Early Release Prisoners: Preventing Homelessness and Rough Sleeping

Baroness Hyde of Bemerton Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hyde of Bemerton (Lab)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for tabling this debate and for his compassionate and evidence-based work over many years in this space to make our country safer and to improve the lives of all those impacted by the criminal justice system. The topic of this debate is a subject close to my heart as well, having spent part of my career working with people immediately prior to, on the day of, and following, release—known in the sector as “through the gate” work. I will focus most of my remarks today on women, because that is the bulk of where my professional experience lies.

As alluded to by the right reverend Prelate, the transition from prison to community is a tough one. Some of the people I have worked with have told me it was a tougher transition than going from the community to prison. It is made harder by a lack of supportive relationships with people not involved in crime, by complicated applications for benefits, by trying to ensure that you have the correct medication, by perhaps trying to ensure that you have the correct support for abstinence programmes—and then you might be met at the gates by your pimp or dealer. There is also the enormous social stigma that can last many years after your conviction and licence have ended. In the middle of all this is the question of where the person might sleep that night and on subsequent nights, which is crucial to determining future positive outcomes.

Noble Lords are well aware that the country is in a housing crisis and a prison population and capacity crisis. I am proud to sit on these Labour Benches and I support all that we are doing to address this, not least in the Social Housing Bill, which we will debate on Report on Monday.

Neither the prison crisis nor the housing crisis can be solved overnight. But, alongside the immediate actions that this Government have taken, I urge noble Lords to continue to use the privilege of being long-term incumbents to ensure that strategic and longer-term plans are laid, so that we are able to both prevent and solve women’s homelessness and criminal justice involvement.

I want to tell you about Hayley, who I worked with—unsurprisingly, that is not her real name. I met her a few days before her release from a prison located far from anywhere, as they often are, it seems to me. On the day of her release, we went on several bus journeys to save money, rather than using other forms of transport, to take her to probation, the drug and alcohol services and the homeless persons unit. There, we sat through a perfunctory questionnaire while it was rattled off—“Do you have pets? What is your local connection? Are you the victim of domestic abuse? Are you the victim of sexual assault? Have you ever worked in prostitution?”—as though these were perfectly normal questions to ask in a public council office.

We spent several hours there and through advocacy we were able to secure her somewhere to sleep that night. But the part of the borough where she had been engaged in prostitution was also the part of the borough where cheap B&B temporary accommodation was available, and that was what the local authority could afford. Therefore, after a very long day—we were on hour 10 or 11 by this point—we went with the keys to an address in the very streets where she had previously been living and working, using drugs and being involved in prostitution. I took her to this sparsely furnished room via Tesco to get a few bits and left her for the night in this very basic room with nothing more than a magazine and a box of cereal to distract her. I was not optimistic about how this was going to go, and it felt deeply unsatisfactory to leave her there. A decade later, as I recount this to noble Lords, I am still deeply unsatisfied by our failure to meet that woman’s needs and to keep her safe, even though it might have been regarded as a success because she had a roof over her head for the night.

I am sure that well-informed noble Lords across your Lordships’ House are keen to take a strategic view and, just as Marmot introduced the idea of the social determinants of health, noble Lords here can work on the social determinants of crime. In Hayley’s case it was childhood trauma contributed to by parental addiction, resulting in her own addiction, being groomed into prostitution as a teenager and living on the streets when she was not living in a prison.

There are many charities and local authorities doing good work in this space, and I urge the Minister to keep digging into that evidence and drawing on the resource available from local authorities. My former workplace, Islington Council, does amazing work finding solutions in this space. It has a Housing First officer employed by the council to meet prison leavers at the prison gate. They are co-located in the probation office to co-design their service. They have quarterly meetings with probation and, at the last rough sleeping count, nobody found rough sleeping in Islington had left prison.

I wonder whether the Minister has come across the Californian outfit Impact Justice, which, through its Homecoming project, has helped house 600,000 people leaving prison for six months using an Airbnb-style platform where hosts offer their spare room to the person being released. A scheme like that would ensure that another Hayley will not be left in a box room with a magazine and a box of cereal for company, with the whole system just crossing its fingers that it will work. We have to get this right. I urge the Minister to continue pursuing best practice, from local authorities and internationally, to meet this need.