Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Thursday 6th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

May I pay particular tribute to the good people of Stoke? They have been incredibly welcoming not just to Afghans but to many other immigrants to the country and looked after them. I very much acknowledge my hon. Friend’s point that it is for us all to play our part and to ask our councils to offer homes where they can and to identify properties. The quicker that we can get properties on our books, as it were, the sooner people can move out of bridging accommodation and build real, permanent futures for themselves and their families.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

I am clearly not alone in dealing with large number of constituents with family members trapped in Afghanistan. They are increasingly desperate, because until today they did not have any further detail about the resettlement scheme’s operation. Will the Minister now publish advice and guidance that we can provide to constituents with family members in Afghanistan whose lives are at risk? Having listened to the statement and knowing about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Afghanistan and the dangers of travelling to a third country, I fear that those constituents will be losing all hope.

[Victoria Atkins]

Again, we have been clear from the start—it was clear in the 13 September statement—that this is not a process open for applications. It is a referral process precisely because of the numbers involved. We know that an enormous number of the population of some 40 million will feel unsafe, and we do not have an unlimited capacity to help all 40 million citizens. I encourage the hon. Lady to help her constituents who are looking at the family reunion rules and the schemes to see if there is a route for them.

LGBTQ+ Afghan Refugees

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Tuesday 21st September 2021 Westminster Hall

[Kate Osborne]

I share my hon. Friend’s concerns. I believe that guidance may have been changed in 2020, but perhaps the Minister can help with that in her response. Ultimately, we should not, under any circumstances, contemplate sending LGBTQ+ people back to Afghanistan.

Following on from that point, I want to focus on the resettlement of LGBTQ+ refugees in the UK. The Government’s vulnerable persons resettlement scheme for refugees from Syria was highly praised for its focus on the most vulnerable people. When the scheme was launched, the Government committed to accepting LGBTQ+ refugees, but no data was made available by the Government or the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to confirm whether or how many LGBTQ+ refugees were resettled to the UK. Can the Minister tell us whether the Government will ensure that LGBTQ+ people are included in the UNHCR’s prioritisation profile for the resettlement of refugees from Afghanistan and with a defined, accountable process for this community to access protection and resettlement that meets their needs?

I welcome the prioritisation of vulnerable people under the Afghan citizens’ resettlement scheme and the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people once again. However, will the Government ensure that family reunification applications are responsive to all family configurations, including those of LGBTQ+ families, for example recognising that Afghans with same-sex partners will not have had access to legal recognition for their relationships.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. As she says, the Government have talked about a new settlement scheme for Afghans who are most at risk, and it is welcome that LGBTQ+ people are included, but does she share my concern that those that are still trapped, both in Afghanistan and in neighbouring countries, there is very little information and advice that we can give them on how they can access that scheme or when it will be available?

[Kate Osborne]

Yes, I do share those concerns. Again, I ask the Minister to address that point in her response.

The Nationality and Borders Bill plays into the situation. While the support for LGBTQ+ Afghan refugees from the UK Government is welcome, the provisions in the Nationality and Borders Bill will create significant dangers and obstacles to asylum and permanent residence for LGBTQ+ people facing similar levels of persecution. Many people who have been welcomed into this country’s LGBTQ+ community would not be here under this potential law and would not have had the chance to rebuild their lives free from homophobia, biphobia and transphobia. Enacting the Bill as it stands would undermine the UK Government’s commitment to being a global leader in advancing the rights and dignity of LGBTQ+ people. The UK is convening a global LGBTQ+ summit in 2022 and co-chairing the international Equal Rights Coalition of 42 states.

The inherent contradiction in the Bill is that those arriving by their own means are treated differently. They are penalised for making their own way here. Can the Minister confirm that LGBTQ+ people who travel via third countries will not be subject to different treatment, as set out in the Nationality and Borders Bill? The Bill also introduces provisions for accommodation centres outside the UK while people’s applications for asylum are assessed or, before that, while it is being decided whether their asylum claims are admissible in the UK.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading - Day 2
Tuesday 16th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab) [V]]

I would like to begin by echoing the comments of my hon. and right hon. Friends yesterday and today who have registered our concerns about the Bill, our disbelief that this Government are seeking to treat attacks on statues as more important than attacks on women, our opposition to disproportionate restrictions on the right to protest and the missed opportunity to protect women and girls from violence and the hatred that underpins it. Nottinghamshire police and our police and crime commissioner, Paddy Tipping, have shown the way by treating misogyny as a hate crime, and the Government need to follow.

