Women Released from Prison

Debate between George Howarth and Kate Green

Wednesday 18th October 2017 Westminster Hall

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to contribute to the debate and to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. I am pleased that we are having the debate, as I have a long-standing interest in the experience of women in the penal system. I thank the many organisations that have supported me both for this debate and over a number of years, including Agenda, the Prison Reform Trust and the Howard League for Penal Reform, as well as Women in Prison, and which give us excellent briefings and information.

The title of this debate is about women leaving prison but, like my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore), I will first talk about women going into prison. Alarmingly, the number of women in prison exceeded 4,000 for the first time in July 2017. As we know, the experience of women in prison is generally not a good one: 16 women died in custody in 2015-16 and there have been 18 suicides in 2016 and 2017 so far. That is 14 more than in the previous eight years put together. As we heard from my hon. Friend, many women who have a period in custody face losing their home and their children as a result of incarceration. We know that many also suffer mental health difficulties, which time in prison may exacerbate.

An increase in the number of women going into prison troubles me—especially to the extent that it reflects a perverse consequence of the Transforming Rehabilitation programme. I think it is a commonly understood problem that that programme is leading to a rise in the number of women being recalled to prison. The number of women recalled to custody following their release has increased by 68% since the end of 2014, according to analysis by the Prison Reform Trust. The number of those with a sentence of less than 12 months returned to custody after licence recall was 14.6 times higher in the first quarter of this year than in the first quarter of 2015. The numbers in the first quarter of 2017 were 220 women, compared with just 15 women two years before.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore said, despite the intentions of Transforming Rehabilitation to reduce reoffending, women are increasingly going round and round in a revolving door. We need to do better, both to keep women out of custody and to prevent them from returning to custody following release from a period in prison.

There may be a number of reasons for the high rate of recall, but one that alarms me is that the through-the-gate support that was envisaged to be provided by dedicated case managers in Transforming Rehabilitation is not yet properly in place. Nor are all community rehabilitation companies offering genuinely gender-specific programmes. My first question to the Minister is: will he review how Transforming Rehabilitation is working and the role of community rehabilitation companies in preparing women for and supporting them on release?

I am concerned that the Transforming Rehabilitation model means that the provision that should be in place for women completing custodial sentences is fragmented. The majority of women, most of whom commit less serious crimes, are likely to fall under the auspices of the community rehabilitation companies, with only a small number of women deemed high risk being supervised by the national probation service.

I understand the risk model that underpins Transforming Rehabilitation. I do not entirely agree with the model and am not convinced that it is viable, but I understand what the Government say it should look like. However, the number of women prisoners referred to the national probation service will be so infinitesimally small in the scheme of things that it is difficult to see how gender-sensitive models can be devised by the NPS for this very small group of very vulnerable women.

One suggestion I would like to put to the Minister is that all women leaving custody should be supervised by the CRCs, not the national probation service. Will he investigate that suggestion and make an assessment of the risk implications of doing so? Those risks could be mitigated, or indeed more than balanced out, by improving access to dedicated gender-sensitive support focused in the CRCs and available to all women.

I am sure the Minister will be well aware of the whole-system approach we have been trialling in Greater Manchester, where my constituency is. I very much commend that approach to him. The programme aims to embed integrated gender-responsive support services for women at three points in the criminal justice system—on arrest, sentencing and release from prison. Nine women’s centres in Greater Manchester provide support hubs for women referred via a range of routes. The services they offer are very much appreciated by the women who access them. I visited my own women’s centre and can absolutely vouch for how the women feel about them and the positive experience they have. They welcome the opportunity to be in a women-only safe space.

The 2015 evaluation of the whole-system approach carried out by Sheffield Hallam and Manchester Metropolitan universities found that service users had revealed a strong sense of despair, hopelessness and isolation prior to engaging with the support on offer at the women’s centre. Once they had that engagement, it gave them a sense of purpose and a structure to their day. It gave them aspirations for the future in terms of volunteering and employment opportunities and led to improvements in health and opportunities to re-engage with their children and families. The development of that positive sense of self is really necessary in improving wellbeing and reducing the isolation and lack of confidence that often lead women to offend and take them to a crisis point where criminal behaviour may result.

