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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Dr Phillip Lee)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. I congratulate the hon. Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore) on securing a debate on such an important subject. He and many other speakers have made thoughtful and informative contributions and have raised several pertinent points that I will respond to.
I share many of the concerns that have been raised today. Female offenders are some of our most vulnerable members of society and often have complex needs. A significant number of the female prison population are indeed victims of difficult circumstances. They often face mental health issues, substance misuse problems, domestic abuse and homelessness. Those are all issues that need to be addressed during and on release from prison if we want to reduce reoffending and enable the women to have a chance to reintegrate back into their communities.
Our statistics show that almost half of women reoffend after leaving custody. That is not acceptable. I do, of course, recognise the concerns raised by the September 2016 Her Majesty’s inspectorate of probation thematic report on women’s services in the community. The report acknowledged that there were examples of excellent work, but that it was inconsistent. It was also encouraging that the majority of women interviewed felt that their involvement with probation services had helped reduce their likelihood of reoffending.
We accept that aspects of probation delivery, including through-the-gate services, are not meeting our expectations. As the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Mr Gyimah), made clear in July, we have already taken action to make changes to the contracts with community rehabilitation companies to better reflect the costs to providers of delivering core services. We are continuing to work with providers to explore further action that we might take to ensure that services protect the public, rehabilitate offenders and deliver the sentences of the court.
Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service contract management team has reviewed the compliance of CRCs against gender-specific contractual requirements. Although in general CRCs are adhering to their obligations, we are working with them to identify the necessary actions required to improve delivery and outcomes for women offenders. It is important, too, that women who are being supervised by the national probation service on licence have access to the interventions that will help build and sustain their rehabilitation. HM Prison and Probation Service is looking at the interventions provided to women in custody and in the community to identify any gaps or deficits, but also to ensure that staff maximise the use of interventions that are currently available.
The Transforming Rehabilitation reforms extended post-release supervision to some 40,000 offenders serving short custodial sentences, who previously received no support from probation on release. They also introduced through-the-gate services to help released offenders to resettle in the community. We know that, with the extension of supervision to offenders serving short custodial sentences, the number of recalls of women has increased.
Although it is important that a community order or post-custodial licence is properly enforced, we also need to support women to reduce unnecessary recall. We have therefore taken forward specific work to ensure we engage effectively with female offenders to improve compliance with an order or licence. This includes offering female offenders the option of a female offender manager if that suits their needs best; issuing a practice guidance document on working with women offenders to probation staff to help them to consider issues specific to female offenders; updating our instructions to probation staff on offender childcare to support access to childcare provision to facilitate engagement in supervision and specified activities, thus supporting female offenders to complete the requirements imposed upon them where childcare issues were previously a barrier; better supporting staff by providing additional guidance to inform their consideration of the thresholds to recall by, and, where viable, to make alternative decisions to improve engagement and compliance; and looking at how to best train prison and probation staff on how to most effectively engage with women and to work with them in a way that takes into account their previous experiences of trauma. Evidence indicates that if we do so, we are more likely to achieve effective outcomes and increase their compliance with their community order or post-custodial licence.
Concerns have been raised today about the sustainability of women’s centres. We recognise the important role that women’s centres can play in supporting female offenders, and those at risk of offending, to address their often complex needs and turn their lives around. We are investing £1 million in seed funding between 2016 and 2020 for local areas to develop new ways of working with female offenders by adopting a joined-up multi-agency approach and bringing together services at each stage of the criminal justice system. That model, often termed a whole-system approach, brings together local agencies and criminal justice—statutory and voluntary—to take a joined-up approach to providing the holistic, targeted support that a female offender needs, with shared investment and outcomes.
Women’s centres are at the heart of many of those models. The national probation service and CRCs are key partners, ensuring that female offenders receive targeted, wraparound support, both through the gate and in the community. I strongly believe that locally led services are more effective in addressing the needs of vulnerable women. The first whole-systems approach model in Greater Manchester has been fully operational since January 2015. The model includes police triage, a problem-solving court, and support alongside community orders and on release from prison. Although we cannot conclude that the model has had a direct impact, there has been a reduction in the number of adult women prosecuted, and in the number given custodial sentences in Greater Manchester in 2016. Learning from Greater Manchester and our other grant-funded areas will inform our future work.
