Offenders (Day of Release from Detention) Bill

Debate between Lord Bird and Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede

3rd reading
Friday 16th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I thank Simon Fell, MP for Barrow and Furness, for his wonderful work on getting the Bill off the ground.

What is so interesting about the Bill is that we invest a vast amount of money in putting people in prison and if, at the end of that period, they are released on a Friday and have no family support, friendships or relationships and cannot go to Citizens Advice, the local authority or any of the other support services, they often fall homeless over the weekend. We know that homeless people who have been let out of prison have the temptation and possibility of falling back into the crisis of poverty and the crisis of crime.

Therefore, I am pleased that we are making this wonderful little nugget of change to help us consider that there are a lot of other things to do. Is it not wonderful that we can say, “If we make that investment in somebody’s life, let’s make sure that, when they get out, they don’t fall back into grief”? I beg to move.

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Bird, described the Bill as a “nugget of change”; that is a modest thing for him to say.

Although the scope of the Bill is narrow and specific, it will make demonstrable change. There have been attempts to make this change in other, larger Bills in the past, which have fallen by the wayside, so I congratulate him, as a relatively new Member of this House, on getting through this significant addition to the way we manage people who come out of prison. As he said, this is a very vulnerable group of people who are very likely to reoffend, particularly if they are released on a Friday, so every step, however little, matters to try to reduce reoffending. I congratulate the noble Lord.