Offender Rehabilitation Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Hamwee and Baroness Corston

Tuesday 11th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Corston]

My Lords, I am delighted to support the amendment tabled in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. It is 15 months now since we had the first vote specifically on this issue that I can remember. At that time there was a tied vote and we were promised a strategy. Subsequent attempts to amend legislation to provide for gender-specific services have failed.

My reading of the current government policy on transforming rehabilitation is that we are going back 10 years, because we are going to have an offender strategy that can be tweaked for women, rather than asking what kind of strategic priorities we need for women offenders. Those are missing. We have a two-page statement, not a strategy, from the Government about what is going to happen for women. If this was a serious undertaking, this kind of amendment would have formed part of the Bill. It would not be up to Members of the House to try to put it into the Bill.

The other thing that I found very troubling during the course of my review was how many women knew that their lives were spiralling out of control but knew that there was nowhere they could go to get assistance. That is what was so amazing about the seed-corn money, although it was £15 million, that the previous Government put into keeping women out of prison by providing women’s centres as alternatives to custody. I know that the Minister has visited at least one, and I am sure that noble Lords who are interested in this area will have done the same. You hear stories of women who have gone through a period of the most amazing redemption because they have had these gender-specific services from people who understand the reality of women’s lives and the centrality of family and children. They understand that when women go to prison, unlike men, there is no one to keep the home fires burning, and they usually lose their children and do not get them back.

All these issues can be dealt with easily if you make provision statutorily for gender-specific services, because people have to think about it. It is not a question of women being an add-on. I accept that, given the overall prison population—there are about 86,000 men in prison and 4,000 women—you could say that women are an add-on. However, given that some 17,000 children a year are affected by their mothers’ imprisonment, and a significant proportion of those children end up in prison themselves, such provision seems to me to be the most important preventive strategy. I cannot for the life of me understand why the Government are so reluctant to have this in the Bill, because it would be a matter of pride to do so. I know that the Minister will tell me how much has happened, and I will listen with patience but with some irritation, because, given my experience in the 21 years since I first set foot in a women’s prison, I know that it will not be enough. So I say to the Government: if this amendment is not accepted, we really want to see something that will work.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Marks spoke on the needs and importance of specific services for women. I hesitate to follow the noble Baroness because I cannot be nearly as powerful as she was, but I cannot keep silent either. I spoke on the issue on the previous day in Committee. I appreciate that this is a different amendment that addresses a different matter from those that we have looked at before. On short sentences and a period of supervision, I want to make one specific point before I come to the more general. Unless the supervision requirements are appropriate, for all the reasons that we have talked about, the likelihood of a breach of the requirements by the offender must be higher, and that will mean that she is back in custody. That is exactly what we want to avoid.

I know how strongly my noble friend Lord McNally feels about this, and I know that we are going to hear that work is under way, led by his colleague, Helen Grant. However, I will make one point and ask one question. My point is that a marker of some sort should be put down that shows the importance with which this House regards this issue—like the noble Baroness, one finds it difficult to find the words, but they are not specialist services, because they are not an add-on; they are a different group and they need different services. Furthermore, the marker should acknowledge the importance with which this issue is regarded outside this House by, I think, everyone in the offender management penal reform field to whom I have spoken.

My question to my noble friend, who is probably at least as frustrated as I am, is what amendment, if this is not accepted, would put down that marker, get past the Treasury, if that is where the problem is, and not restrict the progress of work done in the MoJ but enable us to make the point? Many noble Lords have put down a string of amendments. If none of those is going to get a tick from the Minister, can he help us—I know that he is on side—by suggesting what would take the matter forward at this stage?