Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Kennedy of Shaws and Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames

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

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, the amendments in this group propose the establishment of a women’s justice board, along the lines of the Youth Justice Board. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for adding their names.

The drafting of the two amendments remains as it was in Committee, and closely reflects the wording of the provisions in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 establishing the Youth Justice Board. When we debated these amendments in Committee, on 17 November, they enjoyed widespread support from everyone, except the Minister. The diversity and unanimity of the support we received, I suggest, speaks volumes. Indeed, the support from the Labour Party was unqualified. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, said:

“We on this side of the Committee strongly support these excellent amendments”.—[Official Report, 17/11/21; col. 327.]


He spoke of the need to give real drive to the movement to further the needs of women within the criminal justice system.

No one disputes that the Youth Justice Board has been a resounding success. It has concentrated effort on recognising and addressing the special needs of young people within the criminal justice system. It has diverted many away from involvement with the system, and offered help and support to those who have been convicted and sentenced, both with community sentences and in custodial settings. The figures speak for themselves: in the last 15 years, the number of under-18s in custody in this jurisdiction fell by about three-quarters, to well under 800 now.

The establishment of a women’s justice board could, we believe, achieve similar success for women, by concentrating effort and resources on helping women who come into contact with the criminal justice system, diverting them from custody, improving the effectiveness of community sentences for women, increasing their use in consequence, and building ways of offering women offenders specialist support with the special issues and difficulties that they face. In Committee we debated those at length.

We also considered the appalling effect of custody on women and their children. The harsh truth is that 19 out of 20 children whose mothers are imprisoned are forced to leave their homes. All the evidence is that those children are themselves more likely to become involved in crime, more likely to suffer from mental ill health and to fail at school, and less likely to find stable employment as young adults—all to the detriment of society at large. The Minister, replying in Committee, disagreed with the proposition that there is a crisis of confidence in women’s justice. That is not the view of the overwhelming majority of experts and those working in this area, who are all deeply troubled by the lack of specialist support and consideration for women in the system.

It is true that, as the Minister said, we have the female offenders strategy, which started in 2018, and the Advisory Board on Female Offenders. The Ministry of Justice is doing work in this area, but it was working in the area of youth justice before 1998, and that did not obviate the need for the Youth Justice Board.

The Minister said in Committee, and repeated when we met the other day—I am grateful to him for the time and care that he has taken, as he always does, to consider the arguments on this issue—that the key point, from the Government’s point of view, was that we do not have a separate criminal justice system for women and girls, as we do for young offenders. As he put it, there is no separate legal framework; women are dealt with as part of the adult offender population. He drew a distinction, for that reason, between women’s position in the criminal justice system and that of young offenders, whom the law treats differently from adults.

I am afraid I do not follow that logic. It seems to me that it contains a non sequitur. The Government accept that women, like young offenders, have special needs in the criminal justice system. The Minister himself spoke of women having particular needs which we needed to identify. I say we need to do more than to identify them; we need to address them. He spoke of the prevalence of mental health issues, of the number of women survivors of abuse—I took it that he was referring to both sexual and physical abuse—and of the closer link among women offenders between drug and alcohol abuse and reoffending than exists for male offenders.

The Minister did not speak in Committee about the particular family issues faced by women in the system—but the effects of custody on the children and families of women offenders are devastating. We have heard about them, in particular, in the debates on the amendments proposed by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester on primary carers. It is no answer to the need for special attention to women’s needs in the criminal justice system to say that women are subject to the same criminal law as men. That fact, of itself, does nothing to address those special needs.

The Minister raised in Committee the issue of the time needed to establish a women’s justice board, but if we could achieve, in 23 years, anything like the same improvements as the Youth Justice Board has achieved in that time, that would be swift progress indeed. He also spoke of the cost implications of establishing a women’s justice board. That does not allow for the substantial savings that would follow from keeping even a few women out of custody, with the knock-on social costs of taking children into care, and the social costs that follow from women’s involvement in the criminal justice system, particularly when they receive custodial sentences.

There is simply no genuine and convincing answer to this proposal. I urge the Government simply to accept that establishing a women’s justice board would be the most effective, and the most promising, way to achieve all that they themselves say that they wish to do for women who find themselves entangled in a system that lamentably fails to address their particular difficulties. I beg to move.

[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.