Appendix 1

Police and Crime Committee – 1 November 2017

Transcript of Agenda Item 6: Women Offenders in London

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): That takes us to the main part of the morning, which is the subject of women offenders in London. This Committee, as I say, is embarking on a thematic piece of work around this and this is the first part of our investigations.

To set the scene around it, clearly, although women make up a small amount of the overall number of offenders, they are a distinct group with very specific needs in relation to offending and rehabilitation. It is great that you have come along today to assist us in that work. The issues we will be picking out in our questions will include very much the Corston Report [The Rt Hon Baroness Jean Corston, 2007] and the closure of [HM Prison] Holloway. Importantly, our work here is reflecting upon the Mayor’s work in this area and you will know that the Police and Crime Plan specifically refers to women offenders - and the Mayor has already committed an amount of money towards that - and a new female offender service. We will be talking about that later.

The first question, if I may, is largely, really, to scene set. I have referred to the Corston Report, which was ten years ago, in essence, and I would like you all if you could on this particular instance - in relatively succinct terms because we will investigate it more thoroughly later - to reflect upon that it has been ten years since the report calling for a distinct and separate - distinct more than separate, I would say - approach to women offending. Broadly speaking, how much better or worse is the situation for women in the criminal justice system today? If you would all like to comment, I will just go along [the line]. Please signal if you would like to go first. What you could do, would you kindly introduce just yourself and your organisation? That would be quite helpful when you make this response.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): OK. I am Jenny Earle. I am the Programme Director for Reducing Women’s Imprisonment at the Prison Reform Trust, which is a small United Kingdom (UK) wide charity dedicated to reducing the number of people sent to prison unnecessarily and improving the conditions of prison for those who must be there. For the last four years, we have had a programme dedicated to tackling the problems facing women in the criminal justice system with the objective of reducing the number of women who end up in prison.

The Corston Report is a very important landmark report and blueprint for progress and improvements in the criminal justice system. Has the situation improved since then? I would say overall not very much. Indeed, in the last year or two, we have seen record numbers of women dying in prison and that was one of the problems for the Corston Report; the high number of women’s deaths in prison. That has spiked again very recently. There are very high rates of self-harm amongst women in prison and generally a growing evidence base of the damage done to women.

We have not seen the implementation of the Corston approach for a more community-based response to women’s offending. We are still seeing large numbers of women - too many vulnerable women - drawn into the criminal justice system because of a failure to meet their needs in the community. I suppose the overall conclusion of the Corston Report was that most of the solutions to women’s offending do not lie in prison;

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they lie in the community. We need a much stronger emphasis on women’s specific solutions in the community and there is still a long way to go before we have achieved that. Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): I am Kate Paradine from Women in Prison. We provide three women’s centres across the country in Woking, Manchester and Lambeth, the Beth Centre, but also services in prisons in different parts of the country. We are also leading a campaign to reduce the prison population of women from about 4,000 at the moment to 2,020 or under by 2020. Our role as well is about amplifying the voices of women affected by the criminal justice system, which are often missed out from these kinds of discussions.

I will not say very much more than Jenny has, but we did publish a brief report, The Corston Report: Ten Years On, which Women in Prison produced. Really, the progress has been woeful in those ten years and we have certainly taken steps back in terms of funding women’s services. That is the only thing I would add to what Jenny has said: that in terms of funding and developing a network of women’s centres, the position is pathetic, given that we have had ten years to make progress. In London in particular, things are really pretty bad compared to other big cities, including the likes of Manchester. Advance is here; we have the Beth Centre; there is Hibiscus, which runs a women’s centre and other centres like, in Barking and Dagenham, Huggett. However, in terms of a focus on women affected by the criminal justice system, there really is a desperate need for development.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Kate, thank you. We will be drilling down later on what we can ask the Mayor to do in the London context and the shortfalls and shortcomings. Niki?

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): My name is Niki Scordi. I am the Chief Executive of Advance. Advance has been working with women in the criminal justice system for over 20 years now and particularly female offenders for about ten years. We run a programme, among others, called Minerva and it is partly funded by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime.

I would echo what Kate and Jenny said: that services have been slow to start, very poorly funded, inconsistently funded and, therefore, it makes it challenging to build on them and embed them in the system. They are fairly short-term and so we begin to make progress and then we have to go back and start again. We are not given enough time for the results really to take effect and, therefore, to build on the developments. We are talking about things like diversion and women’s centres again.

I would say in London, compared to Manchester, we have two full specific female offender centres, one in west London, which is Minerva for Advance, and one in south London. There is nothing in north London or east London at all. There are domestic violence and other types of centres, but specialist female offender services are limited.

The only other point I would add is that the structural issues remain and that causes a real challenge to support those women, including things like housing, obviously, as you can imagine, and a whole load of other services, which I am sure we will explore as we go as well. It is a challenge.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Thank you. You mentioned Manchester. We will be talking about comparables with London and Manchester. Melanie, did you want to add to that?

Melanie Sheehan (Director for Female Offender Services, Advance): Yes. I am Melanie from Advance and I head up the Minerva service, which is the service for female offenders that Niki was just referring to.

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I would echo everybody on the panel. Progress has been slow, but I do feel like we are making progress. Events like this really highlight the needs of female offenders and that is coming up on the agenda. I have been working in criminal justice for about 15 years and in the last maybe six, seven or eight years with female offenders specifically, and we have been campaigning for a long time for the issue to be on the agenda. I feel it is now and this is a great start.

We have implemented all Corston’s recommendations in the Minerva service but, like everybody has said, there are not enough organisations doing the same thing. That is where I am hoping this will lead.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Thank you for sending the details of the Minerva service to us. That has done it is best to implement the recommendations as stated in Corston. Thank you very much. Helga?

Helga Swidenbank (Director of Probation, London Community Rehabilitation Company): Good morning. I am Helga Swidenbank from the London Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC). We provide services to 31 service users across all London boroughs including 4,000 women. I had a previous life as a junior governor grade at Holloway - and so I have worked in [HM Prison] Holloway - and also a previous life as the Director at HM Prison Bronzefield. Therefore, I have a sense of what is going on in custody as well as what is going on in the community.

On the question on how far we moved since Corston, I would echo all the comments made by my colleagues on the panel: not very far. Probably the one notable success with my former custodial hat on is end of strip-searching in custody, which has made a huge impact on the lives of women entering into custody, many of whom are traumatised before coming in. However, there has been very little investment in what is going on in the community across the board. There was a surge of investment post-Corston and we are going to talk about what is going on now. The answer is that we have not made as much progress as we would expect ten years on.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Thank you for that. The consistent response is that the progress has been negligible. In some areas where operations like yours have adopted it and have funding around that, you were able to implement those, but, in general terms, there has not been the will or the political will or the sustained funding to take Corston where it should have gone to over those ten years. We can tease that information out in the coming questions and then come to a situation where you could give us recommendations as to how we can go to the Mayor and take it further. Thank you very much for that.

We will now go to some questions specifically around women entering the criminal justice system. As I mentioned earlier, women make up a small but significant number of overall offenders and particularly have their own issues around that. At the time of Corston, it was highlighted that women had a lower involvement in serious crime, but some of the figures we have had recently have shown an increase in women’s involvement in serious violence, et cetera. We would like some questions around that.

