Fair Process Needs Facts

Fair process needs facts

Awards are supposed to recognise good work. In criminal justice, they also send a message to people who live with the system on their backs. If a charity can win a prize while serious concerns and hard evidence are sat in plain sight, something is wrong with the process, not just the optics.

This page looks at the Criminal Justice Alliance Awards, The Recruitment Junction and what a basic idea of fairness should mean when organisations are shortlisted and celebrated.

Back to CJA Awards hub Open TRJ evidence archive Read full TRA article

What a fair awards process should mean in practice

For organisations

A fair process gives an organisation the chance to tell its story honestly, including context, mistakes and repairs. If there are concerns on record, the organisation should have the opportunity to respond to them directly, not just hope nobody notices.

Good organisations usually welcome that level of scrutiny, because it proves they can stand on evidence and not only on reputation.

For people affected by the work

People who rely on services or work inside them need to know that awards are not handed out in a vacuum. If you have raised safeguarding, equality or data concerns, and the next thing you see is the same organisation being applauded on stage, it feels like the system is telling you to stay quiet.

That is why fair process is not an abstract legal idea. It is about whether complaints and evidence actually change anything in the real world.

In the TRJ case, the facts were there

Before the 2025 Criminal Justice Alliance Awards took place, detailed evidence about The Recruitment Junction already existed in the public domain. This was not secret or buried material. It included:

Public funding analysis confirming more than one hundred thousand pounds of public money, including at least £134,000 from Newcastle City Council alone, at the same time that "no public funding" claims were being made.
Evidence of multiple email addresses being blocked while GDPR rights and Equality Act questions were live.
Preserved PDFs of complaint handling, service withdrawal and contradictory public statements.

All of this is collected in the TRJ evidence and document archive and backed by primary documents. The question for the awards process is whether anyone chose to look.

What went missing from the awards narrative

No space for live disputes

The published awards material focused on success stories, partnerships and individual case studies. There was no visible mechanism for noting where an organisation was in live dispute about safeguarding, disability discrimination or data handling.

A simple symbol or line of text acknowledging outstanding concerns would have been enough to show that the issues existed and were being taken seriously.

No obvious route for whistleblowers

Staff, volunteers and service users watching the shortlist announcement had no clear public route to say "you might want to see this evidence before your final decision."

That gap is exactly why The Reasonable Adjustment created tools such as the whistleblower page and independent evidence archive, and why this shadow domain exists.

The minimum fairness anyone should expect

Transparent criteria

Award organisers should publish clear criteria that include safeguarding, equality, data handling and honesty in public communications, not only outputs and growth.
Structured conflict checks

Panels should declare conflicts, check public registers and read any serious public interest material relating to shortlisted organisations. That does not require a full investigation, just a willingness to look beyond nominations.
A channel for concerns

Nominees, staff and service users should have a published route to send evidence directly to the awards team in a way that does not rely on the organisation itself forwarding criticism.
Decision log with evidence attached

When an award is given despite live concerns, there should be a confidential record of what was seen, what was not, and why the panel believed the decision was still justified.

How The Reasonable Adjustment and Ki-Ki fit into this

The TRJ case did not only lead to articles and PDFs. It also pushed the creation of The Reasonable Adjustment as a long term platform for evidence based reporting, and later Ki-Ki as a technical backbone for fast sites and evidence grade logging.

The idea is simple. If institutions are going to ignore or sidestep disabled service users, then somebody needs to write things down clearly enough that funders, awards bodies and regulators can no longer say they did not know.

This page is part of that record. It is not neutral, but it is grounded in documents that can be checked. The more that awards and funder processes catch up with that level of detail, the less likely it becomes that a contested organisation can be lifted up as a model without proper scrutiny.

therecruitmentjunction.co.uk