2002 Community mediation

This page contains an outline of this review, and a summary of the key findings. Details of how to find the full report can be found at the bottom of the page.
 
Title
“Responding to community conflict: A review of neighbourhood mediation”
 
What is it?
The review is a scoping survey of neighbourhood mediation provision in England, Wales and Scotland. It focuses in particular on mediation of disputes between neighbours rather than the wider definition of community mediation that includes victim-offender mediation and peer mediation in schools. It examines how these services are funded, who uses them, and how quality standards are set and maintained.
 
Who did it?
The review was commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and researched and written by John Gray of Frameworks Consultancy, with Moira Halliday and Andrew Woodgate. It was published in 2002. The authors used a combination of analysis of Mediation UK’s Service Profiles and Annual Community Mediation Dispute Survey 2001, and telephone interviews with mediation service managers.
 
Key findings
The providers:

• The sector is diverse in terms of size of service and funding sources and levels.
• Mediation UK, the umbrella body for community mediation, has 174 service members, of which 140 provide neighbour mediation.
• Approximately 90% of Mediation UK’s service members are independent charities. The remainder are “in-house” services run from within another agency, most often a local authority.
• At the time of the research, 3,500 mediators were involved in delivering neighbour mediation. Most services use volunteer mediators, although there is an increasing trend for services to use paid mediators.

The cases:

• The annual survey (2001) found that full or partial agreement was reached in 30% of cases that were referred to community mediation services.
• At the time of the research, 16,000 disputes a year were referred to neighbour mediation services, three-quarters of which were accepted for mediation. Of these, however, only 12% ended up in a face-to-face mediation. Other cases were resolved without mediation or dealt with by the mediators brokering an agreement by “shuttling” between the parties.
• Where parties meet face to face, the success rate nationally – ie, where a full agreement is reached – increases from 19% to 90%.
• Most cases are referred by housing officers (51%), followed by self-referrals by one party in the dispute (30%) and the police (9%).
• Noise (45%) and violence (37%) dominate the range of issues dealt with.

The users:

• Service users are more representative of their local communities than are the mediators who provide the services.
• Neighbour mediation is more likely to be accessed by people from lower socio-economic groups and by women.

Funding:

• Annual service incomes ranged from £3,623 to £233,000, from a variety of sources including local authorities and other agencies, charitable grants, and a growing reliance on self-generated income.
• Services providing neighbour mediation are committed to delivering mediation free at the point of use for reasons of principle and practicalities.
• Sustainability of service funding is a concern, and some sources of funding present potential conflicts (eg the impact of restricted local authority funding on access for the general public).
• Research into the cost-effectiveness of neighbour mediation is still incomplete.

Accreditation and quality standards:

• The authors found that among service providers there was some opposition to the Legal Services Commission’s Mediation Quality Mark, which replaced the Mediation UK accreditation scheme. Concerns related to the time and resources required to fulfil the QM requirements, with no guarantee of funded work arising as a result, as well as a belief that the requirements might pose a threat to volunteering and to innovation.

Future trends:
 
One recommendation the authors make is that there is increasing confusion over the terms “mediation” and “conciliation”, and services have a responsibility to be explicit about what mediation entails and how it differs from other forms of alternative dispute resolution. The authors also identify a number of opportunities and tensions that the sector faces, including:

• service sustainability
• engagement in violent conflict
• the mainstreaming of mediation and reparation within the criminal justice system
• the Mediation Quality Mark
• payment of mediators
• academic criticism

 
The research is not available on the internet, but the book can be bought from Joseph Rowntree bookshop.