My first question is probably to Jenny initially. The Prison Reform Trust carried out work to understand the level of women’s offending and the nature of that offending. Is the number of women offenders in London and the type of crime committed in line with what you see in other large cities?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): The short answer to that is probably yes, broadly speaking. The number of women arrested in London is larger than anywhere else in the country because it is our biggest city. About 26,000 women are arrested every year in London and about 1,200 are sentenced to immediate custody.

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In terms of patterns of offending, it is still the case that the majority of women who end up in prison are there for non-violent offending and most women’s offending is non-violent offending. You mentioned an increase in the number of women involved in violent offending and that is showing up in the data and that does need more analysis.

We had a roundtable recently, actually, on domestic violence as a driver to women’s offending. Quite a significant proportion - I cannot give you numbers now but I will see if I can get some to you later - of those offences are around retaliatory violence in abusive relationships and there is an increased incidence of women being arrested for retaliatory violence. According to some research, particularly by Professor Marianne Hester OBE in Bristol [Centre for Gender and Violence Research at the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol], they are often inappropriately arrested as the primary perpetrator when actually they are defending themselves or they are responding to protracted periods of being abused.

The other thing I would say is that if you talk to magistrates and judges about women’s violent offending, so-called, as it is appearing in the data, they will say it is usually very much at the lower end. There is also evidence that it is likely to be associated with unmet needs around drug and alcohol addictions, particularly alcohol. In fact, I would say - and I know this is anecdotal - that I was talking to a woman in Bronzefield not very long ago who said she had been recommended for an alcohol treatment requirement but, instead, she had been sent to prison where there was no opportunity for her to address that underlying problem she had, which was around inappropriate alcohol consumption.

There is quite a lot of unpacking that needs to be done if you are talking about an increase in women’s violent offending and it should not be taken, if you like, at face value or be interpreted to mean that women are necessarily becoming more violent. It is changed patterns of arrest and responding in particular to domestic abuse. Overwhelmingly, women are still sent to prison for minor offences, shoplifting and theft offences. Nationally anyway - and I do not have London data - women are twice as likely as men to be sent to prison for a first offence.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): We have some questions about that. Just lastly on the comparables with other cities, clearly, on basic numbers there would be more because it is London, but is the proportion pretty much the same as the larger cities and similar cities proportionally? Is it proportionate in London compared to other cities in regard to the numbers of women offenders?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): It is high in relation. It is hard to do that calculation because, to do proportionality, you have to benchmark it against populations --

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Yes, that is my point.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): -- and Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) arrest rates and the gender breakdowns are often not particularly granular. There is evidence of slightly disproportionate rates in London. I have my colleague, my analyst, Dr Tom Guiney [Dr Thomas Guiney, Senior Programme Officer, Prison Reform Trust], behind and so he will correct me. I do not want to mislead the Committee at all. We would say that the numbers of women arrested in London are too high, but to do an accurate calculation of proportionality is complex. London is up there, though.

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Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Of course. Regretfully, we would understand and accept that. We have some more questions. Caroline, did you want to carry on with those questions?

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: If I could pick up these questions, I was interested that the Prison Reform Trust has highlighted TV licence evasion as accounting for 36% of prosecutions of women. It seems extraordinary to me, I have to say. However, if we are focusing on the issue of violence, the figures we have for the year 2015/16 show that violence against the person was over 10,000. The next category was 5,700 for theft and then miscellaneous crimes against society was 5,500. They were the biggest crime types.

You mentioned, Jenny, the issue of retaliatory violence for people who have been suffering or living with domestic violence, probably for many years. Do we know anything else about the types of violence being committed by women?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): Again, I am referring very much to Professor Marianne Hester’s OBE research because she has done very thorough empirical research, mainly based in Northumbria but looking at police files and court records and all the rest of it. She has concluded that, where there are cross-allegations at least in a domestic abuse incident, women are three times as likely as men to be arrested for that violence. They are more likely to be using a weapon and that is for the fairly obvious reason that on the whole they are less likely to have the physical strength. There is other evidence, of course, from victim surveys that the violence women inflict is likely to be much less serious than what men inflict on women and more likely to be one-off incidents, reacting to those kinds of histories of abuse. There is some evidence that the violence is different in severity and frequency in particular.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Can I bring in Helga here, just to get a picture from you about the level of violence being committed by women and what you know in terms of the types in your experience?

Helga Swidenbank (Director of Probation, London Community Rehabilitation Company): What we are seeing can be divided into community sentencing and custodial sentencing. In terms of community sentencing, the top three offences are violence, theft and fraud. In terms of custodial sentences - the women working in custody and through the gate - theft, violence and fraud and, therefore, basically, following up from what Jenny was saying, violence for community sentences and primarily violence against the person, echoing Jenny’s analysis.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: In terms of the police data, does it give us the full nature of offending by women? Are there any areas that are particularly missing?

Helga Swidenbank (Director of Probation, London Community Rehabilitation Company): We have a pretty full picture. One of the questions that is posed in some of the documentation is around whether we have enough data. The answer is, yes, we have enough data. We understand what is going on. The question we all have to answer is: what do we do about that? We know. We just need to understand what we do and what actions we take.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Thank you. Perhaps I can ask Kate [Paradine], Niki [Scordi] and Melanie [Sheehan]. It has already been touched on by Jenny [Earle] that we talk about vulnerabilities that lead to offending: drug problems, mental health, alcohol issues, coercive relationships. Are these vulnerabilities more acute for women?

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Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): Yes, I would say that is very much the case. We will take the example of women being the primary carers of families, for example, and therefore that puts undue pressure on them to sustain their families and look after children, parents and so on. It often leads to financial difficulties, which therefore might lead to fraud on benefits, shoplifting for food to feed families, and so you can see a direct link between their responsibilities and the pressures that are put by their own families and by society in terms of their response to managing those, using offending, if you like, as a way of coping rather than choosing to do so because they want to. I would link that to, often, very low, unstable income and, therefore, again, using offending as a way of coping. Certainly, trauma and abuse often from a young age, not necessarily recent, leads to other psychological difficulties and therefore leads to coping mechanisms. They might be drugs and alcohol and, therefore, again, a funding that is a result of experience rather than a separate issue.

It is linked to vulnerability. I am sure Kate [Paradine] will add many, but housing difficulties is another one where people, again, with poor financial situations are choosing or resulting in committing offences to cope with a situation of homelessness and so on.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: It is not just a coping mechanism; some of it is just poverty.

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): Completely. They are very closely linked to that.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): On every measure, if you compare women and men in prison, they are all very vulnerable and disadvantaged, but on every level women are more so, be it mental ill-health, experience of domestic violence, sexual assault, exploitation, including through prostitution. The caring role in the family is really important in terms of survival and poverty-related offending. In that sense, the 5% of people in prison who are women, are the most disadvantaged and vulnerable.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Do you want to add anything, Melanie?

