Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what proportion of men in prison have access to legal advice on the issue of parental rights and responsibilities.
Answered by Lord Bellamy - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
Prisoners are entitled to civil legal aid if their legal matter is in scope, and they pass both a merits and a means test. The merits test considers the case’s likelihood of success and benefit to the client.
Legal aid is available in certain family matters, such as public family law cases which fall under the Children Act 1989. These types of cases include proceedings relating to whether a child should be taken into care or who should have parental responsibility.
In private family proceedings, legal aid is available for domestic abuse victims and where the child is at risk of abuse, subject to providing the required evidence and meeting the means and merits tests.
However, the National Security Act 2023 introduced a restriction on access to civil legal aid for convicted terrorists, which narrowed the range of circumstances in which individuals convicted of specified terrorism offences can receive civil legal aid services, though these provisions have not yet commenced.
It is not possible to estimate how many prisoners have a family law-related issue that is in scope of legal aid, and/or are eligible for legally-aided advice, as doing so would require each prisoner undertaking a means test and merits test of their case, as well as an examination of their issue to understand whether it is in scope.
Prison staff are required to assist prisoners who wish to access legal advice by providing lists of legal advisers, supplying appropriate forms, and assisting prisoners to complete them where requested due to language or literacy difficulties.
Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what the visit rates were for (1) male, and (2) female, public sector prisons in (a) 2019, (b) 2020, (c) 2021, (c) 2022, and (d) 2023.
Answered by Lord Bellamy - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
Visits are managed locally by each establishment and data is not routinely assured and reported nationally. Collating and assuring the data in the format requested would incur disproportionate cost.
His Majesty’s Prison & Probation Service continue to promote the importance of offering different types of visits including family visits. We are aware that the Covid-19 Pandemic substantially impacted the numbers of face-to-face visits and stakeholders’ concerns over visitor numbers in some prisons being slow to return to pre-pandemic levels. There are a number of possible reasons for this including the introduction during the pandemic of additional ways in which families can stay in touch including the roll out of in-cell phones and secure video calls. Establishments have been working to provide a range of services to help prisoners develop or renew positive relationships. This includes using Official Prison Visitors, contracted family support workers, partnership work with external organisations such as New Bridge and the use of peer mentors.
Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what progress they have made in identifying prisoners’ children, by sex and age, and obtaining other relevant data for their welfare, through the Better Outcomes through Linked Data programme.
Answered by Lord Bellamy - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
The Ministry of Justice’s most comprehensive estimate remains that over the course of a year, approximately 200,000 children may be affected by a parent being in or going to prison. This estimate is based on 2009 survey data.
The Prison Strategy White paper detailed our intention to work with other government departments to commission updated research to improve our collective understanding of the overall number of children affected by parental incarceration.
As part of this work, changes have been made to the Basic Custody Screening Tool (BCST) to enable us to collect data on entry to prison about how many primary carers are in custody and how many children under the age of 18 are affected by their imprisonment, which means that we can access this information centrally. Questions contained within the BCST are under continuous review to reflect learning from operational colleagues and people with lived experience of prison. While the BCST does include questions on the sex and ages of dependents of prisoners, the collection of this information relies solely on self-declaration of the parent in prison and therefore may raise challenges as to the accuracy or consistency of this information without being able to verify with other sources.
The Government is delivering on its white paper commitment to improve our data and evidence in this area, through the Better Outcomes through Linked Data (BOLD) Programme. BOLD is a £19.7m cross government Shared Outcomes Fund programme which is linking data to enable better evidenced and more joined up cross government services. The purpose of BOLD is to identify the overall scale of the issue by improving our understanding of the number of children affected by parental imprisonment. The BOLD programme aims to do this by exploring data available across government, including information that does not rely on self-disclosure. We expect findings from the project to be published in Spring 2024.
Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what progress they have made in collecting data on prisoners who are primary carers and their children through the Basic Custody Screening Tool so that this information can be accessed centrally.
Answered by Lord Bellamy - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
The Ministry of Justice’s most comprehensive estimate remains that over the course of a year, approximately 200,000 children may be affected by a parent being in or going to prison. This estimate is based on 2009 survey data.
The Prison Strategy White paper detailed our intention to work with other government departments to commission updated research to improve our collective understanding of the overall number of children affected by parental incarceration.
As part of this work, changes have been made to the Basic Custody Screening Tool (BCST) to enable us to collect data on entry to prison about how many primary carers are in custody and how many children under the age of 18 are affected by their imprisonment, which means that we can access this information centrally. Questions contained within the BCST are under continuous review to reflect learning from operational colleagues and people with lived experience of prison. While the BCST does include questions on the sex and ages of dependents of prisoners, the collection of this information relies solely on self-declaration of the parent in prison and therefore may raise challenges as to the accuracy or consistency of this information without being able to verify with other sources.
The Government is delivering on its white paper commitment to improve our data and evidence in this area, through the Better Outcomes through Linked Data (BOLD) Programme. BOLD is a £19.7m cross government Shared Outcomes Fund programme which is linking data to enable better evidenced and more joined up cross government services. The purpose of BOLD is to identify the overall scale of the issue by improving our understanding of the number of children affected by parental imprisonment. The BOLD programme aims to do this by exploring data available across government, including information that does not rely on self-disclosure. We expect findings from the project to be published in Spring 2024.
Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what is their most recent estimate for the number of children with (1) a parent in prison, and (2) a primary carer in prison.
Answered by Lord Bellamy - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
The Ministry of Justice’s most comprehensive estimate remains that over the course of a year, approximately 200,000 children may be affected by a parent being in or going to prison. This estimate is based on 2009 survey data.
The Prison Strategy White paper detailed our intention to work with other government departments to commission updated research to improve our collective understanding of the overall number of children affected by parental incarceration.
As part of this work, changes have been made to the Basic Custody Screening Tool (BCST) to enable us to collect data on entry to prison about how many primary carers are in custody and how many children under the age of 18 are affected by their imprisonment, which means that we can access this information centrally. Questions contained within the BCST are under continuous review to reflect learning from operational colleagues and people with lived experience of prison. While the BCST does include questions on the sex and ages of dependents of prisoners, the collection of this information relies solely on self-declaration of the parent in prison and therefore may raise challenges as to the accuracy or consistency of this information without being able to verify with other sources.
The Government is delivering on its white paper commitment to improve our data and evidence in this area, through the Better Outcomes through Linked Data (BOLD) Programme. BOLD is a £19.7m cross government Shared Outcomes Fund programme which is linking data to enable better evidenced and more joined up cross government services. The purpose of BOLD is to identify the overall scale of the issue by improving our understanding of the number of children affected by parental imprisonment. The BOLD programme aims to do this by exploring data available across government, including information that does not rely on self-disclosure. We expect findings from the project to be published in Spring 2024.
Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the reasons for the 22 per cent rise in divorce applications since reforms were introduced in April 2022.
Answered by Lord Bellamy - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
The Government continues to monitor and assess divorce application statistics. In the first year since divorce reforms were introduced in April 2022, 119,000 divorce applications were made through the new process, compared to almost 108,000 applications for the last full year under the previous legislation. This is an increase of 11 per cent. We expected a temporary spike in the volume of applications following implementation of the divorce reforms. This is because people will have waited to apply for a divorce under the new process. However, international evidence shows that long-term divorce rates are not increased by removing ‘fault’ from the divorce process. We expect volumes to return to previous levels once the initial peak has occurred.