Farmer Review

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Wednesday 11th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome my noble friend’s review. For me its strength lies not just in its compassion, thoroughness and involvement of so many stakeholders. It lies also in its hard-headed logic; it is grounded in reality and in what we know works. Put simply, as we have already heard, in helping to reduce reoffending, family relationships work.

It surely follows that, if we want to reduce reoffending, and thereby reduce the number of victims of crime, the size of the prison population, the amount of overcrowding and therefore the pressure on our prisons and on all who work in them, it makes sense to facilitate sustaining family relationships. That is why I also welcome the review’s practical focus in chapter 7 on building the right estate for reform. That means, among other things, good disability access being factored in from the outset, in consultation with disabled people’s organisations such as Disability Rights UK.

Disability access was a central theme of what I consider one of the jewels in the Conservative crown: the landmark Disability Discrimination Act 1995. Yet I worry that sometimes my party risks giving the impression that we do not always take sufficient pride in the DDA—too much of which, as the 2016 report of the ad hoc Select Committee on the Equality Act 2010 highlighted, remains unimplemented. So to disprove what some disabled people perceive as a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Government, I make a plea that they announce soon how they plan to make good on their welcome manifesto commitment to review disability access and, where necessary, take action—and, moreover, that they use the Farmer review, the planned opening of new-build prisons and the redevelopment of existing sites to put disability access at the heart of improving the prison estate.

As the population ages and disability becomes more of an issue for prisoners and visitors alike, we need to plan now for accommodating the demands which demographics will inevitably place on the prison system. Indeed, the urgent need to do so is underlined by a recent MoJ report on the prison population in England and Wales, which projects that the total number of over 50 year-olds being held in prisons will rise from 85,863 in June this year to 87,400 in June 2021.

In conclusion, we need to seize this opportunity to get it right on disability access—whether for prisoners or visitors—if we want to facilitate sustaining the family relationships that are so crucial to reducing reoffending. My noble friend’s review charts a compassionate and logical way forward. I urge the Minister to signal today that the Government will implement its recommendations.