Melanie Sheehan (Director for Female Offender Services, Advance): I would echo what my colleagues have said. I would say the primary issue that I have seen is that all of these things lead to a real lack of self-confidence and self-esteem. We spend a lot of time in Advance helping women to build up their self-esteem so that they are able to make decisions that lead them away from offending and do not repeat patterns of behaviour because it is what they know. In a way, it is where they feel safe. Even though they know they are not safe in any respect, they feel safe because that is a decision they have made before. It is breaking that cycle which is the hardest part. We spend a lot of time helping women feel good about themselves and not to be judged by their behaviour. We take the holistic approach that that is part of their behaviour and it is a part that needs to change, but they need help to understand how they can change and support to do that. That takes quite a long time and sometimes that is not sufficiently recognised. You can put as many services in place as you like, but they need to be long-term and they need to be sustainable and they need to work with the woman to empower her to be able to make those decisions and take those steps. It is not, “Off you go and see this service and you will change”. It takes time and patience.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Yes. Thank you. I saw Jenny being passed -- did you have some data you wanted to share?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): My colleague, Dr Guiney, has given me some numbers here that indicate that women are more likely to be involved in a violent offence at the point of arrest, but at the point of imprisonment it is less likely to be a factor. The

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best thing is if we provide some supplementary evidence with the numbers because, otherwise, I will probably misrepresent what he has given me, which I do not want to do. We certainly can provide that to you in writing as a follow-up submission.

The other point he makes, which is very helpful, is that of course there are issues around offence categorisation and a lot is wrapped up in that term of ‘violence’. It could be affray; it could be fights on a Friday night. It includes domestic conflicts as well. I suppose that just reinforces the point I was making about needing to drill down more into what that really represents, this so-called increase in violent offences. The other point I would just highlight, which we may come on to, is that there is a proportionately lower use of community sentencing in London --

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): That is the next set of questions.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): Yes, but there are issues we can point to around relative proportionality.

Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Thank you.

Peter Whittle AM: Jenny, in your role of trying to reduce the existence of women in in the criminal system, I just wondered. I was very interested in this particular figure about the TV licences. Do you, in your position, ever lobby the Government? Do you ever try to get changes, for example, to take the TV licence out of the criminal system and put it in the civil one? That would make a massive difference, would it not?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): Yes.

Peter Whittle AM: Do you actually ever discuss that?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): Yes, we do. We have raised that in discussions with the Government and they are looking at that. There is widespread agreement that it is completely inappropriate. Indeed, in some cases, women have been unlawfully imprisoned around TV licence evasion because it originates with a fine, often, and you are really not supposed to be imprisoned in this day and age for non-payment of a fine. It is scandalous that 70% of those prosecuted for TV licence evasion are women and that is because they are more likely to be at home. It is definitely something that can be tackled because it is one of the factors that draws women into the criminal justice system and it does seem inappropriate.

Peter Whittle AM: You would prefer it to be a civil offence or a civil situation?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): Yes, I certainly, don’t think it should ever result in a woman’s imprisonment and we know that women are often unable to afford fines and the like.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): Can I just add? It is not just TV licences; council tax imprisonment still happens illegally. We partner with a project that is supporting women to leave prison. Women in prison for council tax non-payment are reading in our Women in Prison magazine about this project and being released. That is how bad things are. We are even imprisoning people illegally for that kind of thing. Also, for truancy and things like not getting your children to school, still, the ultimate sanction being used is prison.

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Peter Whittle AM: Thank you.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): That takes us to sentencing, which is our next set of questions. We have touched lightly upon this. In Corston ten years ago, one of the recommendations was that community sentencing should, in essence, be the norm for the least serious offences. Compared to other large cities, London seems to differ in that respect. We have a set of questions around that. Sian, did you want to lead on that?

Sian Berry AM (Deputy Chair): Yes. Jenny, were you about to say that women are less likely to get a community sentence in general compared with men? Was that what you were about to tell us?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): No. I said that they were less likely to get a community sentence in London than in Manchester, yes, but there has been nationally - and particularly in London - a decline in the use of community sentences and that is something that we are very concerned about. We need to see an increase in the use of both out-of-court disposals and community sentences in order that we do not end up with a disproportionate number of women in prison for minor, nonviolent offences and for very short periods because, of course, the usual alternative to a community sentence is a short prison sentence. The outcomes for women of short prison sentences are very poor and we have seen a rise over time in the use of short prison sentences. I know this is something you will probably come on to later, but we have more recently seen a really shocking rise in the number of women recalled to prison because, of course, now, if you are sentenced to a period of imprisonment of more than one day, you are subject to 12 months’ supervision when you come out of prison. In the absence of appropriate and effective and women-centred support, that is resulting in the revolving door into prison spinning ever faster and faster for a lot of women.

Sian Berry AM (Deputy Chair): There is a difference between London and other big cities in terms of the amount of community sentences given and a higher rate of custodial sentences. Can you comment on why that is or why you think that would be?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): I do not know all the reasons empirically, but I would say from the evidence we do have that there is an awful lack, as Kate [Paradine] and others here have already indicated, of appropriate services in the community for women. That is key.

There is a lack of mental health services, particularly. There is this one community-based order that can be given called the mental health treatment requirement. There is very little of that available in the community across London. The Prison Reform Trust is supporting a pilot of a women-specific mental health treatment requirement in Northampton and the early findings are looking very positive. Of course, the fact it is being piloted is because there is evidence of women having specific and often unmet mental health needs. That then links to drug and alcohol use and to other challenges that women face in their lives. We need more services that are geared to supporting women who have been failed, often, over many years by social services.

Sian Berry AM (Deputy Chair): Can I ask Helga to comment, possibly, on any differences you see in London in terms of the types of sentences given?

Helga Swidenbank (Director of Probation, London Community Rehabilitation Company): It is difficult for me to make comparisons because I do not have data for other large metropolitan areas that might

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be comparable. What we see is exactly what Jenny has referred to: less use of community sentences. The people you do not have here are the National Probation Service and they are the people who will make recommendations to the courts, do pre-sentence reporting and give a steer to judges and magistrates about what kinds of sentences are appropriate for our service users. Getting some insight from them would be helpful to understand what their thinking is and why and how they make references and referrals.

Sian Berry AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you. If I could ask Kate now, do you have any comments on that? Do the courts know enough in London about what can be recommended as an alternative to custody?

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): There is a huge need for a public relations campaign with magistrates and other sentencers, but they have to have things to refer to. Pre-sentence report writers have to have services available, be it mental health treatment requirements, alcohol treatment requirements, but also the services that we provide and that Melanie [Sheehan] has described by Advance. It is the same in the Beth Centre. We provide an opportunity to engage women over the longer term. We find that when women engage with our services as part of the process of criminal justice, they are staying with us. They are carrying on getting long-term help with the root causes of their offending. This is the heart of the matter: short prison sentences are only making severe problems much worse. Therefore, in answer to your question, all roads lead to a system in London of support services that can accompany community alternatives to custody.

Sian Berry AM (Deputy Chair): If they exist, then, presumably, promoting those to the courts is a good idea. Does the location of the services that already exist make a difference? Are women in north London where there is not provision less likely to get community --

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): Lambeth is a massive supporter because it provides the Beth Centre, but local authorities have a role to play in making sure that they have services in their local areas so that things can be provided locally for women. In Lambeth, we have partnerships with magistrates to try to help the understanding of what is available because there is quite a low level of understanding among sentencers about the impact of prison and so it takes quite a lot of work to turn around attitudes. Some magistrates will hardly sentence women because they are a small proportion of the overall cohort.

