Greater Manchester Victims Gateway

Briefly describe the initiative/ project/service; please include your aims and objectives 

As part of the Justice Devolution agreement with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), the previous Deputy Mayor of Greater Manchester investigated options to improve the flow of data for victims of crime. This followed the completion of a piece of work known as Annie’s Journey, which mapped the negative and positive impacts of current data sharing across the Criminal Justice System (CJS). 

Work continued through the Strategic Review of Victims Services. This review involved research, multi-agency workshops and a user-centric full system review of victims’ services. The review culminated in a report to the Deputy Mayor and a new vision for a victims’ services redesign. This instigated a piece of work to further define the future delivery model for victims’ services in Greater Manchester (GM). A key output of this was the independent ‘Victims Services Demand Modelling Report,’ which was a valuable resource for the proceeding Discovery process. 

A Discovery was undertaken in July – September 2020, to explore the digitisation of victims’ services. Three Discovery workshops were conducted with thirteen different stakeholder organisations who represented the end-users of victims’ services. Solution Modelling conversations were conducted with Greater Manchester Police (GMP) and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) to explore the feasibility of delivery on the high-level solution requirements identified in the Discovery workshops. 

A review of the then GM Victims Service website was undertaken and key findings outlined in the ‘GM Victims Service Website Review Report,’ which was finalised in March 2023. The review report gave the recommendation ‘To replace the existing GM Victim Services website with a new solution, a GM Victims Service Gateway.’ 

Following a public consultation in 2021 to gather views on the proposed priorities, the Police and Crime Plan – ‘Standing Together’ 2022-25 was published (https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/media/5892/gmca-police-and-crime-plan.pdf). ‘Standing Together’ is a partnership plan that describes a new era of accountable and people-centred policing, community safety and criminal justice services for Greater Manchester. One of its three key priorities is ‘Keeping people safe and supporting victims,’ with victims and equality at the front and centre of the plan. 

This plan and the previous discovery work culminated in a project team being brought together in May 2023, led by GMCA’s Digital Transformation team, with the following vision: The projects ambition is to develop a digital solution that transforms the way victims and survivors’ access, engage, and interact with victim services across Greater Manchester, through the development of a digital solution that reflects the victims’ journey and enables better use of data to inform decision-making. This digital solution will put the needs of victims front and centre, allowing them to track and manage their own service journey, as well as access services at a time convenient to them, with the flexibility to engage and re-engage over time as their needs change. 

The main objectives of the project were: 

• – to provide a secure portal for victims of crime to refer themselves for support from the Greater Manchester Victims’ Service (GMVS). 
• – to allow victims to control their own support journey. 
• – to allow victims to access support anytime and anywhere in an accessible way. 
• – to create a standardised GMVS self-referral form. 
• – to create a direct integration of the self-referral form and GMVS’s case management system. 
• – to allow victims to complete multiple self-referrals. 
• – to allow victims to track their engagement with the GMVS. 
• – to provide transparency on who from the GMVS is engaging with the victim, as part of their support journey.
• – to provide information on support services and types of crime. 
• – to provide information on interactions with the criminal justice system if a victim reported a crime, using an interactive video timeline. 

The initial ambition of the project was to release a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to a small control group to gather feedback from key stakeholders and partners. The design of the website is such that further developments are ongoing, whether planned or from feedback, and the project has invested in continuing to work with the digital supplier who built the website, to carry out this continuous improvement.

What are the key achievements?

The Victims’ Gateway (VG) is a strategic product, supporting the delivery of the Greater Manchester Strategy objectives to deliver core/devolved services for the public via Justice Devolution, supporting victims and reducing the impact of crime. It will support creating a better information ecosystem that realises the full potential of information: managing, sharing and using information responsibly, helping to tackle our most serious challenges. 

It will contribute to enabling resilient, safe and vibrant communities where everyone has access to essential services and support our mission to build responsible data driven public services. and the partnership plan that describes a new era of accountable and people-centred policing, community safety and criminal justice services for Greater Manchester. And finally in relation to the Victims Code and Victims and Prisoners Act 2024, it focuses on victims’ rights and will improve support for victims and help to give them confidence that if they report a crime, the criminal justice system will treat them in the way that they should expect. 

The VG allows victims to tell their story once. A key finding from the original discovery project was that as victims went through their support journey, they would not know which service was reaching out to them, and they would often have to retell their story again and again with each individual service. 

The VG provides the user in need of advice and services with transparency, informing them who from the support service will be reaching out to them. This removes confusion around who they are liaising with at a difficult time and builds trust between the individual and victims services. 

