Support for Women Leaving Prison

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Tuesday 9th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)]

It is a joy to appear under your moderating hand once again, Sir Charles. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for this important debate in the aftermath of International Women’s Day. I ought to start by reassuring her and other hon. Members, and indeed my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price), of my long-standing commitment to smart justice over tough justice.

Just over 10 years ago, I became devotee of Mark Kleiman, a remarkable academic in the United States, who sadly died a couple of years ago. He wrote a seminal book, which I would recommend to hon. Members if they can get hold of it, called “When Brute Force Fails”. It is an examination of the American criminal justice system, where many years of locking up more and more prisoners for longer and longer in the hope that it would do something about crime actually produced the reverse. It proposed a series of smarter, more innovative approaches towards criminal justice, which were, a decade or so ago, showing some potential.

I am pleased to say that one of those proposals—sobriety tagging for those for whom alcohol is driving their criminal behaviour—is now rolling out across the country. It has started in Wales, where just the other day we managed to tag our 100th offender with a sobriety tag rather than sending them for a custodial sentence. Compliance in that particular project is running in the high 90th percentile. It will be rolled out in England at end of this month. I hope that for all kinds of offenders—male, female or other nomenclatures—it is the kind of smart approach that will have benefits beyond the positive and negative of incarceration.

I will start by reaffirming what the hon. Member for Swansea East referred to as our ambition and commitment to fully delivering the female offenders strategy, which was published, as she said, back in June 2018. I am pleased that she expressed real hope about that strategy. As she said, it has three main aims: fewer women coming into the criminal justice system and reoffending, fewer women serving short custodial sentences, with a greater proportion managed successfully in the community, and better conditions in custody to enable rehabilitation and improved outcomes.

The strategy clearly articulates why we need a different approach for female offenders. They make up less than 5% of the prison population, but are among the most vulnerable in society in terms of both the prevalence and the complexity of their needs. Many live chaotic lives, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) pointed out, and have experience of abuse, as well as of mental health issues, substance misuse, accommodation needs, and debt and finance problems. Female prisoners are more likely than male prisoners to have been taken into care and to have witnessed violence in the home as a child. More than 60% of female prisoners reported having experienced domestic abuse, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned, compared with 7% of male prisoners. Outcomes for women in custody are worse than for men, including high levels of self-harm.

Women are also more likely than men to be living with dependent children before imprisonment, and the consequent impact on families is therefore greater, increasing the risk of intergenerational offending. Each of the strategy’s aims is equally important, and each one is equally relevant to the subject of the present debate on support for women leaving prison. Clearly there will be fewer women leaving prison and requiring support if we can successfully reduce the number of women entering the criminal justice system and reoffending. Equally, if more women are managed effectively in the community, there will be fewer serving short prison sentences. For those women who must be sentenced to prison because of the severity of their crimes and to protect the public, providing better conditions in custody improves the chances of effective rehabilitation.

A number of Members mentioned the Government plans to build 500 more prison places in women’s prisons. Many Members argue that this proves the Government have abandoned their female offenders strategy, particularly the aims of having fewer women in custody serving shorter sentences, and more being managed successfully in the community, but I hope that my comments thus far make clear that that is not the case. However, the impact of the extra 20,000 police officers, with the likely increase in charge volumes, cannot be ignored and doing nothing is not an option. The long-term prison population is expected to increase over the six-year project horizon.

While custody should remain the last resort for most women, in line with the female offenders strategy in meeting projected demand, the expansion of the women’s estate will provide better conditions for those who do require custody. Our design principles include requirements around being trauma-informed and gender-specific, ensuring suitable visiting spaces are provided, greater in-cell communications options informed by the covid learning, and in open design the potential inclusion of rooms to support overnight visits for mothers and their children, currently available in only two women’s prisons. If we succeed in reducing demand for prison places, we will be able to close older, less suitable accommodation. Having reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to fully delivering the female offenders strategy, I would like to highlight our activity in two specific areas of support raised by Members this afternoon specifically for women leaving prison: accommodation and employment.

Offenders face significant barriers to securing suitable accommodation, often linked to their lack of access to the necessary funds, availability of local authority housing supply and affordability of or access to the private rented sector. A £70 million investment programme was announced in January to provide stable accommodation to these prison leavers. The investment will bring together the work on approved premises and the Bail Accommodation and Support Service with a new tier of provision for prison leavers at risk of homelessness.