Sian Berry AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you. Helga, do you have any comment to make on that or further comments on how the courts could be better informed or better referring people to noncustodial?

Helga Swidenbank (Director of Probation, London Community Rehabilitation Company): Yes. One of the conversations we have with the MPS is how we can talk through them to the courts about what services we provide not just women but more generally. We do provide services. We have women’s teams who work specifically with women. We have women-only reporting days in our offices. We work very closely with organisations like Women in Prison and Hibiscus and co-commission the services that Advance provides. Being able to inform and educate magistrates and the judiciary is something we are working with the MPS around.

Sian Berry AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you.

Fiona Twycross AM: I was struck by the statistic - Jenny, I think it was you who said it - that women are twice as likely to get sent to prison for the first offence, which feels quite remarkable, to be honest, notwithstanding that other points that have been made about the number of women who will come before magistrates. I wondered if we could maybe start with Niki and Kate [Paradine], just to comment on what

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impact improved sentencing decisions would have on the services you are able to provide. Maybe, Niki, you could start?

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): On the main point, I would refer back to the short-term sentences. We work with the London CRC to provide a service in prison, as I know Kate does, although it is impossible practically to be able to provide that service if a sentence is for a few weeks because it takes some time to get into prisons and work through the gates and support the women. Therefore, we are seeing a real difficulty in engaging with women.

The other thing I would say is that, if you do not send a woman to prison, it means that her practical needs are not as urgent. If she comes out of prison, our support is going to be focused on her practical needs. Given the length of time that we are able to support them, based on the funding that we currently have, we are having a real difficulty engaging with them in their longer-term needs as we were referring to earlier. We are focusing very much on practical rather than emotional and longer-term support. We offer it, but it is a lot less available. Therefore, a better improved service and better improved sentencing and shorter sentences that are not custodial would enable us to have less investment in finding housing for them and getting them to the doctor and getting their benefits sorted out and really focusing on the long-term causes and the root of the problems and the challenges that they face in terms of mental health. Then they make much more headway that is much more lasting and avoid the reoffending rates that we are seeing are going back up again because the services are not there.

I will pick up on the point about north London because we do provide some in north London co-commissioned by the London CRC, but it is a service that is for a short-term period and, because there are no specialists or not enough specialist women’s services, it is not holistic enough. The travel coming from London to west London to our women’s centre or going to Lambeth is prohibitive for most women both in terms of cost and then familiarity. Their lives are challenging and often chaotic enough to be asking them to make that difference.

I know we are picking up the impact of Holloway later on and so I am sure we can talk about that but, yes, that would be the impact of better sentencing, including better locations.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): Just to say, in north London, Hibiscus has its women’s centre. Hibiscus focuses on services to foreign national women. I agree with Helga that we have plenty of data but there are small gaps and a big gap is foreign national women and understanding where women have been arrested, what for, whether they have been put through the system. Hibiscus can target its services from north London.

Just in answer to the sentencing point, I know we are picking up on Holloway later, but I do need to say at this point about the logistical challenges of linking women in prisons outside London to services inside London. Even if you look at [HM Prison] Downview, it is two-and-a-half hours from Holloway and so staff are doing a four- or five-hour roundtrip just to do one meeting with a woman to try to link her into services. The logistics are a real challenge, but I know we are going to pick that up later.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): We will be exploring that in a minute. Sorry, Jenny, did you want to come in?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): Can I just flag up a response to some of the points raised? The other area that we need more data in is borough-

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level data. What is critical to having a pan-London plan and making progress across London in reducing the unnecessary use of imprisonment is that all 32 London boroughs need to understand their obligations to vulnerable women in their communities. The first step is understanding how many women in their borough are at risk, have unmet needs and/or are resettling from prison.

When we had a roundtable in Holloway now about four years ago, we did manage to get some borough-level data about where women were being resettled from Holloway. It is very hard to get that in any other form. We do get it sometimes from individual prisons such as Bronzefield, which is now the largest women’s prison in Britain and indeed in Europe following the closure of Holloway, but I do think we need to engage in what is happening in the individual boroughs.

There is a very good service in Lambeth. Lambeth is the only borough that has specifically identified vulnerable women in the criminal justice system as a priority group. We need to see much more recognition of this small but vulnerable population in each borough as well as across London, given the mobility of people across London and the fact that they may be offending in areas other than the areas in which they live, which is why this Committee and the MOPAC have such an important role to play because it is about joining up across London to get a decent service for women.

Fiona Twycross AM: Thank you. I know that devolution has been suggested to be the only solution to increase investment and, Jenny, I wonder if you could comment on whether you agree that devolution is the answer to the problem around sentencing decisions and services or if there is more that the Mayor could do now ahead of any further devolution?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): There is more that can be done straight away and we are seeing some progress - we are - with the new MPS Commissioner and the new Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime. We are certainly seeing more steps forward around getting, for example, a police diversion pilot off the ground. There has been a terrible lack of progress in recent years around that, even though there are a number of powers that could be used more effectively. Yes, we are in favour of more devolution to get more joined-up local responses.

I do not know how much this is being discussed, but the devolution of custody budgets would focus minds. At the moment, prison is very much a free good to local authorities and local services and it needs to be understood that it is cost and that actually it is an ineffective use of quite a lot of money. If custody budgets were devolved, then that might be felt in local purses.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): That is leading from talking about Manchester because we understand that in Manchester, which is using community resources sentencing more than us, they have a more of a devolution strengthening around that, which we are aware of. Manchester has been ahead of us on devolution. That question was around that point about asking what Manchester can do or what we can learn from Manchester, particularly, but I am happy with that. Kate, did you want to respond particularly?

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): Yes, just about Manchester, we have a women’s centre in Manchester and we are a key part of the [Greater Manchester Women Offenders] Alliance there. In fact, one of our staff is seconded to co-ordinate the Alliance and so we do know about what is going on in Manchester.

A key piece of learning is the way that Manchester directs money directly to women’s services. It does not route that money through, for example, the CRC and so they are able to develop services that are not just

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about criminal justice but are providing a holistic response that is about prevention as well as responding to the results of the issues around criminal justice. Therefore, devolution does have great promise, but, actually, all the things that we want can happen without that and they need to happen desperately here in London.

The other thing about the Alliance is that it is led by the sector but supported by the local authority. That is really important as well because most of us are struggling day-to-day to get through the day and get our organisations surviving to be managing alliances and so on and that needs funding itself for the capability to create alliances.

Fiona Twycross AM: Thank you. A final question from me is a general question to everybody on the panel. If you had one ask of the judiciary and the courts in respect of sentencing, what would it be?

