Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Baroness Chapman of Darlington Excerpts

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

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I was pleased to attach my name to these two amendments, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, for leading on them. The case has already been clearly made and I will not speak for long, given the hour, but it is worth looking back at the history of this. I looked it up and found a House of Lords Library note from 25 January 2008, referring to a debate drawing attention to the case for setting up a women’s justice board. In 2014, there was an amendment to the legal aid and sentencing Bill seeking to do the same thing. We are often accused of proposing novel ideas that, we are told, we need to go away and think about, but that argument simply does not apply in this case.

The noble Baroness, Lady Corston, produced an enormously important report well over a decade ago that made a huge number of recommendations, most of which have not been implemented. This really is another way, as several noble Lords, particularly the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, have said, of getting at the problem of implementation. We have been talking about how the criminal justice system is failing women for a very long time, and it really is now time to take action. I will finish with a quote from Baroness Howe of Idlicote, who has now retired from your Lordships’ House. She said, back in 2008:

“I must say that I have become tired of seeing this matter brought to debate again and again”.—[Official Report, 31/1/08; col. 805.]


Surely it is time for action.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate because I have been making speeches on this topic for 12 years. I believe, if memory serves, that I was the Front-Bench speaker in the other place who proposed the amendment to the LASPO Bill. It is quite extraordinary. I think it is now 22 years since this was first suggested and, as others have said, we have had the Corston report. We cannot have a debate on women in prison without reference to my noble friend Lady Corston—Jean Corston—and the work that she has done. The idea of a women’s justice board has been around for so long because it is such a good idea. There is so much evidence of the impact, and probably the savings, that it would make, should we take that path.

There is a long-accepted problem—and I know the Minister accepts that there is a problem—with the failure of the criminal justice system properly to address the needs of female offenders. This leads to poor reoffending rates and devastation for families, with children often bearing the brunt. The social and economic cost is enormous. Women make up only 4% of the prison population and are still too easily overlooked in policy, planning and investment decisions for the reasons that my noble friend Lady Kennedy outlined so well. Female offenders are different from male offenders: they have different health needs, including pregnancy, miscarriage, breastfeeding and menopause. We know that these issues are neglected, and we know the failure to tailor provision for women affects reoffending rates.

The frustration is that the Government agree with all this, yet they seem constantly to fail to move the dial. Unfortunately, according to the excellent work done by the Prison Reform Trust, fewer than half, I think, of the commitments made in the Government’s Female Offender Strategy, which was published in 2018, have been met so far. We know that community sentences can be more effective than short prison sentences, yet the use of community sentences is dropping—it has dropped by two-thirds since 2010. Community provision for women needs to be so much better, and the quality everywhere needs to improve. There are many excellent projects, but provision is way too patchy. One of the functions of a women’s justice board, like the Youth Justice Board, would be completely to transform that.

The Government’s Female Offender Strategy is not being delivered quickly enough. This leads many of us to conclude that a new lead organisation for female offenders would make the difference. Since my noble friend Lady Corston’s report, understanding of female offending has improved so much—this is a real positive—and the Government have played their part in this. I believe Ministers want to act and want female offending to improve. I hope the Minister is not just going to stand up and say “We are making progress—bear with us”, because we can all see that it is inadequate. Nothing that has been done so far is making a sufficient difference. Interventions in this space are too often short-term. They leave the fundamentals of substance misuse, mental health, housing, financial literacy and domestic violence unaddressed. We know that self-harm in women’s prisons has reached record levels. The situation is getting worse, not better. More than 20% of self-harm incidents involve women, with 12,000 incidents in 2020 compared to around 7,500 in 2016. A strategy is great, and we need a strategy, but we need leadership to ensure that delivery takes place. A women’s justice board would provide the strategic framework to identify and prioritise the specific needs of women within the criminal justice system.

Having been around this a few times now, the Government have previously argued that this can be achieved through ministerial working groups or strategies, and it could have been done, but the truth is that so far it has not. Many of us will have visited women’s prisons and seen what happens. One of the most upsetting things I have ever seen was when I was present for visits where women were interacting with their preschool children. The response of the women and the children was difficult for prison staff as well. That was an annual thing in that prison—once a year that happened. There is no central co-ordinating body able to identify best practice and make sure it happens everywhere. We fail on that because the Government do not have that central body. Women are going out; they are not making progress—reoffending is as bad as it has ever been. I feel we have come to a point where it is time to bite the bullet and accept the idea of a women’s justice board.

[Lord Wolfson of Tredegar (Con)]

My Lords, as noble Lords will be aware, we debated these amendments in Committee. At that time, they were withdrawn without a vote, although I acknowledge that, as the noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, fairly said, those who spoke in Committee overwhelmingly supported the amendment.

I have of course listened very carefully to the various speeches and points made around the House this evening. I think it is fair to say that the arguments in support can perhaps be distilled in four points. I set them out not to make the case against me stronger but perhaps at least to reassure the House that I have understood it. First, the Youth Justice board model has been a success in reducing the number of children entering the youth justice system or custody and, therefore, it is an appropriate model to follow as the needs of women are distinct. Secondly, sometimes their needs are similar, for different reasons, to the needs of children. Thirdly, women are often victims as well as offenders and largely commit non-violent and low-level crime. Fourthly, a women’s justice board would provide the effective leadership and drive to address the particular needs of women in the criminal justice system and divert them before they come into contact with that system by preventing offending in the first place. The House should therefore be reassured that the Government and I have understood and considered carefully the case. As the noble Lord, Lord Marks, said, we have had a number of very helpful discussions about it.

The Government recognise that women who are in or at risk of contact with the criminal justice system have distinct needs that require a distinct approach, and we have acted in a practical sense on that recognition. We published the Female Offender Strategy, which sets out a comprehensive programme of work to respond to those needs, and we remain committed to its delivery. The Advisory Board on Female Offenders provides external and independent oversight of the strategy, but my ministerial colleague in the other place, Minister Atkins, has also asked officials to review the wider governance arrangements for the strategy to ensure that they are fully fit for purpose to support the work across government which is vital to deliver the strategy.

I explained in Committee why the Government are not persuaded that the Youth Justice Board is the right model for addressing the needs of women. To take up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and others, I again underline that I agree and accept that the Youth Justice Board has done extremely good work in its area. There is a short point here, but I suggest it is very important. We have a separate youth justice system. The Youth Justice Board is a reflection of that different system. It is a specialised justice board for a specialised and separate justice system. That is not just to make the physical point that children are still maturing, so the justice system applies to them differently. It is to make the point that the youth justice system is significantly different from the adult justice system in a number of respects.

Let me set out a number of them. First, with youth justice, there is a statutory aim

“to prevent offending by children and young persons”.

That is from the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. There is a greater focus on prevention and diversion. Custody is used as a last resort, as it is in the adult system, but there is greater focus in the youth justice system because there are separate community services provided by youth offending teams, which are part of local authorities. There is a separate youth court with specially trained magistrates with different sentencing powers. There is a separate sentencing framework for children that does not apply to adults. Of course, there is also an entirely separate custodial estate, which is managed in an entirely different way.