Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Lord Ramsbotham and Baroness Gould of Potternewton

Wednesday 15th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gould of Potternewton]

My Lords, 19 years ago I was proud to make my maiden speech on women in the criminal justice system. In that speech I highlighted the disproportionate and discriminatory response of our justice system to women offenders. I spoke of the complex needs of women offenders and the fact that many women are locked up on short sentences for petty crime, causing untold destruction to their families. I spoke about how the prison system does not do what it should for women offenders, and how we must look at more effective ways of tackling women’s offending behaviour in the community.

Since I made that speech, a number of high-profile reviews of women in the criminal justice system have been published and recommendations have been taken on board by successive Governments. Still, though, the problem of women in prison pervades; 15 years ago there were some 1,800 women in custody but today there are over 4,000. In 2007 my noble friend Lady Corston—at this point I must give her apologies; she has had to leave for family reasons at this late hour—produced a compelling review of women with particular vulnerabilities in the criminal justice system. The Corston report highlighted the specialised and specific needs of women offenders that are being wholly neglected in a justice system designed for men, even though the complex and multiple needs of women offenders and women at risk of offending are well documented. Domestic and sexual violence, poverty, mental illness, problematic substance misuse and homelessness are just some of the issues facing many women offenders. Often when they go into jail there are dire consequences.

I remember listening to the male governor of Styal women’s prison, who had spent his career in men's prisons, talking about his experience of arriving at Styal. He spoke of how shocked he was at the levels of self-harm. He described how in a male prison there was an average of six prisoners on special observation for self-harm each day, while in Styal it was an average of 50. He described the high levels of mental health problems and the fact most women were there on short sentences, some women for eight days or even less. I remember his words: “I’ve never seen such a concentration of damaged, fragile people”. In this weekend’s Sunday papers, he reiterated that statement, which he made a few months ago.

When women are sentenced to custody, that has a profound effect on family life. Many women have children or elderly or disabled dependants. Each year, 18,000 children are separated from their mothers by imprisonment, and just 5 per cent of those children will get to stay in their homes when their mother goes to jail. In 2006, the Social Exclusion Unit found that only half the women in prison who lived with or had contact with their children prior to imprisonment had received a visit from their children since going to prison. Sending women to prison is also, for the most part, ineffective. Two-thirds of women serving sentences of 12 months or less are reconvicted within a year of release. The impact on the children of those women cannot truly be imagined, but we know that it is dramatic.

We conclude, as I concluded in my speech 19 years ago, that our current approach to women in the criminal justice system is not working. At this point, I declare an interest as patron of the women’s centre in Brighton and Hove, which provides an excellent example of cost-effective treatment of women offenders in the community that works. The Inspire project is a partnership between five women’s organisations, all of which play a part in delivering a holistic service to women offenders that addresses their complex needs. It helps women with accommodation, employment, health and well-being, and drug and alcohol problems, debt and financial issues, children and families, and experience of domestic and sexual violence. Women engage well with the services and the project’s success in reducing reoffending is to be commended.

The Inspire project is one of a number of innovative projects that work with women offenders across the community. These projects are not only effective in reducing women’s offending but very cost-effective. The cost of a women’s centre placement is less than £15,000 a year, compared with the £56,000 it costs to keep a woman in custody. The cost-saving arguments are clear and will, I am sure, be of interest to the Government.

The Bill represents an opportunity to bring about the radical change that is needed to reform the criminal justice system into one that works for women. That is why I and others were so disappointed to see that women had not been properly considered in the Bill, which was my motivation for tabling this amendment. Amendment 182A calls on the Government to establish a cross-departmental commission with responsibility for maintaining effective governance and the oversight of women’s justice. This is much needed to ensure that women are given the support they need to stop their offending behaviour and to become active members of the community. The amendment offers an effective way of ensuring that the needs of women in the criminal justice system are considered at the highest level of decision-making within government.

The commission would draw together representatives from government departments and public bodies whose responsibilities are relevant to the needs of women in the criminal justice system. It would include representatives from justice, health, social services, housing, education and employment. These key agencies would come together to develop, implement and monitor a cross-departmental strategy to reduce offending by women, and to ensure that the right services for women offenders are provided at the right time. It would also provide a report to Parliament each year, documenting progress through measurement, monitoring and accountability.

Amendment 182B, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, on women in the criminal justice system, also calls on the Secretary of State to establish a women’s justice commission, although it also asks for the commission to remain independent of government. However, I wonder whether there is not a case for exploring how we could bring the two concepts together.

