Crime and Courts Bill [HL]

Baroness Corston Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Corston]

My Lords, I support Amendment 133A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. He suggested that my report had sunk without trace. Perhaps I may reassure him that I have not. Having waited over a year from the day when the noble Lord, Lord McNally, promised this House that we would have a strategy for women offenders which would be published “quite shortly”, found the statement released last week was acutely depressing. It was thin and took us back to the days of the women’s offending reduction programme. It is extraordinary that this can happen, particularly as I know that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, and his parliamentary colleague Helen Grant MP have been visiting women’s centres up and down the country and must have got the same message.

Why has nobody recognised the plight of women at risk of offending? It was reported in the papers that the women’s prison population had gone down by 400 since the previous Government started implementing my report. Given that the women’s prison population is, at any one time, just under 5,000, that is a proportionate reduction that the Minister might be quite proud of if it happened in the male estate. Why has it happened? It has happened because of the focus on women at risk. Magistrates’ courts up and down the country now do this work but there is no reference to it whatever. Will the Government please stop talking about payment by results? I have been in Parliament for 21 years and I have never known a Government who wanted payment without results.

Women’s centres, which work with women offenders who have been sent there by the court and women at risk, can have reoffending rates as low as 10%. There is no prison system in the world that can boast reoffending rates of 10% and yet these centres are now writing to me to say that their funding is being cut and they are finding it hard to cope. The £3.78 million, to which the noble Lord, Lord McNally, referred, is all well and good but probation trusts are, as I understand it from correspondence I have had with Helen Grant, being given the job of ensuring that that funding is spread. A smaller pot of money is being spread further so centres like Anawim in Birmingham—I challenge anyone visiting that centre not to be profoundly impressed with the work it does with very troubled women—are finding it difficult to cope. A lot of the women about whom constituents visit Members of Parliament in their advice surgeries are ones whose chaotic lifestyles lead to prison. Work done with them saves local authorities a lot of money.

I want to contrast what is happening with this advisory board with what happened before. We had a Minister, Maria Eagle, who regularly made Written Ministerial Statements on progress. That went alongside a very detailed strategy that was a thick document, not the two pages—it may have been three but it certainly was not more—that we had last week. This advisory board will work only if it has absolute overall strategic direction and a multidisciplinary team of civil servants working alongside it. I do not see that happening.

When I hear the Government say, “We are implementing Corston”, which I do not say out of arrogance but I gather that within the Ministry of Justice I am a noun and a verb, I feel my blood boil because it is not true. This Government do not understand the situation with regard to women generally, what gender-specific services are and what kind of priority should be given. If they did, it would not have taken one year and 10 days to publish what is a thin, mean document.

A huge opportunity has been missed because you cannot reinvent a broken wheel. Centres such as Anawim write to me saying, “You know what work we do and we are now finding that we are turning away women who lead chaotic lifestyles and are at risk of losing their children”. This is alongside a Bill under which we are speeding up the adoption process. What happens is that instead of helping these women who are at risk of offending to turn their lives around and keep their children, we do nothing for them and let someone else adopt their children.

[Lord Hurd of Westwell]

My Lords, I must add a word of praise for the two speeches that we have just listened to and a word of exhortation to the Minister to pursue more effectively the lines that he set out. We can welcome the steps that he outlined, so far as we understand them on first reading. Whether those steps will be taken or in some way accelerated by the fact that we are having this debate and passed an amendment at an earlier stage, I do not know. However, in attempting to make his case, I thought that the Minister’s heart was not in it. He did not really explain why my noble and learned friend’s amendment would be unhelpful. He took some pride in saying that life has moved on—meaning that the Government have moved a step or two—and that the amendment was therefore out of date. However, the Minister has not been too chary in the early part of our proceedings today in moving government amendments that updated the Bill. It would not be beyond the wit of his department to commission an amendment that would have filled any gap and brought us up to date on the Government’s latest actions, which, I understand, came to a head last Friday.

This is a black hole in our criminal justice system. In my time as Home Secretary, I visited a good many prisons, and I have visited several in the past year or so through my involvement with the Prison Reform Trust. Nothing is more desponding, gloomy or soul-destroying than a visit to a women’s prison. I do not know quite why, and I have not sorted out the logic of it in my mind, but there is something particularly disagreeable and unnatural—awful, really—about a woman in prison. When you consider the kind of offences in which women are characteristically involved, particularly those concerned with drugs, you are filled with a feeling of pity and anger that this defect in our criminal justice system should yawn so widely and take so long to deal with.

The noble Baroness, Lady Corston, is of course to be congratulated on her report, which has helped to move things on, as has the tireless work of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. They have illustrated clearly in their powerful speeches the defect. What is lacking is accountability and a person or persons whose responsibility it is to put this wrong right. Short of that, I fear that we are just being subjected to an amiable, and certainly sincere, smokescreen. They have proved beyond doubt that that is not sufficient. This has drifted on year after year, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said, and now we are offered not a statute, or a promise of legislation, but an advisory board. There is an advisory board sitting in this Chamber, but unfortunately its advice is not being taken.

I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, intends to press his amendment to a vote. I am sure that the Minister does not need to be told this, but I would ask him to take away and report to his Secretary of State and to all concerned in the Ministry of Justice the strong feeling in this House that there is a black hole in our arrangements and that we look to this Government to put it right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Corston]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, must know that during our time in government, 39 women’s centres were set up—£15 million was spent setting them up—to divert women from custody. I take great offence at his suggestion that nothing happened.

[Lord McNally]

I am not suggesting that nothing happened, but I am suggesting that the problems that we are facing now are very real. We have made progress on this. We have ring-fenced funds in a time of very real problems for government funding. I am surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, did not make even a passing reference to the fact that we are for the first time dealing with prisoners serving sentences of less than 12 months. I know that the previous Government tried that and then abandoned it. However, every time a Government try to make progress with an advisory committee it should not just be dismissed. I have been working for six months with Helen Grant and she is someone who is going to take responsibility. The Secretary of State has made her the Minister for Women’s Prisons, separating it out from other prisons so there is a line of responsibility.