidence target is to achieve a statistical significant increase across England and Wales (at the 95% level) in both measures from their baseline (6 months to March 2008) by the year ending March 2011.
Local Criminal Justice Boards are not being performance managed against these measures, and data at this level is provided for information purposes only.