To reduce reoffending and provide health and wellbeing support, we are launching a new accommodation service providing up to 12 weeks of basic temporary accommodation for prison leavers who would otherwise be homeless. This will launch in five of the 12 probation regions in England and Wales, and all individuals aged 18 and over released from prison and at risk of homelessness will be eligible, as will those moving on from approved premises who are also at the same risk. It is anticipated that the new intervention will begin in summer 2021 and provide support for approximately 3,000 service users, who will be subject to supervision by probation and have ongoing support from their community offender manager.

As part of its response to the covid-19 pandemic, the Ministry of Justice secured £11.5 million to support individuals at risk of homelessness on their release from prison and help them to move on to permanent accommodation. The scheme initially ran between 18 May and the end of August and provided up to 56 nights’ accommodation per individual, meaning some prison leavers were accommodated until 26 October. We reinstated the scheme on 22 October to run up to 31 March, meaning individuals may receive accommodation support up to 26 May this year.

While the scheme is an immediate response to support prison leavers at risk of homelessness, the Ministry of Justice is keen to utilise the learning gathered from the scheme to help develop longer term improvements. We have started to draw together learning with the intention of publishing a report in the autumn. To support the oversight of its covid-19 response, Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service set up seven homelessness prevention taskforces to help find accommodation for offenders upon release. These teams have been very successful in securing improved accommodation outcomes and building new local partnerships with local authorities and housing partners. The service is considering how they might be a feature of the future landscape.

On employment, Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service’s New Futures Network has a dedicated employment broker focused on partnering employers with prisons across the women’s estate. These partnerships result in work opportunities for serving prisoners that provide training skills, qualification and employment on release. Opportunities are available across a variety of industry sectors.

More recently, to mark International Women’s Day, Sodexo announced the launch of its SheWorks skills-building programme in three prisons. With the support of the New Futures Network, this will be extended to further prisons over the course of the year. Sodexo aims to fill 5% of its job vacancies with prison leavers and those with an offending background by 2023.

Additionally, from the end of April this year, the Clink charity’s kitchen training programme will be expanded to women’s prisons at Eastwood Park, Send and Downview, as part of a broader roll-out of the programme. The training scheme provides the opportunity to transform job prospects by delivering industry-recognised qualifications, training and work experience.

[Jim Shannon]

The Minister is setting out clearly some of the good things that can be done. Within those, in my contribution I mentioned social skills. It is important that people can leave prison and interact with people in a way that they can understand and feel the confidence that they need. Is this one of the measures that the Minister will introduce for those who are leaving prison?

[Kit Malthouse]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. In discussions in the Ministry of Justice I have made it clear that my view, which I think is shared broadly by Ministers in the Department, is that there are three foundations for success in life post-prison. They are a job, a house and a friend—effectively, someone to hold your hand. If someone leaving prison has those three pillars in their life, they are much more likely to succeed on the outside. Too often, people have one, or possibly two, but certainly not all three. In the role that I am trying to put in place around integrated offender management—the reboot of that effort—that is what we are going to try to achieve.

The New Futures Network continues to support businesses that are part of the employers’ forum for reducing reoffending, to deliver new, tailored employment for women. Initiatives to be trialled include mentoring and thematic virtual sessions covering the development of soft skills, as the hon. Gentleman said. These will be offered to women serving the last few months of their sentence. The framework of support will be tested in three prisons.

Given the ambition of the hon. Member for Swansea East for the Government to go further, she will be pleased to know that as part of the January announcement to tackle and reduce reoffending, we are seeking to introduce and test new approaches and roles across education, employment, accommodation and substance misuse. HMP New Hall, which was mentioned, has been selected to ensure the specific needs of women are captured, so that learning can be shared across the female estate more broadly.

To conclude, I hope I have removed any doubts about the Government’s ongoing commitment to deliver fully the female offender strategy and that, in the time available, I have been able to provide clear examples of how we are working to properly support women leaving prison. As far as the extra 500 places are concerned, I hope that the hon. Lady and others will understand that, while we have to plan for the worst, and the impact of 20,000 police officers on the prison estate cannot be ignored, we will work very hard between then and now for a much better outcome than an increase in the prison population.

[Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

Carolyn Harris, for two minutes.