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Women, Justice and Gender Equality

By way of reinforcement to the point just made by the hon. Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt), may I mount one of my habitual hobby-horses and alert the Minister to the fact that a significant proportion of prisoners in this country, including female prisoners, suffer from a speech, language or communication disorder of one sort or another? I invite her to try to intensify pressure within the Government to ensure that in the future at prisons and young offender institutions an assessment is carried out as a matter of course of the condition of each individual prisoner as the precursor to providing speech, language and communication assistance. Without that, people cannot access education and training courses, which would otherwise be so beneficial to them.