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Women, Justice and Gender Equality

I entirely endorse my hon. Friend’s suggestion of the figures that we should aim for. In one of the meetings that we went to, Minister Ehsan, the Minister for women and youth, said that the first step that she took when she became a Minister was to recognise that when women are suspected of committing a crime, that affects their families, their status, their children, and their relationships within their communities. She decided that all women should be automatically granted bail pending trial unless they were held on suspicion of crimes of terrorism or manslaughter, because, as she said, when we imprison women and take them away from their families, we are building additional problems for their communities, their families, their villages, and especially for their children. I feel particularly passionate about this, perhaps because we have no prisons for women in Wales. As a result, Welsh women face 100 per cent. of their sentence away from their community, their family, their children and, sometimes, their language—the language in which they prefer to communicate. That cannot be acceptable. I was pleased to hear the recognition from my hon. and learned Friend the Minister that the women’s prison population has gone up by 126 per cent. in recent decades. The best strategy to reduce female offending is to improve women’s access to work, to improve their mental health services, to tackle drug abuse among women, to improve their family ties, and to improve the life chances of young women through our schools and in our communities. I have to acknowledge that the Government have achieved a lot on all five of those methods. However, every time we move forward—it is the great challenge for politicians—our communities say, ““Well done, we expected you to do that, now what are you going to do?”” That is what we have to face in relation to women and offending. We have improved on the services and facilities that are out there in our communities, but there is still much more to do. We have to acknowledge that 71 per cent. of female prisoners have no qualifications. Our schools must not fail women in terms of the opportunities that they have when they are young, and our employers must encourage them to obtain those qualifications; otherwise, they will make it more likely that women will fail and face a life that could eventually lead into crime. We know that 65 per cent. of women reoffend on release. Our prisons must reduce that number by offering opportunities in terms of skills, education and family links. We know that nearly 40 per cent. of women prisoners lose their homes. When people leave prison without a home to go to, they will almost certainly reoffend. It is a tribute to women that the figure is as low as 40 per cent. It is a tribute to their creativity, energy and determination, but it is a disgrace that we do not campaign more effectively and rigorously to enable women and men to have a settled and secure future on leaving prison. If we want to stop reoffending, we must get rid of the constantly swinging door of choosing between sleeping on a friend’s sofa until the friend is driven crazy and reoffending to get back to some sort of security and a home. We must give people something to fight for. That can be a home.