Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Lords Hansard - part one & Report stage
Monday 10th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment, because there is a real problem at the heart of criminal justice, which leads to the dissatisfaction that women feel about the justice system. We have created our system around a notion of gender equality that followed on from many years of using the male pronoun, “he”, with the person at the heart of the criminal justice system being a male agent. We then decided that we could not have that any longer, and that the way forward was gender neutrality. But of course gender neutrality is to a large extent a fiction. We know that that neutrality—creating some sort of supposed equality in criminal justice—actually creates further inequality. To treat as equal those who are not yet equal creates only further inequality. I want to emphasise that: it creates further inequality to pretend that we now have equality between the sexes. That is why I feel—although I know it is never comfortable for Governments to take ideas from elsewhere—that having such a board is a necessary part of addressing the great public discontent about the system and the way it deals with women.

I support the idea of a board that looks specifically at women in prison. We know that the majority of them have mental health issues and that their dependency on drugs and drink often derives from backgrounds of abuse: having been brought up in families where abuse was prevalent, or having themselves been at the receiving end of abuse. Understanding women in prison, how they themselves almost invariably have been victims of crime, is one of the ways in which we will progress the system. The Government should adopt this idea.

We need to concentrate on addressing what happens when women go to prison, because often they lose their accommodation and their children are taken into care. The disruption of everything that matters to them is so great that it is very difficult to repair. I therefore support the amendment. It is worthy of this House’s consideration and it is regrettable that it has been dismissed out of hand. There is a problem at the heart of this: you cannot move from inequality to equality simply by saying that there is equality now.

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment. Noting the success of the Youth Justice Board, as the noble Lord, Lord Marks, did, I venture to suggest that many of the problems of women in the criminal justice system would disappear if there was such a board, and the establishment of women’s offending teams.

[The Lord Bishop of Gloucester]

My Lords, I add my wholehearted support to this amendment. I am very grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Marks and Lord Ramsbotham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for their continued commitment to women in the criminal justice system. As bishop to prisons and president of the Nelson Trust, I am acutely aware, as I have said so often, of the need for a gendered approach to justice. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, has just put that very powerfully.

While men and women need to be treated with equal justice, equality is not about sameness. Women are caught up in a criminal justice system that has been designed around men, and there needs to be a gendered lens. As we have heard already, many, many women are more likely than men to be primary carers or victims of abuse or exploitation. When they are given a prison sentence, they are more likely to be given a very short one, often far from home. I do not want to repeat things that have been said so many times in Committee and on Report but, having lost the amendment on primary carers earlier on during Report, I am very grateful to noble Lords for bringing forward these amendments, which will go a long way towards ensuring that we get the same outcomes. I am therefore wholeheartedly glad to support these amendments.