Not all victims of crime report the incident to the police, or if they do, they may not be offered support or not want support at that time. Providing victims of crime with the ability to refer themselves for support at a time appropriate to them, empowers the user and provides them with control over their own support journey. 

Throughout all phases of development, the VG Project Team has embedded robust security measures to protect victim privacy and data confidentiality. Examples of this include a ‘leave site quickly’ button, enabling the user to quickly and safely close down the VG if the user is in a dangerous situation and stopping the VG being returned to via the back button on the browser. 

The VG is hosted in the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA’s) public cloud environment, meaning that there are significant security measures in place, including the proactive monitoring of the VG to ensure threats to the platform are identified and responded to at the earliest opportunity. 

A full Data Privacy Impact Assessment (DPIA) was completed, including mapped out data flows of both directional flows of data, with a dedicated GMCA Information, Data and Governance (IDG) lead on the project team from the start, and involvement of the IDG team from the Greater Manchester Victims’ Service (GMVS). This ‘Data Protection by design’ approach was to ensure that individuals personal data was held and transferred securely. This includes asking users to create secure accounts to add and hold their data, which includes asking them to authenticate each time to access their account, and a clear retention period built into the digital solution. There was a lot of consideration throughout the design phase of ensuring a balance between creating a secure digital solution but not making it inaccessible or off-putting to users, particularly when they could be in a heightened emotional state. 

The technology that has been used to build the website, Microsoft Power Apps, allows for the ongoing development and security of the site. The ambition of the project has not ended with the soft launch and there are features available, such as SharePoint, which have not been utilised, giving scope for further functionality to be added when needed. There is already a development roadmap in place, adopting agile and product management practices to ensure that ongoing feedback is gathered, assessed and built into the product roadmap. 

The project has been so successful, and the technology easily replicable, that the Senior Responsible Owner (SRO) for the project has asked for a similar website to be built specifically for GM partners within the sector. This will allow them to be able to communicate, share information easily that is not for public consumption, and complete professional referrals to the GMVS. 

How Innovative is your initiative?

This project was never seen as just being a digital project, with the aim to build and deploy a piece of technology, but rather as an opportunity to make a real and positive change to the experiences of victims of crime across GM through using innovative technology and building on lessons learned from previous projects. 

To enable this, the project was designed with a user-centric and agile approach, and this was a major requirement within the tender process for the digital supplier who was going to build the digital solution. The commitment to build a digital solution that was fit for purpose for the audience was a key driver of the project. Some of the reasons for this user-centric approach included: 

• – A design process that was driven by the needs and preferences of the people who will use the product or service. 
• – Emphasising the active involvement of users throughout the design process. 
• – Not having a fixed or rigid approach, but rather a flexible one that could be tailored to the specific context and goals of each project. 
• – Being a way of fostering innovation, creativity, and social change by putting users at the heart of the design process. 
• – Supporting working in an agile way, allowing us to build and refine as we moved through the project. 
• – Building on research done in the discovery phase, helping us to understand how users would need the gateway to work, and identifying key requirements. 
• – There were key project requirements that needed to be met, but how these were achieved was part of the collaborative userled design approach. 
• – Using a variety of methods and tools to engage users in different stages of the design process, including co-design workshops, user-testing, and feedback sessions. 

An agile approach was chosen to allow an iterative and flexible approach to the development of the key requirements, allowing for quick changes to be made, particularly in response to stakeholder feedback, and as there were key interdependencies with other projects across Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and the sector. The digital supplier supported this way of working, and with each project milestone, the flexibility in how these progressed, helped to build a sense of trust from the project’s key stakeholders in what was being developed. 

This collaborative approach was taken with all the interdependent activities that formed the project, such as the rebranding of the Greater Manchester Victims’ Service (GMVS) through workshops led by a branding agency, the creation of user stories (key design requirements) from stakeholder co-design workshops, the build of the Criminal Justice System video timeline website with an external supplier (a previous project that was absorbed into this one to become part of the final GMVS website), the creation of interim webpages as the victims’ website at the time was not fit for purpose, and the pulling together of content for the new GMVS website. 

Due to the strategic commitment from the Deputy Mayor to improve the experiences of victims of crime across GM, and the sensitive nature of the project, the Project Manager invested a lot of time speaking to key stakeholders on the project’s objectives, as well as providing ongoing updates on the project’s progress. To support this, a lot of time was invested in benefits realisation exercises, including mapping out the benefits, both interim and long-term, and aligning these to GMCA and crossGM strategies. This was to build trust in the project with key stakeholders, as well as providing justification for the investment in the project, and beyond into BAU. Part of this included the completion of the full EIA, with mitigations built into the design of the digital solution, as well as engaging Data Protection colleagues, both internal and external to GMCA, to ensure the most secure approach was being taken in the storing and sharing of personal data. 

