Blog: Welcome steps towards a women-centred approach
Last week, the House of Commons Justice Committee published the government’s response to its report on women in prison.
In this blog, Emily Evison, Policy & Programme Officer at the Prison Reform Trust examines some of the key commitments made by the government in its response and shares her assessment of them.
The committee endorsed the government’s 2018 Female Offender Strategy as a welcome step forward in recognition of the need for a specific approach to women. But the committee found there had been a concerning lack of progress against the aims and objectives of the strategy. It attributed this to a lack of investment in the measures needed to make the aims achievable. The committee made recommendations across a range of areas, aiming to ‘re-energise’ the government’s ambition to deliver the strategy.
The government accepted 35 of the committee’s 38 recommendations. Many of the commitments made by the government are welcome. These include a clear reiteration of its overall commitment to the Female Offender Strategy, as well as work on better data collection and sharing and full national roll out of the primary care mental health treatment requirements by 2023/24. However, the proof of whether the government will deliver on its promises remains to be seen. Much will depend on the forthcoming delivery plan, the measures and the timelines the plan sets out, and whether performance against those measures is published.
Below we highlight some of the key commitments made by the government in its response and our assessment of them.
Delivering the Female Offender Strategy
The government says it aims to publish the Delivery Plan for the Female Offender Strategy 2022–2025 ‘shortly’. The plan will include specific and measurable commitments based on the three original aims of the Female Offender Strategy. But in addition, there will be a fourth aim focussing on ‘protecting the public through improving outcomes for women released from prison’.
Strengthening family links
Similarly, there is a commitment to publish an update on the implementation of the recommendations in the Farmer Review for Women by the end of this year. As it stands, the government has said it has implemented 25 of the 31 recommendations. However, without a detailed update, we are unable to assess whether this is correct.
Residental women’s centres
The planned residential women’s centres (RWCs) continue to be an expensive experiment. The original commitment in the Female Offender Strategy was to “develop a pilot for ‘residential women’s centres’ in at least five sites across England and Wales”. More than four years later, the first site is yet to receive planning permission, and this response from the government makes no clear commitments on the remaining four centres. From the response we can also see that £10 million (over three years) has been allocated to this first centre in Swansea, a huge amount of money compared to only £24 million (also over three years) to the whole of England and Wales on non-residential support.
Expanding the women’s prison estate
The key aim of the Female Offender Strategy was to reduce women’s prison places. However, the government remains committed to building an additional 456 spaces in the women’s estate. The government’s response again highlights that the rationale behind this figure was based only on general modelling of the prison population. The additional detail the government provides is welcome. There will be 12 open (25 places per unit) and six closed units (26 places per unit) across HMPs Drake Hall, Eastwood Park, Foston Hall, Send and Styal. But we have to question why women who would be suitable for open conditions need to be in prison in the first place. It is also unclear what the recent changes to the criteria for transfer to open conditions will mean for demand on those open places. We have every reason to fear that demand for these places will decline markedly as the number of women denied transfer under the rules increases.
The government’s response certainly conveys a greater sense of urgency than was evident in the years immediately after the strategy was published. But the merry-go-round of ministerial changes has delayed the publication of the action plan that has been so long in the preparation, and the prospect of spending cuts is an immediate threat. So the wider sector needs to keep up the pressure to ensure the government keeps its promises. The wellbeing of thousands of vulnerable women in the justice system depends on it.
Emily Evison
Policy & Programme Officer