Finally, it is essential that appropriate arrangements such as these are in place to maintain the effective governance and oversight of women’s justice. Without them, I fear that the needs of women offenders will continue to be marginalised and go unmet. I will then have to make another speech about women in prison in years to come—although certainly not in 19 years. I sincerely hope that that will not be necessary. I beg to move.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, said, it is a great pity that the position of women in the criminal justice system was neither included in the Bill nor debated when it was being processed through the other place.

I was very glad that so many recommendations from the excellent report of the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, were accepted by the previous Government and supported by the coalition. Many repeated what I recommended in two earlier thematic reviews on women in prison in 1997 and 2001; that the Prison Reform Trust recommended in a report chaired by Professor Dorothy Wedderburn in 1999; and that the Fawcett Society recommended in three reports published between 2002 and 2006. Like the noble Baroness, we all appreciated that too many women who should not be there were in prison and that, while there, their treatment and conditions were not fit for purpose. I was motivated by my shock at finding, among other things, that women were being chained while in labour and having any injuries recorded on diagrams of male bodies because no diagrams of female bodies were issued. Therefore, while warmly welcoming the report of the noble Baroness, I must admit to my disappointment that it was not until they appeared in a report which the previous Government themselves commissioned that they either noted or took action on the recommendations for essential improvements that had been made earlier.

Several times during the passage of the Bill, the Minister has told us that such and such an amendment is not necessary because a group has been appointed in the Ministry of Justice or NOMS to look at what is being put forward. I have to admit that every time he does I clench my fists and groan inwardly. Policy-making groups inside ministries are neither capable of designing and overseeing, nor designed to direct and oversee, the implementation of strategy—a word that is frequently misused because it is so imperfectly understood. A strategy is an overarching direction that binds everyone and everything involved in achieving a particular purpose. I have quoted previously the senior civil servant in the Home Office who berated me, saying that she wished I would stop talking about strategy because it was not a strategy that was needed but strategic direction. When I asked her what she meant, she replied, “Top-down, of course”, implying that every ministerial utterance was to be regarded as strategic direction. No wonder offender management is in a muddle.

Strategies require implementation, not just verbiage, and verbiage does not become strategy just because it comes from the top. I plead guilty as charged by any noble Lord who may accuse me of allowing my military background to influence my understanding of strategy, as well as my appreciation that nothing involving people will succeed unless they are overseen and led. That background fuelled my appreciation that all was not well with offender management in general, and with the treatment of and conditions for women in particular, when I saw what was and was not happening during my first inspection of Holloway more than 16 years ago. I admit to my astonishment when the then director-general of the Prison Service told me that there was no such person when I asked to see the director of women’s prisons, who I presumed was responsible and accountable for their custody. The Prison Service, he told me, thought that a civil servant in the policy branch was quite sufficient. When I asked him who the governor of a women’s prison could go to for help and advice, he said the area manager, who was responsible for the budget but might or might not have worked in a women’s prison. In my report on that never to be forgotten inspection, I included a recommendation that a director of women’s prisons be appointed.

Since then, I have watched a series of expensive changes to the bureaucracy of offender management predictably fail to bring about the desired improvements on the ground because they did not include the appointment of individuals responsible and accountable for overseeing implementation in different types of prison and with different groups of prisoners. This, too, surprises me because Ministers and their officials are ignoring evidence that is before their eyes every day. My Army contemporary, General Sir John Learmont, came to exactly the same conclusion for exactly the same reasons when invited by the then Home Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne, to inquire into the escape of high-security prisoners from Parkhurst in 1994. However, his recommendation—that a responsible and accountable director of high-security prisons should be appointed—was accepted. As a result, they remain the only properly managed part of the prison system, in which good practice somewhere is turned into common practice everywhere, and incoming governors are required to carry on from where their predecessors left off. Why on earth has that success not been repeated with and for other groups?

I repeated my recommendation in every other inspection report and the thematic reviews of women in prison that I mentioned earlier. Those reviews were only about prisons, but I was immediately attracted by Professor Wedderburn’s recommendation that there should be a women’s justice board, on the lines of the Youth Justice Board, that was responsible and accountable for women everywhere in the criminal justice system. I warmly supported the proposed wider responsibilities of the chairman seeing my hoped for director of women’s prisons as an essential, responsible and accountable subordinate. I also saw the chairman sitting alongside the director-general of the Prison Service, the director of the National Probation Service and the chairman of the Youth Justice Board on an executive board in which each was responsible and accountable to Ministers for their part of the offender management system.