I remind the House that the Crown court backlog is failing victims and witnesses. I welcome today’s announcement of a Nightingale court for Nottingham. It has taken too long, but I am glad that the Government have finally responded. There are some welcome measures in the Bill that reflect the hard work of many colleagues who have campaigned for change, but I would like to raise two specific issues.

First, clause 164 paves the way for deaf people to sit as jurors in England and Wales. Previously, language service professionals have not been allowed to enter the deliberation room, so anyone requiring in-person communication support has been barred from jury service. However, I ask the Minister to consider whether it is drafted too narrowly. The clause allows for a British Sign Language interpreter to support a deaf juror, but of the 900,000 UK residents with profound or severe hearing loss, only around 100,000 use BSL as their first language. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on deafness, I know that a large number of deaf people can only participate when they are supported by a speech-to-text reporter, so will the Minister clarify how this affects them? Will a speech-to-text reporter also be provided in the deliberation room? Will the Minister consider amending the clause to use a catch-all term, to give the Courts Service more flexibility to meet the needs of all deaf jurors?

Secondly, I would like to raise concerns about the effectiveness of measures in the Bill to tackle dangerous driving. The increase in the maximum penalty is welcome, but we must review the definition of dangerous and careless driving and formalise the role of driving bans as a sentencing option for those whose actions have clearly caused danger but who are not dangerous drivers who need to be imprisoned. I would also like to see stronger penalties for hit-and-run offences or where death or serious injury is caused by opening a car door unsafely. Cyclists deserve better protection. Finally, the Government need to close the loophole that allows convicted drivers to evade driving bans by claiming exceptional hardship. I hope the Minister will consider amendments on those matters.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

What progress he has made on planning for the (a) opening and (b) operation of Nightingale courts.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

What progress he has made on planning for the (a) opening and (b) operation of Nightingale courts.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Philp)]

Coronavirus has had an enormous effect globally and on public services in this country, which is why this year we have invested an extra quarter of a billion pounds to facilitate court recovery. As an important part of that we have already, as of today, opened up 40 additional Nightingale courtrooms, with a further 20 to open by the end of March.

[Chris Philp]

In relation to criminal cases, I am pleased to report to the House that since August last year, every single month, relentlessly, the number of disposals in the magistrates court has exceeded receipts, so the outstanding caseload in magistrates courts has been declining relentlessly since August, as the system has recovered. We now have more than 290 effective Crown court jury trials, which is more than we had before the pandemic, and just before Christmas disposals exceeded receipts for the first time during the pandemic. That quarter-of-a-billion-pound investment is working and we are getting the justice system back on its feet following the very substantial and understandable challenges that coronavirus has presented.

[Lilian Greenwood [V]]

The Minister already knows that Nottinghamshire’s police and crime commissioner, the chief constable and I are all extremely concerned about the delays in bringing serious criminal cases to trial and the failure to establish a Nightingale court in Nottinghamshire. I look forward to the discussion that he promised last week, but all Members will want to understand why progress is so slow. The Minister talked about 40 courts being open now and 60 by the end of March, but Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service said that 200 would be needed; what is preventing him from addressing that problem? How much investment has the Treasury earmarked for Nightingale courts?

[Chris Philp]

On the question of investment, I have already said that in the current financial year we have spent an extra quarter of a billion pounds on justice recovery. We are hiring an extra 1,600 HMCTS staff and we have more Crown court jury trial rooms operating than we did before the pandemic. I am, of course, carefully studying the proposals for Nightingale courts in Nottingham and look forward to a conversation with the hon. Member on that topic in the near future.

In terms of speeding up the system, even before coronavirus hit us we had increased expenditure on the Crown Prosecution Service by £85 million a year, hiring an extra 400 prosecutors, and we are on track to hire an extra 20,000 police officers. Our commitment not only to dealing with coronavirus but to speeding up the justice system more generally is clear for all to see.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Tuesday 14th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Alex Chalk]

Absolutely nothing could be further from the truth. The Government are committed to this. I was a practitioner in 2010 and I well remember when Labour was in government and Labour Members derided the “gravy train” of legal aid. We will never do that, because we recognise its importance. This Government have eased the rules on hardship and interim payments to enable the early drawdown of payment for work done, and for solicitors we have doubled the number of opportunities to seek payment on account. This is really important: we are accelerating work on CLAR—the criminal legal aid review—because we want to put between £31 million and £51 million into the profession as soon as possible. That funding will be released before too long.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

What progress he has made on implementing the recommendations of the Lammy review, “An independent review into the treatment of, and outcomes for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in the Criminal Justice System”, published in September 2017.

[Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)]

What progress he has made on implementing the recommendations of the Lammy Review, “An independent review into the treatment of, and outcomes for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in the Criminal Justice System”, published in September 2017.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Robert Buckland)]

We remain absolutely committed to taking forward every recommendation that falls to Government and to completing the action on all those within our responsibility over the next 12 months. Recently, in February, we provided a further progress report in which we describe the undertakings to which we have committed the Department in relation to the recommendations.

[Lilian Greenwood]

Black and minority ethnic young people already face discrimination in the jobs market, and those with a criminal record are doubly disadvantaged. By putting barriers in the way of young people who have changed and present no significant risk to others, the criminal records system traps them in their past. The Taylor review recommended reform to ensure that young people are not unnecessarily held back by childhood offences, but my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) called for a new approach, learning from the system for sealing criminal records adopted in many US states. When will the Government implement Lammy review recommendation 34 and allow young people to demonstrate that they are more than their past?

[Robert Buckland]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that question. She will be glad to know that only last Thursday the relevant statutory instrument was laid before the House to remove both the requirement for automatic disclosure of youth cautions and the multiple conviction rule, which cause problems for people who have old convictions, regardless of their nature or the sentence. I want to go further. I have considered carefully the recommendation of the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), and the sentencing White Paper later this year will have further proposals for reform of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Frazer]

We have to recognise that the treatment of women in prison, their sentences and the treatment once they are sentenced might be different from men and if they are victims of crime. In our female offenders strategy, we recognise different treatment; but of course people who commit crimes must be punished for them.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

I listened carefully to the Minister when she said that prison officers can access training. Does she agree that it should be mandatory for prison officers who are working with pregnant women to have such training, and can she confirm what proportion of prison officers have already accessed that training?

[Lucy Frazer]

At least one prison officer in each establishment has already undertaken the training, so there is specialist support, and more women than that have done it; I would be very happy to provide the figures in due course.

Female Offender Strategy: One Year On

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2019 Westminster Hall

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend makes a good point; we know that traumatic brain injury is one of the routes by which women come into custody, and we see disproportionate representation of women with brain injury inside our prisons.

What sentences do women receive? Fines are most common and their use has been increasing. They are often seen by criminal justice practitioners as an effective and swift means of justice. But as the Magistrates Association points out, many women cannot afford to pay the fines that are imposed, which leads them into debt or pressures them into reoffending.

By contrast, the use of community penalties has been falling since 2015, with community penalties representing only 5% of sentences received by women, which is half the rate we saw a decade ago. While there has been a welcome fall in the number of women sentenced to custody, three quarters of those who received custodial sentences were imprisoned for a period of less than 12 months. I believe that short custodial sentences have been shown not to be effective and not a good use of money. Some 70.6% of women receiving a custodial sentence of under 12 months in the period from April to June 2016 went on to reoffend. Such sentences are not achieving a reduction in reoffending.

Many women are in custody now as a result of being recalled to prison following release and during a period of post-release supervision. That has been exacerbated by transforming rehabilitation changes, which introduced post-release supervision for those who had served short custodial sentences. In practice, the failure of such supervision arrangements to recognise women’s caring responsibilities, their lack of access to transport and their anxiety about leaving the house is leading many women to miss appointments. They are therefore in breach of the terms of their release and find themselves going back in through the revolving door of recall.

I contend that our system is clearly not working for women or for wider society. That was understood by the Government too, because the 2018 female offender strategy sought to address a number of those concerns and issues. What specifically did the strategy introduce? It introduced some £5 million over two years for investment in community provision, including £2 million for programmes to address domestic abuse, and a pilot to introduce five residential women’s centres. The strategy was explicit in its ambition to reduce the number of short custodial sentences served by women. It introduced new guidance for the police on dealing with vulnerability, and guidance on whole-system approaches, such as we have had for a number of years in my home city of Manchester. It also sought to introduce a national concordat on women offenders.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that the £5 million is wholly inadequate? I have heard from Nottingham Women’s Centre, which provides the CHANGES—Creating Hope, Achieving New Goals, Experiencing Success—programme for women who are leaving prison, or to help women to avoid prison. It says that

“we had a total of 12 days to bid for the money with a partner. We ended up being funded for a six week pilot project.”