There is considerable evidence of a link between a lack of stable accommodation and reoffending, with suitable accommodation playing an important part in enabling offenders to get a job or get into training, and to get registered with a GP. HMPPS has undertaken some initiatives to improve access to accommodation, such as expanding the bail accommodation and support services contract to offer accommodation to offenders on licence. We continue to work with all probation providers to ensure that offenders get the support that they need to find accommodation on release.
Accommodation is, however, a serious problem that requires a cross-departmental response. We are working with the Department for Communities and Local Government on a number of its housing priorities, including the implementation of the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017. Through the duty to refer, all prisons and probation providers will be subject to a new duty to refer someone they support who might be at risk of becoming homeless to the local housing authority.
I want to mention the work that we are doing to improve health outcomes. We are looking closely at what more we can do to improve support and continuity of care and treatment when someone leaves prison. One example is the change we made to allow prisoners to register with a GP prior to their release from prison, to facilitate a timelier transfer of information from prison to GP practices. That sounds like a simple change, but I know from my professional experience what a difference it can make.
The number of self-inflicted deaths is thankfully reducing, but six women still died in prison in the 12 months to June 2017. All deaths in custody are a tragedy, and I am acutely aware of the need to do more to meet the needs of women in our care. The incidence of self-harm is also still unacceptably high, and disproportionate compared with men. We are acting on the initial results from the Independent Advisory Panel on Deaths in Custody’s rapid information-gathering exercise on preventing the deaths of women in prison.
Action we have already taken includes making improvements to prison reception areas and first-night provision. We have also updated and improved the assessment, care in custody and teamwork process for supporting at-risk prisoners, and we have strengthened the suicide and self-harm training for staff, and for ACCT case managers. Juliet Lyon, the author of the report, also looked at what more could be done for women before their release from prison. She noted that the run-up to release could be particularly stressful as women consider all aspects of their life that have been on hold while they have been in prison. I met with Juliet only recently.
The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) always makes an informed contribution to these debates and I thank her for that. We have been reviewing and, as I have already said, have changed the contracts around CRC. The Department continues to assess the performance of probation, particularly for women because there have been difficulties. I met with DCLG this morning to discuss accommodation.
Regarding the points made by the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), I fully recognise the complexity of the women involved and their needs. Every prisoner I have met has appeared vulnerable to me, whatever their crime. The hon. Lady said that there are two whole-life sentences, but there are a greater number of restricted prisoners in the country. It should be noted that more than 2,000 women currently held in custody are there for more than 12-month sentences, so there is no easy fix, and we need to maintain some perspective.
The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made reference to substance misuse and mental health care access. As a practising doctor, I am aware of that. Indeed, I am fully aware of the difficulties in seeking appropriate mental health care within prisons, continuity of care on leaving prison and access to appropriate substance misuse programmes. I have been doing my bit to go into bat for the Department on that with the Department of Health, which ultimately carries responsibility for those services.
The hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) kindly invited me to visit Scotland, but I am already going. I was going to go last week, but I am now going in December. I was very impressed by the presentation we had by people from the Scottish Parliament and Scottish civil service on the quite impressively bold approach on women’s justice that is being embarked upon in Scotland. I very much look forward to visiting.
Finally, in terms of the Government’s strategy for female offenders, one issue that was raised in the thematic report on women’s services by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of probation was the lack of a strategic focus on women. I am pleased to say that we have made progress. In April this year, Sonia Crozier was appointed executive director for probation and women. The creation of that role provides an excellent opportunity to focus on the needs of women in a more holistic way across prisons and the community. I am also leading the development of a female offender strategy, which I intend to publish later this year. This debate has been helpful in informing that work and highlighting what else we need to do to improve outcomes for women in the community and custody.