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): Just to use prison as a completely real last resort and to always be focusing on root causes of offending and dealing with those in the communities in which people live.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): Can I just quote the United Nations (UN) Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, who came and visited Britain, including women’s prisons in Britain? In her concluding remarks, she said that sentences need to be much more creative. They do have powers that are underused. For example, I would point to deferred sentence. It is underused and is an opportunity to allow women, particularly in a more problem-solving court context. In any event, they have the power there to defer sentence and allow a woman to show, for example, that she is prepared to engage with local support services. Once she has shown some progress, then they can decide that rather than go for the default option - which, sadly, it does often seem to be - of a short prison sentence, something else might be more appropriate in her circumstances.

Also, there just does need to be a much more vigorous approach to ensuring that courts have all the information they need about the individual in front of them and when that is a woman - and they are much less likely to be seeing women on a routine basis, as Kate [Paradine] has indicated, because they are a relatively small proportion, something like 15% of those in the criminal justice system overall - that they find out what is going on in her life. Has she been coerced into offending? Is she offending to support a partner’s drug habit, which is a characteristic of many women in prison? Does she have children who are going to be adversely impacted? Most women are primary carers and are much more likely than men to be primary carers. All that information needs to go before the court.

Again, at our recent domestic violence summit, the Chief Magistrate said that they are very dependent on the either the defence lawyers or the National Probation Service providing them with that information to inform their decision-making. We have evidence including from the Lammy Review [David Lammy MP, 2017] - and this particularly affects black and minority ethnic (BAME) women - of often very poor levels of representation for women in court. Because of the problems with probation, which no doubt we will come on to, there has been a decline in the use of pre-sentence reports and a decline in their quality and comprehensiveness. We certainly need to see progress in that area.

That is probably more than one thing, but it all wraps up into more informed sentencing, if you like.

Melanie Sheehan (Director for Female Offender Services, Advance): I would simply refer them back to the Corston Report because Baroness Corston OBE said custodial sentences for women must be reserved for serious and violent offenders who pose a threat to the public. We do not need to say any more than that.

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Tony Arbour AM: This is a question for Jenny, really. Are you saying that there are some branches of the judiciary who are not bending over backwards to keep women from custody?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): The problems that have been alluded to are, for example, the absence of appropriate community support and Community Orders. Are they being given the opportunities to offer a non-custodial sentence? Actually, there is an overuse of custodial remand for women and so I am not accusing any members of the judiciary of not doing their best, but we are faced with this situation where a disproportionate number of women are in prison for non-violent offences and for minor offences. In London, 44% of women get sent to prison for shop-lifting of theft, mainly shoplifting --

Tony Arbour AM: Of course. What I am seeking to discover -- in many years sitting on the bench, I and my colleagues and people that I have met over the years have always been very reluctant and it absolutely is the last resort, giving a custodial sentence. If we did not have appropriate reports, the matter would be put over until we did get those reports. It is true that we will castigate the appropriate authorities, whoever they may be, social services or whatever, for not providing those reports. I find it difficult to believe that really any branch of the judiciary willy-nilly will put someone in custody. That may, of course, not be your experience.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): We work closely with the Magistrates Association. I have personally never met a magistrate who will say they have sent a woman to prison, but we are dealing with the evidence of women being inappropriately imprisoned on remand and on sentence. In a sense, we have to confront that reality.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): Speedy justice is a big focus and we hear from magistrates and sentencers that they do not feel they are getting the information they need to make informed decisions. That is what they are telling us, including about whether children exist, whom someone is the primary carer of, basic information like that. This is a whole-system issue. It is not about sentencers not doing the right thing. It is to do with the whole system not working. Speedy justice is working against the interests of sentencers having the information they need.

I would refer you back to deferred sentencing. It is massively underused. It could be used to such good effect. In some countries, if you are a primary carer, you get two weeks to sort out childcare arrangements before you are sent to prison. Our system works that you go straight away and the practicalities of that have enormous implications, including for the care system. Therefore, it is not a case of sentencers being willy-nilly about this.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Sorry, Helga, did you want to comment?

Helga Swidenbank (Director of Probation, London Community Rehabilitation Company): I just wonder, in the absence of the MPS, whether it is worth me just explaining what you mean by speedy justice. There has been a push over the last 12 to 18 months by Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) and the MPS to do same-day reporting in an attempt to move cases through the system more rapidly. There has been some down-side to that, which is the quality of information and the ability to get more detail. There has been a trade-off there that is worth exploring.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Thank you for that. Now we are turning to London’s women in prison. We have already touched upon the issue of the closure of Holloway, but we have some more specific questions around that.

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Joanne McCartney AM: If I can start with Kate, we know that in London our transport system works on a radial basis with all the roads going to central and so Holloway, in a sense, being in central London, was quite ideally placed. You said earlier about a four- or five-hour roundtrip for outreach work. One of the independent advisors to the Corston Report has given evidence to us in writing and has said:

“It is hard to exaggerate how bad the situation is for London women now located so far out of London following the closure of Holloway.”

Is that a statement you agree with and can you perhaps just expand a little on some of the problems that are arising?

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): A hundred percent. The thing that is important to start any discussion about Holloway is that the decision was so sudden, so rushed and so poorly implemented by central Government, with absolutely no planning at all for the impact, neither before, nor during, nor afterwards, and so the impact on the whole system has been disastrous. Someone - I cannot remember which of you - asked about us lobbying. We lobby all the time around this issue and have done from the start. The annual accounts of charities in London in this area will show the impact, including, for example, clawback from London funders who have funded services on the basis of targets being met for boroughs and we have not as a system been able to meet those because, as soon as Holloway’s closure was announced, magistrates stopped sending women there. It is a really important issue that there is a huge debt to be paid to London as a result of how this decision was made and how it was implemented.

Then, looking at the consequences, the reality in terms of travel just to Downview, which is on the edge of London, is hard to exaggerate. We are talking four or five hours roundtrip from the Holloway bases which some of us had when Holloway was in existence. Women in Prison had to leave Islington as a result of that and rent rises and so our base now is in the Beth Centre in Lambeth. The change in terms of hubbing services around Holloway has been immense.

Of course, women are not just held in the Surrey-based prisons. They are also held in [HM Prison] Peterborough and across the country, and so the problems are enormous, including linking women back into services. It is important to say that the vast majority of these women do not need to be in prison. They are there on short sentences and that is the key point.

The cost to charities alone has been immense just in terms of - I know it is quite a detailed point - time in lieu for staff. It means you are having to pay staff to travel when previously they had a ten-minute bus journey to Holloway from our office. The costs have been enormous.

We think central Government should review the decision to close Holloway and its implications and what happens as a result because, when other prisons are closed, as they surely will be in central London for men, the same will happen. We think this is urgent now and it is something that we are talking about with central Government. Did I cover all your points? I went on a bit of a tangent.

Joanne McCartney AM: Yes. Did anyone else want to add to that? Niki?

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): I will give you a little anecdotal example of that. We support women in the three prisons in Surrey and, for us to support a woman through the gates, it means we have to pay for a taxi because no one else will and it will cost £50 to get her back into London, at which point you then

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need to go to housing with her, to the General Practitioner (GP) with her to get her prescriptions and so on and so forth. It takes two days to support that woman. Usually she comes out and she does not have accommodation. Sometimes the release is on a Friday, which makes it even harder to support her. Having to get out there for us who are based in west London or south London or even north London to support is a problem. Getting them back in and getting them access and support and settled back into the community is even harder. I am not even going to go into access to their family and friends and so on. The cost to us - and therefore to our funders - is huge.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): Can I just add about release on temporary licence (ROTL)? It is the way that women can have work experience and do jobs in the lead-up to their release, which is an incredibly important part of resettlement. The reality for ROTL now is we provide support for women and opportunities in our organisation and that is incredibly hard in terms of the expenses, the time, the travel and just the logistics of supporting women on day release from prison. Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): In fact, I would just add that there are very few women now being allowed out on ROTL, but that is perhaps another issue.

