Offender Rehabilitation Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Ramsbotham and Baroness Corston

Tuesday 11th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I, too, support the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, on this amendment. Like my noble friend Lady Howe, I am sorry that yet again we should be coming to an important Bill like this and raising the issue of women as something that has been admitted, rather than actually trying to discuss in more detail exactly what should be done with and for women.

We have discussed frequently women in prison, but we have not discussed women in the community so frequently. On several occasions when it has come up, I mentioned the need for specialist women offender teams around the country. We have also mentioned the possibility of a women’s justice board, which would be responsible, like the children’s justice board for children, for looking after both women in custody and women in the community. I hope that the Minister will recommend to his colleague, to whom the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, referred, that she should look very carefully at this because there will be a need for somebody to keep oversight over the cohorts of women around the country who are being subjected to myriad different providers, and there will need to be consistency as well as quality in the content of what is done for them, so I hope account is taken of that in considering this amendment.

[Baroness Corston]

My Lords, I am delighted to support the amendment tabled in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. It is 15 months now since we had the first vote specifically on this issue that I can remember. At that time there was a tied vote and we were promised a strategy. Subsequent attempts to amend legislation to provide for gender-specific services have failed.

My reading of the current government policy on transforming rehabilitation is that we are going back 10 years, because we are going to have an offender strategy that can be tweaked for women, rather than asking what kind of strategic priorities we need for women offenders. Those are missing. We have a two-page statement, not a strategy, from the Government about what is going to happen for women. If this was a serious undertaking, this kind of amendment would have formed part of the Bill. It would not be up to Members of the House to try to put it into the Bill.

The other thing that I found very troubling during the course of my review was how many women knew that their lives were spiralling out of control but knew that there was nowhere they could go to get assistance. That is what was so amazing about the seed-corn money, although it was £15 million, that the previous Government put into keeping women out of prison by providing women’s centres as alternatives to custody. I know that the Minister has visited at least one, and I am sure that noble Lords who are interested in this area will have done the same. You hear stories of women who have gone through a period of the most amazing redemption because they have had these gender-specific services from people who understand the reality of women’s lives and the centrality of family and children. They understand that when women go to prison, unlike men, there is no one to keep the home fires burning, and they usually lose their children and do not get them back.

All these issues can be dealt with easily if you make provision statutorily for gender-specific services, because people have to think about it. It is not a question of women being an add-on. I accept that, given the overall prison population—there are about 86,000 men in prison and 4,000 women—you could say that women are an add-on. However, given that some 17,000 children a year are affected by their mothers’ imprisonment, and a significant proportion of those children end up in prison themselves, such provision seems to me to be the most important preventive strategy. I cannot for the life of me understand why the Government are so reluctant to have this in the Bill, because it would be a matter of pride to do so. I know that the Minister will tell me how much has happened, and I will listen with patience but with some irritation, because, given my experience in the 21 years since I first set foot in a women’s prison, I know that it will not be enough. So I say to the Government: if this amendment is not accepted, we really want to see something that will work.