Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have any plans to hold men and women prisoners on shared sites.

The Prison Safety and Reform White Paper (Cmnd 9350), published 3 November 2016, announced the intention to create five small community prisons for women. It said that we will seek to use land adjacent to existing prison sites to get economies of scale, while maintaining the feel of separate institutions that will be important for prisoners’ experiences.

In line with one of the key recommendations in your review: ‘Women with Particular Vulnerabilities in the Criminal Justice System’, one of our primary objectives is improving closeness to home for women offenders. The creation of these prisons will mean that more women are held closer to their homes and given the support services they need to help them address what are often multiple and complex needs.

We are currently looking for appropriate sites and will set out further detail on the design and operation of these prisons as part of a wider strategy for female offenders which we will publish next year.