Oral Answers to Questions

Seema Malhotra Excerpts

Tuesday 18th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Grant]

I know that my hon. Friend cares deeply about Alana House and its future in his Reading constituency. He has already discussed the matter with me on a number of occasions. The National Offender Management Service has funded women’s community facilities successfully for a number of years and Alana House has been provided with funding of £111,000 for 2012-13. From 2013-14, probation trusts will commission these very important services for women. They are required to provide gender-specific services and if those services are not sufficiently robust they will be challenged. It is too early to say what that will mean for Alana House, but I can tell my hon. Friend that I would be happy to visit the facility.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Corston report highlighted the need for women’s centres to work with women offenders and those at risk of offending. What is the Government’s current policy on continuing to provide support to such services?

[Mrs Grant]

As I said, that funding will continue. The National Offender Management Service has funded women’s services very successfully for many years. The funding for women’s services will continue at the same level, but from 2013-14 probation trusts will commission these vital services.

Church of England (Women Bishops)

Seema Malhotra Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bradshaw]

The answer, of course, is yes, but the Measure made very generous provision for opponents of women priests and bishops; it would have allowed them to continue to have their own bishop. Supporters of the Measure believe that the concessions were pretty generous, and I do not think that they will become any more generous in the weeks and months to come.

That is why I say to the bishops that there comes a time in any organisation, whether it be a political party or a Church, when it is no longer sustainable or possible to move at the pace of the slowest, which in this case means not moving at all. The overwhelming majority of Anglicans do not want more delay. They believe that the opponents of women bishops will never be reconciled. If some of the opponents decide to leave for Rome or to set up their own conservative evangelical sect, so be it. Similar threats were made over women’s ordination. In the event, far fewer people left the Church of England than was predicted, and as time has gone on, more and more parishes that originally decided that they did not want women priests have come to accept and celebrate them.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my right hon. Friend not agree that it is vital that the Church of England considers its trajectory and progress, bearing in mind that women bishops are already part of the international Anglican community in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States and elsewhere?

[Mr Bradshaw]

Yes. I shall mention some of the provinces of the Church of England that already have women bishops when I come on to one of the possible solutions to the impasse.

I was talking about people coming in and out of the Church. For every one person who may leave the Church of England over women bishops, there will be many more who stay or come back; there are also people who, at the moment, shrug and say, “Why should I take a second look at an institution that treats women like this?”, but who will take that second look if women are fully celebrated in the Church. In the discussions that we often have about the importance of Church unity, we very rarely talk about those who have already left or been driven out of the Church, or who have not come in, including members of my extended family and my circle of friends—I am sure that the same applies to many hon. Members—because of the failure of the Church to make progress more quickly.

Having announced on the eve of this debate that they will have another go in July, the Bishops need to be sure that they will win. The process must be concluded quickly—in months, not years. If they are not sure that they can deliver, they should ask Parliament for help. Since the Synod vote, many of us will have been contacted by priests and lay members of the Church, appealing to Parliament to act. A priest from Lancaster wrote to me, saying, “Please, please, please, help.” She went on to ask us to remove the Church’s exemption from equality laws, describing it as

“deeply offensive to most women priests.”

Sentencing (Female Offenders)

Seema Malhotra Excerpts

Tuesday 16th October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to bring this debate to the House today.

One of the starkest examples of how politically correct this country has become is the issue of women in the justice system and, more specifically for this debate, women in prisons and in courts. About 5% of the prison population at any one time in recent history has been female. The other 95% has been male, yet much time, effort, concentration and brow-beating has taken place over the very small number of women in prison. There are countless groups and organisations calling for the number to be reduced. Far too many politicians—male as well as female—are willing to trot out politically correct nonsense on the subject, repeating facts that do not bear any scrutiny at all, and there are far too many calls for something to be done about a problem that, by anybody’s standards, is hard to see exists based on the actual evidence.

