Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Farmer Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 18th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, my interest in the Bill lies in how families and children affected by crime are supported. I will also highlight that victims and prisoners are often overlapping categories.

The duty to collaborate, in Clause 12, reinforces recommendations I made in my 2019 Ministry of Justice review on female offenders. Early intervention in the community requires addressing women’s vulnerabilities that can lead to offending. These include them being victims of crime—for example, as we heard from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle, 57% of women in prison have themselves endured domestic abuse.

Joining up services, peer support and voluntary sector activity is vital for addressing the multiple drivers of women’s offending. I recommended establishing local accountabilities to make sure this join-up happens, so I welcome this duty. I also emphasised the need to include family and relationship work in diversion and out of court disposal programmes for women, and outlined the importance of family hubs. These are now official government policy and being rolled out in 87 local authority areas. I declare my unremunerated interest as a director and guarantor of the not-for-profit consultancy The Family Hubs Network Ltd.

Many family hubs provide domestic abuse services but want to do far more and are very well placed to help children who have experienced or witnessed domestic abuse. Can the Minister confirm that the duty to collaborate will require the police and others to work with family hubs? They need to be cemented into local support infrastructure wherever possible.

Further, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner highlighted at Commons Committee stage that many bereaved families have a poor experience of the Parole Board in terms of being kept informed, and their feelings considered, ahead of the release of offenders. Ideally, the Bill would drive improvements in family liaison.

I am interested in how the Government would have treated Harriet Harman’s new Clause 36, which was selected for consideration on Report but not debated. It called for annual data collection to establish

“how many prisoners are the primary carers of a child … how many children have a primary carer who is a prisoner, and … the ages of those children”.

This was recommended in her Joint Committee on Human Rights report The Right to Family Life: Children Whose Mothers are in Prison. The Government responded positively to this recommendation, provided an accurate method can be found that protects the rights of vulnerable individuals.

Cambridge criminologists Murray and Farrington referred to children of prisoners as “forgotten victims” of crime and “the Cinderella of penology”. This new clause could fit well into a Bill to make provision about victims of, and others affected by, criminal conduct. Accurate numbers and knowing exactly who is affected are both important to mitigate the deleterious effects of parental imprisonment on children, including the greater likelihood that they will themselves become offenders. Studies by Farrington et al and Dallaire found that over 60% of children of incarcerated parents offend themselves.

Mothers are more likely to be primary carers. However, today’s family complexities make this “primary carer” tag less clearcut. Men increasingly fill this role and many have “shared care” of children after parental separation. So, while I support this data collection, it should not further downplay the importance of fathers in children’s lives. That the Joint Committee felt justified in looking at the right to family life only for children whose mothers are in prison exposes an assumption that needs to be challenged. Can the Minister impart any early insights about the Government’s appetite to make such data collection a statutory requirement?

Where prisoners are concerned, public perceptions of men are very different from those of women. Important male/female differences affect the way each sex experiences incarceration, but there is far less societal acceptance that many convicted men are also victims. Yet for both sexes there is a deep connection between being a victim and ending up in prison—a quarter of prisoners were in local authority care. In The Honest Politician’s Guide to Prisons and Probation, the former Lord Chief Justice, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Phillips, describes how

“‘a vast range of people in our prisons are inadequate in one way or another’, including many young people who suffered ‘horrific social deprivation’ … ‘Youths who stab people; they don’t control their emotions and so they do something horrific. But there is no point locking them up for … 20 years for a two-minute loss of temper’”.

By young people he means young men: less than 1.5% of the child and youth estate is female—the rest are male—and only 4.5% of the adult prison estate is female.

Without in any way excusing their crimes, I say that many young men have been through a range of adverse childhood experiences but often lack the developed emotional intelligence to articulate how they have been affected by them. It is a skill shaped through early nurturing relationships—precisely what many have not had when fathers have been absent. The ensuing vulnerability often comes out in anger, gang involvement and, ultimately, self-destructive acts, which can also devastate others’ lives. Victims of such crimes matter enormously, but courts exist to prevent vigilantism, vengeance and private justice.

Some are concerned—I mention here my noble friend Lady Newlove—that this is no longer just a victims’ Bill. But we must learn from those who speak for female offenders and extend to men and boys the recognition that we cannot neatly divide the world into victims and perpetrators. This is not to excuse—I disagree that women should not be in prison, even if they are parents, let alone men—but to build public understanding that funding for effective rehabilitation is money well spent. So, in ending, I ask the Minister to consider that victim/offender is an overlapping category that could be usefully established in law through this Bill, given its somewhat unique title.