The total amount that it received was just over £11,000. The representative of the women’s centre said:

“The evaluation was so huge for a tiny piece of work…we are being asked to track the women after the end of the project for the next 6 months too. I would say if anything it detracted from our work rather than increased our offer and certainly hasn’t helped to shore up what we already have.”

It simply is not fit for purpose.

[Kate Green]

WomenMATTA, which is my local women’s centre, has also spoken of the inadequacy of funding, which I will come on to, and of the complexity of the application procedures. As my hon. Friend rightly suggests, spending time on preparing the applications detracts from the good work that the centres could be doing in working directly with women offenders.

On 27 June, in a written ministerial statement, the Government set out progress to date. I am grateful to the Prison Reform Trust, which has produced a helpful and comprehensive matrix to track progress against the strategy. It is fair to say that both documents show a mixed picture, although I acknowledge that there has been some good progress. For example, we have recently had the Farmer report on maintaining family links, which makes many welcome suggestions. We have had changes in housing policy so that a tenancy can be maintained for up to six months while a mother is in prison. More police forces are developing and using trauma-informed approaches. Liaison and diversion schemes now cover 90% of forces in the country, and the ambition is to achieve 100% coverage next year.

I was very pleased to hear the right hon. Member for South West Hertfordshire (Mr Gauke), the last Lord Chancellor—and, if I may say so, a much-missed Lord Chancellor—speaking positively about his intention or wish to see a presumption against the imposition of short custodial sentences, as already applies in Scotland. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) says, women’s centres still lack sustainable funding. Will the Minister say what has happened to the proceeds from the sale of Holloway Prison? That delivered some £80 million into the Treasury’s coffers, but only £5 million appears to have been released to go towards services for women.

It is welcome that the Government, in their strategy, called a halt to the building of new women’s prisons. Many of us had spent much time urging them to take exactly that step. But what evidence can the Minister show for the efficacy of residential women’s centres? Surely priority should be given to funding core women’s centre provision in the community. No prison has to wonder whether it will have the funding to exist after 2021, but that is the case for most women’s centres, with Lord Farmer himself describing their funding as “desperately precarious”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

I welcome this debate, which has been sponsored by my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green). There is a cross-party dynamic here today and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee), who progressed this issue during the two years that he was in post. I also pay tribute to the right hon. Member for South West Hertfordshire (Mr Gauke), who I am reliably informed has just resigned. Their approach got buy-in from across the political divide.

I had the fortune, although perhaps “misfortune” is the word, to visit a women’s prison, at Eastwood in Gloucestershire, with the Select Committee on Welsh Affairs about 10 or 12 years ago. It was a depressing experience. The women in the prison freely gave evidence through their dinner time; they were rewarded by getting leftovers for their meal. We sent them a box of House of Commons chocolates as a reward, and they were not even allowed to receive that present. We need to treat all those who are in the criminal justice system with respect.

There is compelling evidence to indicate that custodial sentences of six months or less do not work. The Government have, at last, recognised that and have proposed to do something about it.

All women in prison are disadvantaged, but women in Wales are doubly so. Throughout 2016, 62% of sentenced women entering prison across England and Wales were serving sentences of six months or less. The comparable figure for men was 45%. In Wales, a massive 74% of women prisoners are serving sentences of six months or less. The cost of keeping a person in jail is a massive £50,000 a year. Some of those women are in jail for not paying their TV licence. It is £154 for TV licence; it costs £150 a day to keep that woman in jail. Women are put in jail for not paying their council tax. I am really pleased that the Welsh Government took the initiative earlier this year not to pursue people who have not paid their council tax for a custodial sentence.

I pay tribute to the women’s centre in Rhyl, run by the wonderful Gemma Fox: it does fantastic work on a shoestring budget. She only has about nine volunteers at the moment, and they look after 300 women a year. One hundred of those women have gone through the penal system. The women’s centre is not given the resources it should be, and more women are ending up in custody; in fact, North Wales is the worst police authority of the 43 in the country for sending women to prison.

Some 80% of austerity cuts have ended up on the shoulders of women. That has a consequential effect on their world view and on their ability to provide for their families. As a last resort, many of them have committed crimes, such as shoplifting or not paying their bills, and they have ended up in prison because of that.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that one of the reasons why women end up in such positions is that they are not receiving the benefits that they are entitled to? Nottingham Women’s Centre told me that, in the last 12 months, its welfare rights adviser recovered £463,000 in benefits that had been lost to women. Would it not help if we sorted that problem out?

