Offender Management Bill

I, too, support the amendment. We welcome the Government’s amendment that places in the Bill, under Section 10 of the Children Act 2004, a duty on probation boards and/or trusts or other providers to co-operate with local children’s trust arrangements to improve the well-being of children and young people. The Government’s amendment also, under Section 11 of that Act, places on providers a need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. We also support the fact that the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, places a duty of care for children right at the beginning of Part 3 of the Bill, thus affirming its primacy as the number one priority regarding children. The issues surrounding offender management discussed by this Committee in the past few days have been curiously free of almost any mention of children—who are deeply involved and affected by what happens to any member of their family who becomes involved in the criminal justice system—except when we discussed staff training today. I continuously observed the relevance of children’s needs in our visitor centre at Pentonville—the very first such centre, back in 1972. Everything that the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said, resonates with my experience. We would deal with children who kept under their hats the fact that they had lost a parent to prison and they were beginning to create anxieties at school. At home, wives would often be left high and dry because their partner had not come home and he was under lock and key, and we saw what that could do to the family’s dynamics. Our centre has given rise to the network of visitor centres that we have today throughout the country, where inter alia children’s needs are recognised and can be supported. That work is choreographed and significantly developed by Action for Prisoners’ Families, of which I am a patron. A few years ago a report on the effect on children of losing a parent to prison, No-one’s ever asked me, gave a most poignant account entirely through the children’s own words of what it meant to them to lose a parent to prison. In effect, it is a bereavement. As we have heard, every year there are tens of thousands of these children who lose a parent to prison. Also, a recent report on the effect of losing a sibling to prison highlighted just how important relationships with siblings are. Indeed, current thinking suggests that they may be of far greater importance than those with a parent for children growing up and particularly at a certain age. To lose, say, an elder brother was, for younger siblings, deeply traumatic. It is well established, as we have heard, that a child who loses a parent to prison becomes significantly more likely to be involved in the criminal justice system. For these and many more reasons, which I will not elaborate on now, the very real importance of the duty of care at least having pole position in the Bill is clear and we support the amendment.