I would just like to add to some of that. When the announcement was made - and it did come out of the blue - about Holloway’s closure, we did say that this could be an opportunity for the Government to flag a complete step-change in criminal justice responses to women. To close the largest [women’s] prison in Western Europe was an opportunity to do things differently and to recalibrate responses to put more of a focus on community solutions. Specifically, we recommended that the visitor centre at Holloway, which sits outside the prison wall, could be converted into a women’s centre so that some of the services that are being talked about that were lost as a result of Holloway’s closure could have been retained and operated from that base for women serving community sentences, for example. Unfortunately, the Government missed that opportunity, as Kate said. Instead, the courts just started sending women further afield to prison, rather than being instructed that now the consequences of imprisoning a woman from a London court were more severe and would impact more harshly on them and their children. Now that the site is being sold, this is another opportunity for central Government, as well as the London authorities, to work together and to seize the chance to create improved resources and services for women in London. We have to keep hold of that objective.

Joanne McCartney AM: I will come on to that in a moment. You said, Kate, that you did not want to go into what that means for families, but I would like a little bit to go into what that means for families because you have already stated that women are the primary carers of children. Has work been done on the emotional damage to children and families as a result of a woman being sentenced to imprisonment? Is that measurable?

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): There is a lot of really good work being done. We know an awful lot about the impact. It is devastating, and you only need to speak to older children, let alone younger children, about the impact. Lucy Baldwin [Senior Lecturer in Criminology, De Montfort University] and other academics have done some brilliant in-depth work looking at the sentencing of mothers and what it means for families when a woman is sent to prison. The financial and emotional costs are often lifelong, sadly. Even a few weeks has an effect for the rest of a child’s life and for the families’ lifetime. The impact is completely underestimated about sentencing primary carers, be them mothers or fathers but they are primarily mothers.

I would like to speak about the impact of Holloway’s closure and families and children because the logistics of travelling means that women are seeing much less of their children and sometimes hardly seeing them because there is no one to take them. The realities of the families we are talking about is hand-to-mouth existence,

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grandparents trying to keep their heads above water. Taking a day or more to travel to the north of the country or even to Downview is a real achievement and that has not been adequately acknowledged. Certainly, no provision has been made for London women - in addition to that which exists across the board, which is in itself a problem - to account for this. I would say that from Women in Prison’s perspective, Holloway’s closure has not had anything put around it in terms of acknowledgement of what that means for children and families, as well as women.

Joanne McCartney AM: Thank you. Can I ask Helga? Your work will start at the prison gates and what is happening. Has the closure of Holloway made it more difficult for you to do your job?

Helga Swidenbank (Director of Probation, London Community Rehabilitation Company): I can answer that, but I also just want to pick up on a couple of other points. I would absolutely echo Jenny’s [Earle] point that the closure of Holloway was an opportunity lost. Having worked at Holloway, it was not a great environment to hold women and so let us not pretend Holloway was a wonderful -- Joanne McCartney AM: No. I have had a look at some of the inspection reports, yes.

Helga Swidenbank (Director of Probation, London Community Rehabilitation Company): Yes. It was a badly designed 1970s building and not a great environment. The opportunity lost was around the Corston principles and so what did not happen was for us to be able to think about communities as units and the ability to be able to work with those London women in London. I just wanted to make that point.

The impact of the closure of Holloway on prisons particularly like Bronzefield was that they have seen a significant increase in their remand population and 50% of their population is now remand. The average length of stay at Bronzefield at the moment is four weeks and that makes it really difficult for us, who provide workers into Bronzefield and to people like Advance and Women in Prison. It makes it really difficult for them to do any meaningful work if you have someone there for only four weeks and to see them on top of everything else they are doing whilst they are in custody.

What has that meant for London CRC? London CRC provides through-the-gate services into Bronzefield and we have a team of people working in Bronzefield and all of the other women’s prisons that serve London service users. We have worked closely, as I have already said, with community agencies to try to bridge that gap between what is going on in custody and into the community.

The distance is a challenge. What we have been able to do is recruit people who live more locally so that we do not have some of the challenges that the smaller organisations have, but moving women back into London and encouraging them to go to visit their probation officer, if they have to go to Barking from Bronzefield, is a huge journey.

Back to my original point: what we have lost is the opportunity, but with the sale of the land we have another window and we need to exploit that.

Joanne McCartney AM: I will come to that in a minute.

Helga Swidenbank (Director of Probation, London Community Rehabilitation Company): Yes. We need to exploit that opportunity to say to central Government, “Let us think about how we revisit those Corston principles and some of her recommendations”.

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Joanne McCartney AM: Yes. We have had some difficulty getting exact figures of how many London women are currently in prison at the moment. Is that data out there? Are we just not looking in the right place? I do not know, Helga, whether you could help us with that.

Helga Swidenbank (Director of Probation, London Community Rehabilitation Company): Currently, we have 1,200 women in custody.

Joanne McCartney AM: Do we know where those London women have gone to? We have figures for the number of women on remand or who have been sentenced at Bronzefield and Downview, but we do not know what proportion of those are London women specifically.

Helga Swidenbank (Director of Probation, London Community Rehabilitation Company): Of those women, the vast majority will be in either Bronzefield, Downview or [HM Prison] Send.

Joanne McCartney AM: If I could come on to the opportunity that may exist now with the estate, I know it is in the Borough of Islington. Islington, I understand, as part of its planning process has issued a supplementary planning brief. As well as affordable housing, it does talk about a women’s centre at which local groups offering services to women could be based. I notice that the sale documentation has gone out as a wonderful commercial development opportunity for housing.

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): Indeed.

Joanne McCartney AM: There is that dichotomy. Perhaps you could just explain what you would like to see now and, in that, perhaps what the Mayor or the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) should be looking at and doing. Niki, did you want to start?

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): Yes. I was going to say that we have had an opportunity to try to influence Islington by working with some of the councillors there to show them what a woman’s centre could look like. We have had them visit Hammersmith and our Minerva centre with Advance. We are also talking to them about highlighting the work that we are doing as part of the programme that is funded by the Mayor’s Office and also the [London] CRC within the communities because - the discussion we had earlier - boroughs are not very well aware of the profile and the needs of female offenders in their communities because there are small numbers. Therefore, that is the challenge of centralisation that they are often funded centrally and therefore not their direct responsibility. By engaging them with that and around the Holloway discussion, there is definitely an opportunity to look at the needs of north London and use some of the sale money, not necessarily to use the facilities within Holloway, which I agree are not necessarily appropriate, but use some of the profits of that to invest back into the community in north London, whether it is Holloway or near there.

