Offender Management Bill

I support my noble friend’s important amendment, having had the pleasure of seeing an improvement in the arrangements throughout the prison system for visitors and visits, many of which depended on the devoted activity of voluntary organisations. I pay great tribute to a number of those organisations for the help that they have given. I always thought that a number of prisons could do more for visitors, not least because visits to prison are enormously draining both for the prisoner and for the family, and that arrangements should be made to help the family through that process before their journey home. I also pay tribute to organisations such as Safeground, which runs a marvellous series of courses called Family Man, which are designed to do what they can to mitigate the experience of imprisonment on relationships between parents, particularly fathers, and their children. It is marvellous work, which I am sure could be expanded. Noble Lords asked about the practical things that could be done. I have always thought that this was one of the biggest justifications for the call made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, in his marvellous report after the Strangeways riots, for community clusters of prisons to be set up so that prisons were grouped in each part of the country, sufficient to hold people from that part of the country so that they did not have to go too far away, except if they were in high security prisons. If we have that basic structure, we can build on it in the ways suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, within a more stable structure.