Women Offenders and Older Prisoners

Debate between Lord Beith and Karl Turner

Thursday 16th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Amess. I am pleased to speak on these two excellent reports following inquiries conducted by the Select Committee on Justice. The two reports, “Women Offenders: after the Corston Report” and “Older Prisoners”, raise some important questions and make valuable recommendations about two distinct groups within our justice system. I will begin with women offenders.

Six years after Baroness Jean Corston’s report, which made 43 recommendations to drive improvements in the women’s criminal justice agenda, I and the Justice Committee are concerned that we do not have strong leadership in the Ministry of Justice. That must be an issue. In their response to the Corston report, the Labour Government accepted 41 of the 43 recommendations and set out to implement them under the strong direction of my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle), the then ministerial champion for women and cross-departmental women’s policy unit. However, as the report rightly identifies, leadership has weakened in the Ministry of Justice since 2010. It also identified a two-year hiatus in efforts to implement the Corston recommendations. During the first two years of this Government, there was no designated Minister responsible for women in the criminal justice system, and I remember raising the issue on a couple of occasions with the then Lord Chancellor.

I agree with the report that it is

“clear that the matter of female offending too easily fails to get priority”

in the system

“in the face of other competing issues.”

A much-delayed strategy was published in March 2013 by the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant), whom I commend for that. It was welcome, but I submit that the six-page document was a vague strategic objective. I think that the Select Committee was right to say that it was produced in haste with insufficient thought. Despite the Minister’s creation of an advisory board, the report states that

“without wider ministerial involvement”,

it will not

“constitute a sufficient mechanism for high level cross-departmental governance arrangements of the sort that Baroness Corston initially proposed”.

Without such ministerial leadership, the board would not have the authority to bring about integrated strategy and co-ordinated service provision.

I also note concerns that the Government’s “Transforming Rehabilitation” agenda may pay little regard to the needs of women offenders. I believe that there is now general agreement that women should not be dealt with in the criminal justice system in the same way as men. Women end up in prison for different reasons than men do, and women often find themselves in prison for non-violent criminality. There also seems to be general agreement that although prison is absolutely right for some crimes committed by women, for the majority of women offenders, imprisonment is frequently an ineffective response. The very personal story told by my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) hits the nail on the head in that regard.

The report states that such recognitions are not about treating women more favourably or implying that they are less culpable, as hon. Members who have spoken in this debate have pointed out; rather, they are about accepting that women face different hurdles from men in their journey towards a law-abiding life, and that the justice system needs to respond appropriately. Again, I fully support those views. It is therefore worrying that the report has found little evidence that the equality duty has had the desired impact of systematically encouraging local mainstream commissioners to provide gender-specific services, tackling the underlying causes of women’s offending, or consistently informing broader policy initiatives within the Ministry of Justice and the National Offender Management Service.

The report identifies further failings and states that progress on the NOMS segmentation work, which aims to separate out groups of offenders to understand risks and needs and target resources accordingly, has been far too slow. It is fair to say, and I am sure that people would agree, that the last Government made good progress on the Corston agenda, which has fallen by the wayside, to be perfectly honest, under this Government.

[Sir Alan Beith]

The hon. Gentleman is slightly overstating his case. What we actually said was that under the previous Government, it took a significant effort, not least by the present deputy leader of his party, to bring together a group of Ministers—women Ministers, as it happened—to get cross-Government signing and implementation. Most of those things were not lost in the first two years of this Government, but further progress might have been more rapid and productive if some kind of similar leadership group had been got together.

[Karl Turner]

I accept that point from the Chairman of the Select Committee, but I think it is absolutely fair to say that during the first two years of the coalition Government, there was no Minister responsible for this area. I respectfully submit that that has been a factor. The governance structures built by the last Government seem to have been pulled down, and the consensus of the majority of witnesses to the inquiry was that progress appears to have stalled under the coalition Government.

In evidence to the Committee, Baroness Corston referred to the previous Government’s abolition of routine strip searches and praised the fact that dedicated funding had been made available to establish community-based women’s centres. Again, I and other Opposition Members are concerned that those centres, which are making a difference in our communities, have suffered funding cuts under the coalition Government. There are now serious concerns about funding to local authorities, which use some of their moneys to fund other centres. I can think of one in my constituency, the Purple House on Preston road, which has done a lot of work with women offenders. It has done a massive amount of work, saving the taxpayer vast amounts of money by preventing people from going into custody.

Like the Committee, I remain unconvinced of the extent to which the approach set out in the Government’s strategic priorities for women offenders is truly integrated across Departments. The Chairman just intervened on me to say that the damage is probably less than I was suggesting, but that is a matter of opinion, and frankly, I disagree. It seems that work on the Corston report’s key recommendation—improvements to high-level governance and cross-departmental working for women offenders—has stalled and is in fact being dismantled. Six years after Corston, we still have far too many women in our prisons, and we need to reduce that number significantly.

In addition to driving the Corston review forward, we look to emulate the success of the previous Government’s Youth Justice Board, which presided over a halving in the number of first-time offences by young people, and a fall of a quarter in the number of young people locked up. Targeting specific groups and tailoring an approach to offenders’ unique circumstances have been shown to work. Using the Youth Justice Board as a blueprint for a similar board for women might have the same impact. Will the Minister consider that?

I congratulate the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), on his new job. He will be responsible for this area, and I know that he will take that seriously. I hope that he will look carefully at the report and implement some of its recommendations.

I turn to older prisoners, who were mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell). This debate is timely, given the report by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons that states that an 84-year-old immigrant detainee suffering from dementia died in handcuffs while in detention. That is a matter for the Home Office, but it is shocking and underlines the fact that the needs of older prisoners and detainees in our prisons and detention centres must be recognised.