There is also a great need for housing for female offenders or for women being released out of prison and, again, an opportunity to think about the housing and move-on accommodation from prison. They are the benefits that can come out of that.

I would highlight - and I know we are coming back to it later on - the Mayor’s Office [MOPAC] through the co-commissioning process and the fund that is now being discussed and a number of us are putting proposals forward. We have the opportunity to develop further the services for women offenders in conjunction with the boroughs as part of the co-commissioning proposals. It would be another missed opportunity because north London and east London are definitely under-represented in terms of services support.

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Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): Can I say about the women’s centre? The ‘women’s building’ is the terminology that we have been using. In Women in Prison, we consulted with a number of London women across the prison estate who had been in Holloway about their experience of the closure and about what they would like to see on the site. Overwhelmingly, issues about access to services and housing came out as what they would like and need. In New York, they closed a women’s prison and that site saw grow on it a women’s building, which was a hub for services. We think that the Holloway site is a chance for London to step up as a beacon and as an example of how we deal with and turn around the issue of women in the criminal justice system, not just nationally but internationally. To do that, that centre could be an office space for some of the most amazing women’s services internationally that we have based in London. I can mention Hibiscus, NIA and obviously we are here today, but there are lots of services that I know. To have an office base and also to provide direct access to a whole range of services for women exiting prostitution, women affected by the criminal justice system, there is enormous potential for the site. All of us are paying commercial rents, usually. There are lots of ways this could be an in-kind help to help us all survive, really.

A point I have not made which I really want to make is how desperate things are for service providers and charities in this space. It is a hand-to-mouth existence. To look at a woman’s building that could address some of those issues would be a great opportunity. Joanne McCartney AM: Yes. It would be good if you could send us the link to the New York model. That would be interesting for us.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): Yes, we can do that.

Joanne McCartney AM: Thank you. Jenny?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): Can I just add that we are very pleased that Islington Council has recognised Holloway as a community-use site? The planning brief is excellent. Because of the size and value of the site, the sale will come to the London Mayor and we are hoping that he and this Committee and City Hall as a whole will get behind the retention of that site for community use and specifically for some services for women. The visitor centre could be operating now as a women’s centre instead of money being spent on guarding it as an empty building. The closure of Holloway represents a loss of investment in women, albeit of the kind that perhaps we did not want. Now is an opportunity to convert that into a justice reinvestment strategy and see money going into more constructive community-based solutions.

We have certainly made submissions in the consultation process and we are supporting the Islington plan for that site, but we are concerned that unless there is concerted action by the London Mayor and MOPAC, it might slip from our grasp and the opportunity would be lost.

The point everyone understands is that there is that legacy argument around the use of that site for women. There is the justice reinvestment. It is much more cost-effective to support community services on that site rather than spending the money elsewhere on prisons. There is the operational argument that if both the national Government and the London authorities want more community-based solutions, given the evidence that north London in particular has had a dearth of women’s services and the poor outcomes that that results in for women and their children, here is an opportunity. We must not lose it.

Joanne McCartney AM: You have been talking to the Mayor's Office, but what about the MoJ? Does it recognise that it has failed in the process and that it needs to perhaps --

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Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): At the moment, there is a strong team in the MoJ working on the female offender strategy and so we hold out hope that all of these issues that we have discussed today will be addressed, but I am sorry to say that we have not seen any practical response to this issue of Holloway, either in terms of support for charities or really open acknowledgement. The mention of Holloway’s closure is often met with silence at Government level, but I understand there is lots going on.

One of the things to acknowledge at this Committee is that the plan at the moment is to sell that site and for that £58 million to go towards a £1.3 billion plan to build new prisons, including five new women’s prisons. That is something which is opposed across the board in the sector and beyond. We believe that new prisons are not needed. That is clear. What we need is for that money and more - revenue expenditure and capital - to go into developing community women’s services, not new prisons.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Just clarify that point, though, because your critique about the women’s prisons at present is that they are too far away from central London. Are you saying that you would not want a women’s prison built in central London to stop that journeying issue that you just talked about?

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): At the moment, the most pressing issue is the vast number of women that just do not need to be in any prison --

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Yes, we get that completely. It is an all-or-nothing attitude. You would not want any more women’s prisons built.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): There are opportunities for --

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): I was not hearing that earlier, you see. Sorry, do you want to clarify, Kate?

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): I am going to point to Scotland now. Scotland had a plan to build a new women’s prison and that was abandoned at the eleventh hour. I would implore you to look at Scotland before New York, but both would be good. In Scotland they are building small, community-based units that are not necessarily prisons as such but are units with secure facilities and safe space --

Joanne McCartney AM: Secure accommodation, yes.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): -- but that is different to the plan. Bear in mind all we have to go on here is a sentence from the MoJ, which was issued a year ago. We do not really have - that is fair to say, Jenny - any more details about what the plans are. We believe there is still an opportunity to do what is the right thing and what is needed with this money that might be available.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): We want to see the provision for women in the community that means there will then be less need for it. It is a sequencing issue, partly, is it not?

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): I see that.

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Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): It is worth the Committee noting that there was a Supreme Court decision in the case of Coll [R (on the application of Coll) v Secretary of State for Justice [2017] UKSC 40] finding that it was direct sex discrimination with the absence of approved premises for women in London. We are not just talking about prisons. There is also the issue of approved premises and there is the issue of bail hostels to try to reduce the number of women who are remanded into custody because they have nowhere to live. Housing is really the solution there, but bail hostels for women are also an important part of the picture.

I would just like to say that we were disappointed that the MoJ in its response to the Islington Council consultation on Holloway said that its primary objective was effectively revenue raising. We would have liked to see more recognition in its response of the importance of ensuring services for women on that site. We do think that the negotiation between London and the MoJ is very important and the Mayor should know that there is strong support for him in that negotiation to ensure outcomes for women in London. Otherwise, what we will see is reduced expenditure on women in London. That is going to be the effect of it if the money is sucked out and just put into prisons, mainly men’s prisons. For all that there is a crisis in the prison system, we do not think that sale of Holloway should be underwriting a solution to that problem.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Thank you for clarifying that.

Joanne McCartney AM: Yes. We are of course seeing the same with young offenders as well being moved out and those family links being reduced. I suppose that there are some recommendations, perhaps, to look at, but the Scottish example is going to be interesting for us to look at.

Of course, the Holloway site is quite totemic because it is really the first and we have [HM Prison] Pentonville following. If something could be done here, it could be a real exemplar of what could be done.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): Yes, definitely. It is well worth everyone focusing on the prize.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Continuing on that same point, we want to talk about diversion or rehabilitation outside the criminal justice system. Unmesh, you have some questions on that.

Unmesh Desai AM: How good are we in London at diverting women from the criminal justice system, if I could start off with you, Ms Scordi and Ms Sheehan? Also, in your answers, I want you to give us a brief overview of your work around diversion and any proposals you have for further diversion work in London.