The use of Power Apps has only been used as a corporate internal-facing tool within the GMCA. By utilising this technology for an external facing website, this meant bringing together GMCA Digital SMEs with the digital supplier to implement new ways of working to allow the website to be built. The decision was taken for GMCA to host the website and part of the 12- month development and management contract with the digital supplier now the site is in a ‘soft launch’, is for the digital supplier to upskill and share knowledge with the GMCA Digital SME’s, to allow for the eventual handover to internal management, and continued development of the website. This has also allowed for the exploration of Power Apps developer roles within GMCA to support this digital solution and the use of the technology for future projects across the GMCA and GM. Transport for Greater Manchester are now considering using this technology for some of their projects. 

What are the key learning points?

Lessons learned: There is a certain amount of uncertainty when building a new digital solution in terms of requirements. The digital supplier usually builds their digital solutions on their own platform, giving them complete control & access to all needed development tools, but the decision was made that it would be more beneficial for GMCA to host the website from the beginning. This created unforeseen challenges as the build began, including providing secure access for the digital supplier’s developers to GMCA systems & the number & type of licences that would be needed to allow them to complete the build. Delays were then caused due to the need to go through procurement processes. Alongside this were the special processes attached to the Safer & Stronger Communities Directorate who were funding the project, as any funding needed to go through additional approval processes. Therefore, the ambition for future projects, taking learning from this one, will be to try to map out what licences are needed at the start of the project & understand any special funding processes that need to be adhered to, so procurement processes can be started as early as possible to mitigate against any progress delays. Another approach will be for our Digital Directorate to procure any necessary software or licences, as there is more understanding around these, with costs then claimed back from the project’s budget holder. 

There were some challenges around the project not having governance over third party suppliers & this having an impact on project timelines. To mitigate against this in future projects, the aim will be to provide enough notice to any third-party suppliers of the projects timelines & set expectations around deliverables, particularly those that have a dependency on them. A key lesson learned from this project was that if procuring any suppliers as part of the project who will be working with a third-party supplier, consider stronger T&Cs at procurement stage to allow the third-party supplier to be held to account, with the aim to prevent delays to project timelines and ambitions. 

Successes: The Power Platform can be used in its ‘out of the box’ state. We made changes to ensure it was fit for purpose, but now one Power App has been built, this is easily replicable, and we are building the Partner website as another Power App on the same Platform. 

Having project management representation within both GMCA and the digital supplier, helped maintain the project timelines & cadence. Each supplier having a project management representative to manage their own internal deliverables and stakeholders, provided benefit to the project’s success. 

As part of the user-led approach, external stakeholders were engaged through discovery workshops, mini-projects i.e. branding, & external events. This created ownership in the Greater Manchester Victims’ Service (GMVS) website, & they are still keen to be involved in its ongoing development. 

When it was recognised that the existing GMVS branding was not fit for purpose, additional funding was released to allow an external agency to be brought into the project. Further engagement with internal & external stakeholders from across the sector and individuals with lived experience was undertaken, resulting in new branding and guidelines for the GMVS website & that can be used by all partners related to the GMVS. What was initially seen as a blocker to the project’s success, resulted in being of benefit to the end digital solution. 

The project was challenging due to the subject matter, so great care was taken to ensure approaches were considered, lawful & appropriate. Part of this included completing a full Equality Impact Assessment (EIA), consulting with key stakeholders and equality networks across GMCA and GM. The feedback to this was positive & the GMCA EIA Working Group fed back that the approach to the project was comprehensive and ‘Anything we can do to support people in such difficulty has got to be good for everybody’. An action plan has been developed from this EIA, with some mitigations already built into the digital solution. All actions will be reviewed 6 months from the initial go live, to ensure that mitigations are still working as they should, & the website is still fit for purpose. This includes working with a Neurodivergent champion, who will be able to provide feedback on any accessibility changes that can be built into the development roadmap. 

To ensure transparency of the project’s ways of working & allow for the easy sharing of information & documentation, maintaining clear versioning control, a dedicated Teams workspace was created that all key stakeholders, both internal & external, were given access to. In the projects lessons learned workshops, members fed back that having clear governance structures & escalation routes in place meant that when faced with any blockers, they knew how and who to escalate these to, removing any unnecessary delays. 

Additional Comments 

To support users of the website, several ‘how to’ videos have been published to the site, taking users through key activities such as creating an account and submitting a referral. This is an ongoing piece of development, with more videos and ‘how to’ pdf’s being added as new functionalities are developed, including how users can use their browser to translate the website if English isn’t their first language.