Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what community-based pilot schemes for women-only offenders are in operation; what the reasons are for such schemes; and if he will make a statement.
There is currently one community based pilot scheme for women offenders only. This is the Women’s Offender Management Complexity Pilot. The Pilot is operating in 2 Probation Delivery Units (PDUs) in Wales.
The rationale for this pilot is that existing Offender Management (OM) models have been derived from information about the whole offender population of which women make up only a tiny proportion. They are therefore more representative of male offending patterns than female.
Learning from this Pilot is being shared with the Probation Reform Programme, to inform the future design of probation services, and the learning is also being tested for its relevance to the whole (ie male and female) caseload.
There are other community based pilots ongoing that are looking at the whole of the probation caseload, but that include cohorts of women. These are:
It remains our intention to Pilot residential women’s centres, as set out in our Female Offender Strategy.