My Lords, I will speak about making provision for women—“female offenders”, as the Bill calls them. These new clauses are intended to make good the remarkable lack of reference in this Bill to women who offend, which is for me and many others impossible to understand. They also echo the thinking and recommendations of the Corston report, which were accepted five years ago by the previous Government and were generally welcomed around the country. Like many of my colleagues and friends in the House, I earnestly wish that some moves can now be made to address these issues which are so long overdue.
New Section 1ZA(7A)(1), to be inserted into the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000 under Amendment 14, simply affirms that:
“Contracts made by the Secretary of State with probation trusts shall require each probation trust to make appropriate provision for the delivery of services to female offenders”,
because it is now generally understood that existing provision, whether in prison or in the community, has been—and still is—largely designed for men. Therefore, it is totally unsuitable for women, as should be absolutely self-evident. Women’s needs are quite different from men’s and the provision must be different.
Jean Corston recommended that there should be separate, specially tailored services locally available, so that the disruption to family life, particularly to children, is minimised as far as is humanly possible. It is self-evident that the needs of the children and families of women who have offended have a huge bearing on their capacity to attend programmes, for programmes to be effective and for reoffending to be reduced. It also has a crucial impact on the risk of orders being breached.
Women’s needs are extremely complex and need correspondingly tailored and appropriate responses. As we heard in a previous debate, most such women are the victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse, which demands quite different skill sets on the part of the providers of services from those required for men. Currently, we simply do not have adequate provision throughout the country to meet the extent of this need. Therefore, we are failing these very vulnerable women. We are also failing our society’s needs and the needs of the many children involved.
Of course, there are probation trusts which make provision for women in their patch. I have visited some remarkably effective and impressive initiatives where women’s centres are turning lives around. I have visited centres where the women themselves are instrumental in making this happen through the understanding and support that they give each other, as well as the skill and sensitive work done by the probation services concerned. But the probation services are not required to do this: hence, the need for this amendment.
The recent joint inspection report on the use of alternatives to custody for women offenders reported a lack of women-specific provision for unpaid work and offending behaviour programmes. However, it said that women-only provision, where available, is often very successful. I know this to be true and have met women who have continued to visit their centre long past the end of their required attendance to help other women who are still under an order.
The second part of this amendment follows on from what I have just said. It states that each probation trust should be able,
“to carry out unpaid work”,
in women-only groups, as well as any offending behaviour work, such as drug and alcohol addiction programmes or domestic violence programmes. For the one or two women in an otherwise male group doing unpaid work, it is likely to be extremely threatening, intimidating and unproductive, and quite likely to end up with the order being breached. Tragically, that is likely to result in a custodial sentence. Indeed, a striking feature of the female prison population is the high proportion of women in prison for breaching a court order—an order originally imposed for an offence that might never have attracted a custodial sentence in the first place. That is a tragic irony.
I hope that the Minister will take this away and look at this serious omission in the Bill. It is not too late to rectify it and, in so doing, he would attract support and heartfelt relief the length and breadth of this land. I beg to move.
6.15 pm