Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I am delighted to have that on the record. Their own job includes some of the issues that we are discussing tonight. I go back to the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Gould. I understand that my colleague—my noble friend Lady Northover—has visited the Brighton project to which the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, referred and that she firmly endorses the opinion that was expressed about its success. This point also goes back to the position and role of public servants—the people doing this tough job—and the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, gave some graphic illustrations. I was also pleased that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, mentioned that the people working in our Prison Service do an amazing job in difficult circumstances. Good care and support from staff saves many lives, and many such instances go unreported. In any given month, prisons successfully keep safe approximately 1,500 prisoners who are assessed to be at particular risk of suicide or self-harm. When people say, ““You don’t have a women’s strategy””, I dispute that. I think that we do and perhaps we should shout louder about it. As has been mentioned, my honourable friend Crispin Blunt in the other place is the Minister with responsibility in this area. On 24 January he made a speech to the Corston funders, setting out a report on progress in this area. He set out the Government’s strategy for women offenders, which ensures that women will benefit in key areas such as mental health, drug recovery, tackling violence against women, troubled families, employment and women’s community services, reflecting the good work by the National Offender Management Service to implement many of the recommendations in the Corston report. In that context, I am afraid that we do not believe that the amendment seeking a published women’s strategy is necessary. We also believe that, as I said, accountability for a women’s strategy should remain with Ministers. Perhaps they are better placed to influence policy across Government and we will ensure that other departments play their part too in supporting vulnerable women in the criminal justice system. Any women’s strategy should be sufficiently flexible to respond to changing circumstances and new priorities, especially as we move towards more locally devolved commissioning to ensure provision is integrated into local services. To ensure that this momentum is maintained, we are working across government as well as with the voluntary and community sector to ensure that offenders receive treatment for their mental health, substance misuse and other health problems in the most appropriate setting, building on the work of the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, to roll out diversion and liaison services in all police custody and at courts by 2014. That has already begun. Last month the Minister for Care Services announced a further £20 million towards this objective from the Department of Health for 2012-13. We are working to ensure that women have a proper opportunity to get off drugs for good. Our plans include the design and implementation of payment-by-results pilots for drug and alcohol recovery, which will provide an ideal opportunity to improve the recovery outcomes for women in the criminal justice system. We are working to ensure that prisons place stronger emphasis on drug recovery and better continuity of treatment and care. We will therefore be piloting drug recovery wings at Her Majesty’s prisons New Hall and Askham Grange from April this year, with a third women’s prison to be identified soon. We are also ensuring that women who leave prison and claim jobseeker’s allowance will have access to the work programme on release so that they have the same opportunities as men, and we are ensuring that services in the community are helping us to deliver effective sentences for women. We are spending an estimated £80 million a year on adult females serving community and suspended sentences and we can see women are doing slightly better than men on these sentences. The Prisons Minister recently announced that in 2012-13 the National Offender Management Service will continue to fund the vast majority of those community services—some 30 services in total. This amounts to an additional £3.5 million to existing probation trust budgets and will form part of their future baseline funding. To divert resources to create a new commission would, we believe, do little to advance the concerns that exist about the welfare and the distinct needs of women in the criminal justice system. We actively consider gender equality in everything that we do, as required by the Equality Act 2010. We are committed to monitoring progress on achieving key outcomes for women offenders in these, and all, areas of our approach to rehabilitating offenders. I believe this is sufficient provision, both under this Bill and more widely, to ensure that we are held to account for progress on this agenda. To summarise, we have the strategy for women; piloting drugs recovery wings; supporting the Department of Health to pilot and roll out liaison services in police custody and courts by 2014; looking at a number of intensive treatment-based alternatives to custody with the Department of Health, which was raised the noble Baroness, Lady Stern; and working with the Department for Communities and Local Government to support the ministerial working group on homelessness. That includes a scheme led by Crisis to improve access to the private rented sector for women offenders and women at risk of offending. We are also looking at gender issues in making prison a place of work and industry and improving the way in which we deliver learning for women in prison, as part of our work with the Department for Work and Pensions. We are working with Louise Casey to take forward a national programme to tackle the problems caused by our country’s most troubled families, as well as working with the Home Office to support women offenders who have experienced domestic violence and abuse. It is simply not true that we have no strategy. Following the Corston report, and following what I think is best practice, we are branching out from a single department across Whitehall to get the best results. This morning, I read a letter in the Guardian, signed by Juliet Lyon and others, and its final sentence stated: "““With clear strategic leadership and improved accountability, it should be possible to reduce offending by women and to reduce women's prison numbers””." I fully endorse that statement and believe it profoundly. I said the other day in the House that one does not need to visit many women's prisons to see that far too many prisoners should not be there but should instead be dealt with and treated on the outside. That is certainly our direction of travel. I know that I will disappoint some noble Lords by saying that we will not set up a commission or other separate body. However, that does not take away from the fact that we are doing many things in the direction of travel of the Corston report. We are also doing many things on our own initiative to deal with the problem. Certain questions were asked about various bodies that were referred to. I do not know whether we have renamed them, but I will check. We are certainly continuing a lot of the cross-departmental work. I am also not sure whether the resources are exactly as the noble Lord left them. I suspect that some may have fallen foul of the necessary cuts that my department faced. However, I repeat that we are focusing money where we think that it can be best used. I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.