Offender Rehabilitation Bill [HL]

Baroness Linklater of Butterstone Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[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?

[Baroness Linklater of Butterstone]

My Lords, I, too, cannot remain silent. I am so glad that we are privileged to have the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, to add her voice to this debate. The crucial thing is that we have not managed to listen hard enough before. There is no question that women are different from men. They are not just differently shaped; they have particular needs and they are absolutely specific. We have known this for years. It is possibly boring but quite graphic to look at just a few of the facts and figures. Women serve very short sentences on the whole, with 58% serving six months or less and many only four months, or a matter of weeks. The sentences are for non-violent offences; we do not need to be protected from these women. Some 81% are for shoplifting, and we know that most shoplifting is for food for their children or for drugs. About 60% of the women, in fact, are drug users.

The final thing, which the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, also mentioned, is that the collateral damage of the imprisonment of women is absolutely unquantifiable. If more than 17,000 children a year experience and suffer separation from their mothers, that damage does not really take a lot of imagination to assess. Some terribly graphic reports have been published. For many children, to be separated in this way from their parents is like a bereavement: in their eyes, their mothers have died. This is a terrible thing to have to experience, but this is what we are doing to this primarily non-violent, very vulnerable, group of people from whom we do not need to be protected.

The centres, which we have models for, do exist and it would not be difficult for the Government to develop them along those lines. Several years ago now, when I chaired the Rethinking Crime and Punishment initiative, we funded the Fawcett Society, which issued an important report, before even the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, saying that we should make this specialist provision. We now have one or two important Together Women groups, and a total in this country of about 55 groups altogether, which is not very many. We have the 218 service in Glasgow and the Willow partnership, which we are very proud of, but they are a drop in the ocean compared with the needs of these women. I have been to a women’s centre recently and not only were the women telling me how much their lives were being changed but there were people at the centre who had been users and were now coming back to support other people who were going through the same terrible experience.

The facts and the figures, as well as this kind of affective argument, seem irresistible. I hope that when this amendment talks about the particular needs of women that the Government will have ears to hear and will take this forward immediately.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Corston, to whom tribute has been paid again today—as it is regularly, and rightly, when these matters come up—has spoken with her customary passion about the problem which her report so significantly addressed. The implementation of her report has, alas, as yet not gone far enough by any means. The Committee will, I am sure, agree completely with the thrust of her powerful argument this evening. I certainly support the amendment moved by the noble and learned Lord, to which other noble Lords have spoken.

It should not be necessary, but it still clearly is, to remind your Lordships’ House, and indeed others, of the impact of the present system on women offenders, particularly those who end up in custody. There is a shockingly high rate of suicide and self-harm for those in custody; it is much more significant than it is among male offenders. We are in essence discussing those who perhaps will be in custody for a short time, but even short-term prisoners will be subject to the temptation of self-harm, and that will apply, particularly again, to women. It is important that we look at this issue for a discrete group and take the sort of measures that deal properly with their problems. Although we are concerned today with the provisions of this Bill, that will need to be at various levels of the justice system. I hope we will have a sympathetic and practical response from the noble Lord when he replies.

I take this opportunity to refer again to resettlement prisons and women, because there is an issue here that that was mentioned on the last occasion in Committee and needs stressing: the proposal, which is welcome in principle, for resettlement prisons for those in custody who will be returned to the community to be nearer the place to which they will return. I pointed out that there are only 13 women’s prisons in this country and that there might well be a problem with housing women in a women’s institution close to where they live. It is a significant issue and a concern to organisations involved with this issue. It would be wrong to house women in an essentially male establishment simply because that happens to be nearer and there is no women’s institution in the appropriate geographical area. In fairness, in replying, the Minister did say:

“it is very important that we make the best use of the existing provision for women offenders in the prison estate, both taking account of its size and the geographical spread. We will be consulting with both providers and stakeholders to design the most suitable resettlement arrangements”.—[Official Report, 5/6/13; col. 1270.]

It is only a week since the noble Lord addressed the issue, and we are not expecting a result now, but an indication of the timescale for the consultation and who will be consulted would be welcome and would help to allay concerns about this issue. I hope we can get a sympathetic response.