Let us imagine that the male population in prison represented just 5% of the total and that women made up the remaining 95%. Would there be an outcry on behalf of the men at the expense of the women? Of course not. There is absolutely no chance on earth that that would happen, so why is there all this concern over 5% of the prison population? How can normally thoughtful, intelligent people have taken such leave of their senses over the issue? The answer is simple. It is all about being politically correct, and not many people in public life like to challenge it, but I do, Mrs Osborne, and today I want to take the opportunity to scotch some myths about all types of sentencing for women. I want to bust five particular myths.

There is an old political maxim that if someone tells a lie often enough, people will believe that it is true. I can only conclude that has happened in this case. I heard the lie that women are more likely to be sent to prison than men and that they are treated much more harshly by the courts, and I was taken in by it. I presumed it was true, because I had heard it so often, and I thought it was an absolute outrage. I was so outraged by the inequality in sentencing that I decided to do some research into it. As many people know, I spend a lot of time researching matters to do with prisons, sentencing and justice, and I wanted to get to the bottom of why women were being treated so badly.

Imagine my surprise when, having looked at all the evidence, I found it was not the case that women are treated more harshly by the courts. The unequivocal evidence is that the courts treat women far more favourably than men when it comes to sentencing. I want to expose five myths today.

The first myth is simple: women are very likely to be sent to prison and are more likely than men to be given a custodial sentence. That is simply untrue. Everyone I have spoken to who is involved with the justice system confirms anecdotally that it is not the case, but let us not just take their word for it. Let us look at the facts. I asked the Library to provide evidence that more women than men were being sent to prison, as I had been told. Not only did it not provide that information, but it confirmed that the exact opposite is true. The Library stated:

“The published statistics show that a higher proportion of men are given a sentence of immediate custody than women, irrespective of age of offender (juveniles, young adults or adult) and type of court (magistrates or Crown). This has been the case in each year between 1999 and 2009...For each offence group, a higher proportion of males are sentenced to custody than females...In 2009 58% of male offenders who entered a guilty plea for an indictable offence were given an immediate custodial sentence compared to only 34% of women.”

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the hon. Gentleman clarify whether the information he received from the Library also looked at statistics by type of offence?

[Philip Davies]

Absolutely. It looked at every category of offence. For every single category, women are less likely than men to be sent to prison.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point and he is right. Not only are women less likely to be sent to prison than men, and more likely to be sentenced to a lesser term than their male counterparts, but they are also more likely to serve less of the sentence they are given in prison. In its offender management statistics, the Ministry of Justice says:

“Those discharged from determinate sentences in the quarter ending December 2011 had served 53 per cent of their sentence in custody (including time on remand). On average, males served a greater proportion of their sentence in custody – 53 per cent compared to 48 per cent for females in the quarter ending December 2011. This gender difference is consistent over time, and partly reflects the higher proportion of females who are released on Home Detention Curfew”.

[Seema Malhotra]

To what extent are family circumstances, especially circumstances of children, taken into account in sentencing? Every year, 18,000 children see their mothers go to prison and only 5% of those children stay in their homes during that sentence. There are also statistics to suggest that a third of women in prison are lone parents, and it is more likely that their children will lose their homes or be placed in care as a consequence of their mothers’ custody.

[Philip Davies]

The hon. Lady is right. That is a fact that is given in the courts, which is why women are less likely to be sent to prison than men. That was a point that my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) made earlier. Let me emphasise my point with a case from earlier this year. Rebecca Bernard, who had 51 previous convictions for crimes including violence and threatening behaviour, led an all-girl gang that brought terror to her town. She has been the subject of two antisocial behaviour orders for making the lives of her elderly neighbours a misery. When this 23-year-old attacked two innocent men in a night club with a champagne bottle, it was thought that a custodial sentence was inevitable. However, she walked free from court after a judge decided that she was a good mother to her three young children. Bernard had smashed a bottle over one victim’s head and then stabbed the other in the arm with its jagged neck. A court heard that she had launched the attack because she believed wrongly that the men were laughing at her. Quite clearly, those factors are taken into account by the courts, which explains why someone such as Bernard, who clearly should have been sent to prison, and who, if she had been a male, would definitely have been sent to prison, was not sent to prison. That is the explanation. I am perfectly content for the hon. Lady to say that that should be the case, but at least let us argue from the facts, because then we will be acknowledging that men are more likely to be sent to prison than women.