[Chris Ruane]

Absolutely, and I will finish on this note. The women’s centre in Rhyl is not just for female prisoners or women going into or coming out of the criminal justice system. It has a holistic approach to giving advice to women on parenting, domestic and sexual abuse, housing issues, finance and employment. Women go there to recover their confidence. There is a social mix there, with middle-class women as well as working-class women and those who have no job. These centres should be funded by central Government, not least with the £80 million that was saved from Holloway.

It says in the Bible that people should

“beat their swords into ploughshares”.

We should be turning our women’s prisons into women’s community centres.

Adult Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd May 2019 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Champion]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend, and I congratulate him, because as a Rotherham MP he has been an absolutely tireless campaigner, both to get justice for the survivors in Rotherham and to get the support services, which we are still waiting for.

The APPG’s inquiry into adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse found that the average male survivor waited for 26 years before disclosing abuse. Therefore, it cannot be right that, at the moment survivors are ready to speak about their abuse, they are forced to join the back of a queue, with waiting lists a year long, and sometimes waiting lists are closed, due to demand and the lack of funding to meet it. Across the country, the reality for survivors is a lengthy wait for support, or limits on the number of sessions available.

Although it was welcome that the Ministry of Justice increased by 10% the rape support fund, which provides grants to specialist sexual violence support services, specialist services are seeing demand increase far in excess of 10%.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate, and I am really pleased to have this opportunity to intervene on behalf of survivors in Nottingham. She is doing a fantastic job. Does she agree that there needs to be a specific pathway, so that people can get referred to robust trauma therapy without having to tell their story again and again, and wait for months? Actually, there is a model for such a pathway, because one has been established for veterans. Should not the same level of care and support be given to these people who—to be honest—have already been failed by the system once? Providing such a pathway would go some way towards recognising that we have failed them by allowing them to be victims of child sex abuse in the first place.

[Sarah Champion]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend, and it should go on the record that she has been such a fighter for the survivors in Nottinghamshire, which is hugely appreciated. Yes, she is right that victims should not have to battle and beg to get support services to enable them to live their life. They are a victim of crime; access to such support should be an automatic right. But victims having to tell their story time and again is something that we keep hearing about. The thing that I am most fearful of is that some of the people going through that fight will just step away from it, and who can blame them for that? However, as a society and as a Government, we need to address that situation and we need to do it now.

To that end, would the Minister consider developing a mechanism for pegging the funds to uplifts in demand, so that specialist services and survivors are not forced to bear the effect of any funding shortfall? Instead, the Government would pre-empt that need and fund it accordingly. We all have to admit that for too long the Government have been behind the curve on this issue.

If we acknowledge the prevalence of abuse and its devastating costs to the individual and society, the logical policy to adopt is a transformative funding package that funds services that redress the trauma of abuse and help survivors to recover. Minister, that requires more than an occasional 10% uplift.

Will the Minister commit to asking the Chancellor for a cross-Government strategic fund, which meets the core funding needs of specialist services, to prevent and respond to child sexual abuse? He may find that he is pushing against an open door, because in March and again in the main Chamber yesterday the Chief Secretary to the Treasury spoke about survivors, saying in March that

“because they have been traumatised and left in despair after suffering the consequences of crime…it should be government’s responsibility to prioritise support for these people”.

Both the NHS and the specialist voluntary sector have a vital role to play in supporting the recovery of survivors. On average, 17% of the budgets for specialist sexual violence and support services comes from the rape support fund, and 14.5% comes from NHS England and clinical commissioning groups, or CCGs. The APPG’s inquiry heard that CCGs have a responsibility for commissioning long-term therapeutic support for survivors. However, when I asked Ministers for an assessment of the effectiveness of CCGs in this regard, they told me that they do not even collect the data on it.

When survivors tell us that the support they need is not there, and specialist support agencies find many CCGs challenging to work with, I must say that this lack of data is extremely concerning. I therefore also ask the Minister to make representations to his colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care to collect this data centrally, so that proper analysis of it can be made. If it is discovered that CCGs are failing in their duty to commission such support, will he consider ring-fencing funding for the long-term therapeutic support that survivors need?

There also needs to be research into the availability of appropriate services for black, Asian and minority ethnic survivors; for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender survivors; and for disabled survivors. During the APPG’s six-month inquiry, we found virtually no evidence, or indeed recognition, of those survivors’ specific needs, nor a desire to commission the services that they need, which is of considerable concern.

