My Lords, Amendment 9, which is part of this group, would add a mental health assessment as a supervision requirement in Schedule 1. As noble Lords will be aware, a high percentage of prisoners suffer from mental health difficulties, and the purpose of the amendment is that the sentencing court should be able to add a mental health assessment as a requirement that would benefit offenders when they came out of prison. Of course, it is far more desirable that this is picked up far earlier upstream, but there may be occasions where it has not been picked up, and it is obviously an issue. Sentencers should be able to add this as a requirement, so if it is not going to be picked up in prison it will be when the supervision period starts. That is the purpose of Amendment 9.
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On Amendment 7 and the others, I agree with everything that has been said. I particularly agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, that many of the points were common sense. I will, if I may, tell one brief anecdote. A friend of mine recently visited a women’s prison in Scotland and talked to the governor, who said: “If I were to open all the doors today, only a very small fraction of the women would actually leave this prison. Most of them would choose to stay here because of the security the prison gives them.”.
As we have heard, the problems faced by women in prison are very different. I think it is generally acknowledged, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said, these amendments put forward a common-sense approach. I very much hope that my noble friend Lord Judd is right when he says that the Government’s real intention is to address rehabilitation, which is a fundamental problem. This Bill introduces provisions that were not in place before. We might differ about the funding and all the rest, but the fundamental intention of this Bill is a good thing.