Particularly notable in the research and the service users’ own accounts was the fact that such intensive and tailored support was not available to them before their engagement with the women’s centres. Providing a more efficient service with less duplication and burden on statutory agencies was also reported to be a perceived benefit of the approach. Women’s centres were said to be places women could turn to and could be linked to other organisations in the community that could help them, which is important, given that the statutory agencies with which women are involved may not be aware of or not have time to make links with one another and offer all sources of support.

I of course acknowledge that the internal alliance between different statutory and voluntary agencies has improved the sharing of good practice and facilitated some of the pathways, but there are concerns. Some have expressed concerns that innovation will be squeezed out as the pathways become more standardised. Not all referral routes appear to be working fully effectively to refer women into the women’s centre provision. As I say, through-the-gate referrals have been particularly disappointing, perhaps because of the lack of dedicated through-the-gate case managers.

Women themselves may not know of or understand the support they could obtain from the women’s centres and be doubtful about it. When I visited Styal Prison recently, women peer mentors in the prison suggested that they should be able to liaise between the prison and women’s centres to encourage women coming up to completion of their custodial sentences to move on to use the women’s centre facilities.

However, the most crucial problem—it will come as no surprise to anybody in the room—is uncertainty about funding. Indeed, that applies to not only the whole-system approach in Greater Manchester, but women’s centres up and down the country.

May I make a suggestion to the Minister? I am not optimistic, but I keep suggesting this in the hope that one day a Minister will agree with me. I suggest, on the 10th anniversary of the seminal Corston report, which suggested that women should serve their sentences in community settings, that rather than money being put into new community prisons, which as far as I can tell are prisons in all but name, that money could be better directed at supporting women’s centres and rehabilitation programmes in the community. More women could be reached. They could be supported to remain at home, to care for their children and to work if they were able to do so. As we know, those are all important factors in reducing reoffending and costs to the public purse. Instead, precarious funding of community provision is exacerbated by cuts to other services, such as mental health services, and to the benefits on which women leaving prison will rely.

Housing is a particular issue. The Prison Reform Trust says that, as we have heard, 60% of women prisoners do not have homes to go to on release. I draw the Minister’s attention particularly to the following problem, which I heard about in Styal. A woman who had served a custodial sentence, who had a history of offending behaviour and addiction and had been treated as having made herself intentionally homeless by her housing authority before going into custody, was not able to point to the successful programme of rehabilitation that she had undertaken in prison in order to have her housing application treated differently on release. Would the Minister, with Department for Communities and Local Government colleagues, look into that?

I am conscious that you want me to move on, Mr Howarth, so I will make just two final points. The first is on universal credit, which we are debating in the main Chamber this afternoon. The prisons tell me that they cannot start a woman’s application for universal credit in advance of her release. That means that women often leave prison with just £47 to their name and a six-week wait. I hope the Minister will talk to his colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions about whether it might be possible to start the application process for universal credit in the prison ahead of the release date.

Finally, I emphasise the importance of family contact, particularly contact with children, which we all know is also a very important factor in helping to reduce offending and reoffending. My final example on that is that on my recent visit to Styal, I met an EU national whose daughter was suffering very severe health problems, having just given birth. The grandmother was deemed low risk by the prison, no longer had her passport and, with a new grandchild, was very unlikely to abscond, yet she could not be granted a family resettlement visit, which would have enabled her to go to her daughter and provide the family with some support.

I hope the Minister will pick up some of the quite detailed but practical points that I have raised, because we all share the common goal of reducing the number of women in custody and helping them to be rehabilitated in the community.

[Mr George Howarth (in the Chair)]

Order.

[Kate Green]

I apologise, Mr Howarth.

[Mr George Howarth (in the Chair)]

Three further people wish to speak. If they all take longer than the Minister gets to wind up the debate, I will not be able to get them in.