Minister, a nationwide public health campaign about child sexual abuse is required. It would raise awareness and—importantly—reduce stigma. It should also aim to direct both survivors and professionals to sources of information and support. In the absence of professional expertise, survivors said that they need quality information about the impact of abuse and about where they can access support. To date, professionals are described as being “caught out” by disclosures, and therefore as being unable to provide up-to-date, relevant and accurate information. In such a situation, survivors usually take it upon themselves to find information and services on the internet, which has mixed results.

In parallel with a public health campaign, the Government need to address the fact that existing sources of information and support are patchy and disparate. The Government could do more, in co-operation with the specialist voluntary sector, to provide online resources about the impact of abuse, and information about the support services that are available, both locally and nationally. This will necessitate cross-Government working and marshalling existing online information from police and crime commissioners, specialist service umbrella agencies, and the Ministry of Justice’s own Victim and Witness Information website. Survivors and professionals need to know where they can source information and support; currently, there is just no clear answer for them.

Privatised Probation System

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

First, may I pay tribute as always to my hon. Friend, who has been a real supporter of the prison officers in her prison and the turning around of Chelmsford prison? It is true that the frequency rate of reoffending has gone up, which means that very prolific offenders continue to offend more, but the absolute number and proportion of people reoffending has decreased—the binary rate has come down—and that is a good thing and worth celebrating.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

The National Audit Office says there is limited time to procure the new contracts, that persisting with the split between the National Probation Service and the community rehabilitation companies still poses risks and that the transition to new contracts threatens service quality. Having wasted millions of pounds and failed miserably to reduce reoffending, why is the Minister intent on pursuing this two-tier system?

[Rory Stewart]

First, wherever we go with this new system, we will have a much more integrated system: it will continue to be a mixed market, but it will be a much more integrated system. Secondly, whatever we do now will involve some transition costs and risks, and we do not want to minimise what they will be, but we have learned the lessons and the most important one is that, instead of focusing on just paying people in terms of reducing reoffending, we will pay people for the overall quality of the services they deliver.

Future of Legal Aid

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Andy Slaughter]

Yes. I will come on to mediation. My hon. Friend highlights two points: first, the lack of early advice and its consequences, and secondly, that the so-called alternatives put in place by the Government have failed, so we are left with effectively no safety net.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is starting to build up quite a case on the issue. Sally Denton, a senior solicitor at the Nottingham Law Centre, made precisely that point about the importance of early advice:

“Given the massive changes to the benefit system coupled with the evidence that most people presenting as homeless to the local authority are doing so following the end of a private tenancy and the massive crisis in homelessness it is clear that failing to enable people to access early assistance with benefits issues will result in many losing their tenancies and either being homeless…or having to be accommodated by the local authorities”.

Do these savings in one area not just create much bigger costs in another?

[Andy Slaughter]

My hon. Friend identifies the fact that by pulling away parts of the legal aid structure, the whole thing has collapsed in many areas. It is often the case that one problem, which may be housing or debt, is caused by another solvable problem, which is the lack of welfare benefits. Because they are not in receipt of welfare benefits, someone who would otherwise be eligible for legal aid may not qualify under the eligibility rules, and therefore the whole thing spirals down.

As I was saying, I have three specific requests. There are other discrete issues that I wish to mention and I will say a bit more about those in a minute, but I would like some indication from the Minister, when she responds to the debate, that at least these three specific requests are being considered as part of the review.

LASPO was billed as having four objectives,

“to discourage unnecessary and adversarial litigation at public expense; to target legal aid at those who need it most; to make significant savings to the cost of the scheme; and to deliver better overall value for money for the taxpayer.”

The Ministry of Justice predicted that the budget for the legal aid bill would be cut by £350 million. It promised that there would be innovative ways in which advice and legal services would be offered, allowing costs to be cut while still maintaining access to justice.

There was, however, little of substance. Instead, LASPO swept away 60 years of the development of legal aid, taking almost all private family law and most of social welfare law out of scope, introducing onerous restrictions on eligibility, and turning on its head the principle of a right to advice and representation. Now, matters would be eligible for legal aid only if expressly allowed by the schedule to the Act.

Later, criminal legal aid got the LASPO treatment. It did not feature in any detail in the original Bill, but subsequent secondary legislation introduced cuts of a similar scale for crime, opening up the prospect of advice deserts and, as we have already touched on, miscarriages of justice, where defendants do not meet eligibility criteria but cannot afford representation.