Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Liz Saville Roberts

Tuesday 5th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

14. What steps her Department is taking to support incarcerated pregnant women and mothers.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Shabana Mahmood)]

We are sending too many women to prison, two thirds of whom are non-violent and over half of whom have dependent children, and 75% of the time the child leaves home after the mother is incarcerated. That is why we have launched the women’s justice board, which will set out its strategy in the spring. Its goal is to reduce the number of women in prison and, ultimately, the number of women’s prisons.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

All Welsh women in prison are held in England, and being far from home adds to the emotional torture of separation from children, but we cannot assess the extent of the separation without public access to Wales-specific disaggregated data. Will the Secretary of State commit to making this information public so that we can ensure that pregnant women and mothers and children have the proper support they need?

[Shabana Mahmood]

The data on how we track the experiences of women across England and Wales will be work that the women’s justice board—once it is up and running—will be able to look into and make recommendations on, which we will pick up in the spring.

Sentencing Review and Prison Capacity

Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Liz Saville Roberts

Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

I can assure my hon. Friend that my ministerial team and I have been working closely with our colleagues, primarily in the Home Office, but also across Government. Support for victims sits in different Departments, but we are making sure that we have a “one team” approach to this important matter. I have sought to pull the levers at my disposal in such a way that we gave the Probation Service the time it needed to prepare for the SDS40 changes. I did that because I wanted to ensure that our obligations under the victim notification scheme could be met. I am monitoring progress on that regularly, and I will ensure that any improvements required are made on a continual basis. We keep this under constant review.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Neil Foden is in prison for the sexual abuse of four vulnerable schoolchildren. He was the headteacher and strategic headteacher at two secondary schools in Gwynedd. Foden was convicted of 19 charges and sentenced to 17 years in July this year for his abhorrent crimes. The judge said he showed no remorse. Can the Lord Chancellor advise me how to seek assurance for his victims that Foden will not be released until he has served at least two thirds of his sentence?

[Shabana Mahmood]

I can confirm that all sex offences of all types are excluded from the SDS40 measures.

Prison Capacity

Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Liz Saville Roberts

Thursday 18th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

I welcome my hon. Friend to her place. This change is designed in part to allow probation to do the job that it would normally do when it comes to prisoner releases on licence. We will have an eight-week implementation period; that is one of the big differences between this scheme and the previous Government’s end-of-custody supervised licensing scheme, which was pretty chaotic and opaque. Things moved very quickly, not allowing probation the time to do its job. I am not going to pretend that the eight weeks is ideal, but it is better than where we might have been: it allows the sentencing calculations to be redone and some planning to then happen in the normal way, so that we can make sure that, when those people are released into the community, they have a proper release plan in place. Once we are into the prospective element of the change, I believe that the process will be much smoother, and probation will be able to do a much more effective job of managing those prisoners as they are released into the community.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Diolch yn fawr iawn, Llywydd. The Secretary of State is entirely correct to say that prisons are in crisis: they have been in crisis for years, and reform is urgently necessary. It is evident that there are many people in prison who should not be there, but that is the only place that they can be—people for whom community-based prevention and rehabilitation would be way better. The last Government promised us a women’s residential centre based in Swansea, but according to an answer to my written parliamentary question earlier this year, delays and uncertainty over planning saw that proposal sidelined. Will the new Labour Government commit to succeed where the last Government so obviously and appallingly failed and facilitate the establishment of a women’s residential centre in Wales, where we have no women’s prison?

[Shabana Mahmood]

I thank the right hon. Member—that is a very compelling bit of lobbying from her. May I offer to meet with her, so that we can discuss this issue in person?