Leadership Insight: Well organised systems don’t always reduce harm
Our deputy chief executive Michael Baker addressed the World Congress on Probation and Parole this week. His address highlighted the importance of organising support around families and harm and not services and structures
Most systems in justice and social care are well organised. But are we working together effectively enough to reduce harm?
We have clearly defined roles and increasingly specialist teams. There are structures to reflect funding and accountability priorities as well as professional expertise.
This is particularly evident in responses to domestic abuse, where systems are typically organised around victims or survivors, those causing harm, and children – often supported by different teams, operating to different priorities.
Individually, these parts of the system often work well. However, families don’t experience harm in this separated way.
What this creates
When systems are organised this way, three things can happen.
Firstly, the picture of harm is fragmented across multiple agencies. Specific services will have a good understanding of the person they work with, but not the full set of relationships within the family. We might understand the pieces of the picture but not how they fit together.
Secondly, accountability can drift and we miss an opportunity to create a shared purpose across agencies. Each service is doing its job, but responsibility for outcomes is less clear and opportunities to reinforce a shared agenda are missing. This is particularly true outside moments of crisis.
Thirdly, impact can be inconsistent. Standardised pathways and interventions don’t always reflect the complexity of people’s lives, relationships and motivations.
The result is a system that can be well organised, well-coordinated and well intentioned but still not consistently targeting – or achieving – a reduction of harm.
A different starting point
The starting point for the Steps to Change model in Surrey wasn’t that services were failing. Local agencies – led by our commissioner the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Surrey – had a simpler insight. Could the system be stronger than the sum of the individual parts?
So the question became:
What would happen if we organised around families and harm – rather than around services and structures?
Through the Steps to Change Hub, victim and survivor support, behaviour change interventions, and children’s services have been brought together into a single model.
We are sharing what we’ve learned from this approach working with the police and our delivery partners at the World Congress on Probation and Parole, as part of a wider conversation about how systems organise smarter to reduce harm.
The key difference isn’t simply integration – it’s how the system is organised with the family as the unit of focus.
Decisions are made with a single view of the family and information is shared once and used collectively. Accountability is held together, not in parts and crucially all agencies are aligned to a shared purpose: reducing harm.
This creates a clear, collective goal across agencies and cuts across organisational priorities. It allows services to meet families where they are, rather than expecting families to fit predefined pathways.
People are no longer routed through separate services. Families are supported as a whole through the Steps to Change model – sometimes drawing on multiple services simultaneously.
It also allows the system to adjust as understanding deepens. People initially identified as perpetrators may be recognised as primary victims who have used retaliatory violence. Others may move in the opposite direction. The system responds to the reality of the family, not the category they were first placed in.
Who can refer – and when – shapes outcomes
How people enter the system determines how early we can act. The service is commissioned by the police, but they are not the gatekeeper. Any agency can refer in, and people can refer themselves.
In many systems, access is shaped by who holds the budget. Here, it is shaped by where the need is.
This shifts not only who refers, but when support is accessed.
Because access is simple and not controlled by a single part of the system, there are more opportunities to intervene earlier, not just at the point of crisis, but when concerns first emerge.
This has led to broader referral pathways, stronger engagement from services such as social care and schools, and greater confidence across agencies that there is a single place where responsibility is shared.
Early access, combined with a shared view of the family, creates better conditions for reducing harm before it escalates. In this sense, earlier intervention is not a separate function but is a consequence of how the system is organised.
Early signs of change
This is still early work – the model received its first referrals in January 2024 and we are cautious about over-interpreting results.
But we are seeing consistent signals across police data, practitioner insight and feedback from victims/survivors and behaviour change participants.
People completing behaviour change programmes show a greater understanding of harm and its impact on others. They report better capacity to regulate emotions and therefore behaviour.
In cases where follow-up data is available, around 84% had no further police contact after completing the intervention. The numbers are small, but the direction of change is consistent.
We are also seeing change in the system itself. People are reaching the right service more quickly. Being incorrectly categorised for example as a perpetrator when victim services are more appropriate can seriously damage trust in the system. Support for parents experiencing harm from their children, where the priority is to stop the behaviour rather than criminalise it, is also critical.
This model allows the system to recalibrate as more information becomes available and respond more effectively to the needs of families.
Significantly, professional practice is also changing with a fuller picture of the family and a clearer picture of what other agencies can do. Perpetrator services have constant reminder about the victim perspective and victim services are seeing that people can and – in many cases – want help to change.
What is distinctive
Multi-agency working, information sharing and integrated services exist in many systems. What’s different here is how we are organised.
- A whole-family approach, not parallel pathways
- A shared purpose of reducing harm
- Shared accountability across services
It is the combination of these things that starts to change how systems behave.
A question for systems
This raises a broader question: are we organising around structures or around families?
If systems are ultimately accountable to the people experiencing harm, then how we organise them is not a technical detail, it shapes whether harm is reduced.
And often, the challenge is not to build something entirely new, but to organise what we already do differently.