Offender Management Bill

I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, on giving the Committee the opportunity to have this important debate. Noble Lords have, perhaps understandably, concentrated on the aspect of the amendment that addresses the issue of the children of those serving custodial sentences. However, in drafting his amendment the noble Lord was rightly very careful to direct our attention across the whole of the offender estate. No doubt all noble Lords can see how important it is for offender management—whether of those in prison or those in the community—to have regard to the welfare of children. I do not think that the Government will resile from that—in fact, just the opposite. I am sure that the Minister will say that that is at the heart of everything that they do. The difficulty is always in balancing that against the other duties of those who must also protect the public. I would certainly wish to see any offender management system have close regard to the welfare of children. There is no doubt that there is a beneficial effect on offenders if they maintain contact with their families, although they may not view it as such at the time. I am very aware that some fathers, in particular, do not wish to see their children ever again. They want to move on and leave that family tie behind, but it may well benefit offenders if they do not do so. Retaining contact with their children may be part of their rehabilitation. I am certainly aware that it will benefit most children to have contact with the parent, but that is not so in every case. We should always remember that contact with a parent has blighted the lives of some children and will continue to do so. Therefore, contact with a parent may not necessarily always be conducive to a child’s welfare, and that is the difficult balance that must be addressed in any offender management system. I anticipate that the Minister will say some very warm words but not accept the amendment as drafted. I hope that, in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, she will be able to say that the Government will reflect on the best ways in which the spirit of what he is trying to achieve can be delivered. I was very grateful to the noble Lord for being courteous enough to circulate to all those interested in the Bill, in advance of this debate, the research by Murray and Farrington of Cambridge University on offending rates among children who are separated from a parent as a result of that parent’s incarceration. The figures certainly show that more research is needed to see what we can understand and draw from the results, which, so far, are not in any way conclusive. However, it is clear that programmes such as Storybook Dads—a service that allows prisoners to record bedtime stories on tapes to send to their children—simply would not have been possible without having been established by dedicated local initiatives. We come back to the importance of local initiatives, as opposed to nationally driven ones, and the fact that sometimes they provide the best way of assisting children. I do not propose to go into more detail on them—we are all aware of the great variety of local initiatives that can assist children—but it is important that between now and Report we reflect on the best ways of ensuring the welfare of children who are not in the prison estate themselves but are either separated from their parents or seeing the impact of crime on the family. Reference has been made to the proposals of the noble and learned, Lord Woolf, on cluster prisons. We have all spoken at some time or another about the benefits that might accrue from such a system but I am not sure how the Government would deliver it. The reality is that prison estates are bursting at the seams—I understand that they are now either full or about to be full—but it is one solution that is very much worth bearing in mind. It is clear that, as noble Lords have said, for families trying to visit a parent or parents in prison—some children have both parents serving custodial sentences—life is not difficult in the sense in which the rest of us may find it difficult; it becomes almost impossible for them not only to carry on their own lives with any sense of normality but to avoid becoming part of the offending culture in the future. That is what I think the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, is really trying to achieve by raising the debate—to make us aware that if we do not put the welfare of children right at the beginning of our consideration, we could end up with the children of current offenders simply being offenders themselves in the future. That does not do anybody any good.