Melanie Sheehan (Director for Female Offender Services, Advance): I can answer that. We currently do not divert women in London. We have run several pilots. Advance ran a pilot in 2014/15 and worked very closely with the police in the tri-borough area to encourage them to use community resolutions to resolve low- level offending by women and divert to our centre at Hammersmith. That worked very well, but the funding ran out and that pilot finished. Women in Prison then took up a similar pilot, learning from our experience in Lambeth, and improved on it by ensuring that there was a police officer directly involved in getting the referrals in from her police colleagues. That worked much better, but referrals were still quite low from the police. It takes a very long time to educate and encourage the police to make the necessary referrals. You have to explain why it is required, what the benefits are to them, what the benefits are to the women and how you are going to work with the women differently. That all takes a lot of education and repeat training for the police, which we did do.

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It does work and it can work and it is very important that in London we divert as many women as possible from even entering the criminal justice system because it will save a lot of time, energy, money, expense and emotional difficulties for the women. A lot of the time when I was working as a probation officer, the women would say to me, “If only I had known all of this, I would never have been here. If only somebody had been able to listen to me empathise with me, support me and help me, I would not have made this mistake. I would not have gone down this road”. That early diversion is crucial for everybody.

We are working with the Mayor’s Office at the moment on some proposals for a new diversion scheme, a triage scheme, and we are hoping that that proposal will be taken forward and funded in the future.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): If I could say about Women in Prison, as you said, we have just recently had a small-scale pilot and it worked brilliantly with the police officer being embedded and working with us. It has ended now and Lambeth has been incredibly supportive.

What we found was that women have stuck with us and so women have been diverted and a number are still with the women’s centre receiving services and support, which is really encouraging and shows the long-term engagement. The vast majority did not offend whilst they were with us and we are having some long-term analysis done to look at reoffending rates over the longer term. Obviously, that does take a while and we are working with the MoJ on that, but we have been really surprised that things have not moved more quickly, if I am being completely honest, because we have a pilot in Woking also which is being heavily invested in by the Police and Crime Commissioner there and the local authority and showing really good results around how we can start really making an impact at the early stages. We would really like this to move at speed now. There is no reason why it should not and, really, we are talking relatively small amounts of money to get quite a lot of impact, and so it is quite frustrating that it is taking really quite a long time and quite a lot of meetings. I know everyone is doing their best, but it would be really good if this group could speed things up; I do not know if that is possible.

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): I will add one more thing which is, again, referring to where women’s centres are and linking it back in. When you are diverting women, you are suggesting to them that they link up to services like ourselves and that they spend some time within the women’s centres; without women’s centres that support is not possible. Again, the women or the communities that are getting supported are in west London and in south London, because those are the only places that they can be diverted.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): We are going to have in the next set of questions quite a lot of detail about the Women’s Centres and the good work and the lack of geographical in parts of the --

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): I realise that I am just making the point around the fact that diversion and a whole lot of other community-based support is linked to where the services are and, therefore, although they are good ideas, they are also requiring quite - you are right - not significant investment where there is already services. For some parts of London; and London is complex, there are 32 boroughs that require quite significant investment.

Unmesh Desai AM: Now I will come to you [Helga]. Yes, if you would like to come in.

Helga Swidenbank (Director of Probation, London Community Rehabilitation Company): Again, I lend my support to that point. I am a big fan of diversion. We talk a lot when we talk about this stuff about whole system approach. If we are able to get women when they start to become on the fringes of the criminal

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justice system and divert them and they never touch probation or they never touch custody; that has to be the right way of doing it, stopping them at the beginning. We are a very strong advocate of diversion schemes.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): I just wanted to point out that the use of out of court disposals declined a lot in London after 2007. It peaked then and has been on a downward trajectory since then which has been a great cause of concern. Also, the use of cautions fell specifically from 6,522 in 2011 to 4,393 and so that is a decline of around 2,000 over a five-year period. The MPS has been the only police force in the country not to use community resolutions at all and they are really important for women. I know now they are going to be rolled out and we are very pleased about that, but I agree with Kate that progress has been very slow in this area. We need to maintain a focus on getting some of these diversion programmes off the ground.

Unmesh Desai AM: I did have a specific question of you about community resolutions. Why is it only now that they are being used by the MPS?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): You need to ask the MPS that. We have been very --

Unmesh Desai AM: What are your views?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): I do not know why they have not been used. There has been anxiety about accountability and that sort of thing and also, I suppose, we have had feedback that they want to be able to refer women into services that do not exist. Yes, it is a very underused diversionary procedure and we would like to see it implemented swiftly.

Unmesh Desai AM: Could you just give us an example of how you see community resolutions being used in the future?

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): It does involve a more problem-solving approach, I suppose, at the point of arrest where, if an officer encounters someone involved or suspected of involvement in minor offending, they make some enquiries of the woman as to what is going on for her. There are eligibility criteria agreed around the kind of offence that will be captured by that response and the kind of information that might be sought from the woman about what is going on for her. Then the matter is closed on the basis that it would do more harm than good in a sense to proceed further down the criminal justice path and so I suppose it is about proportionality and harm minimisation and questions of public interest.

Unmesh Desai AM: That is good.

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): The idea and the process that we are proposing and discussing with Women in Prison and the Mayor’s Office at the moment is that at that point a police officer, as we have piloted, is able to recommend them to connect with a service like ourselves. We then spend time with the woman on a one-to-one basis for a certain period and help her find solutions that divert her away from reoffending or offending initially if it is a first offence and therefore stay away from the criminal justice system. If she has further needs, emotional needs or mental health needs and so on we are then able to engage her with tailored specific services. That is why I made the point that for London to be able to implement a scheme like this it has to have first a process, a funded process, and secondly, places for women to be diverted and workers, like the Advance workers or the Women in Prison workers, that can support that woman to find

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solutions away from offending. That is not an option for many parts of London at the moment and it is certainly not funded for any part of London, so that is the challenge.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): Can I just add to a point that Melanie made about police culture and education around what is possible? What we found in Woking and Manchester is a lot of work has taken place with the police on the front line to show them what can be possible. Police are as frustrated as anyone about the revolving door of the criminal justice system where they can see what the problems are, but they have no way of getting them addressed. Investment in that hearts-and-minds and bringing the police service with you, in terms of community resolution, is really important because there are so many good news stories that change people’s minds and their approach. That is really important to take on board.

Melanie Sheehan (Director for Female Offender Services, Advance): I would just echo that and say that the one key thing we learnt is that the requirement for the police officers to use community resolutions needs to come from the top. It needs to be embedded within the culture because what we found was there were some officers who were very keen on the idea who would use it, they understood it and thought it was a really good way to work with those female offenders that they saw being arrested and rearrested; they wanted to use it, but there was also an awful lot of officers who felt that it was not their role.

We had comments about them not being social workers and not wanting to be involved in what they perceived as social work so there is a whole piece on education. Predominantly the feedback we got from officers when we trained them was that, “This is amazing. We need more of this. Now we understand it and we get it”. That time and investment has to be put in at the beginning and it has to be part of the culture of the police to do this otherwise what we find is the charities do that work and it is not as effective.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): Can I just mention - I am kindly reminded by my colleague here that I should mention it - we have mentioned Scotland and we have mentioned America but Wales has a fully developed system of triage and diversion based upon community resolution and they are seeing some very good outcomes. It is being fully evaluated, it is supported by all four Police and Crime Commissioners across Wales, there are links in through the community resolution process to local women’s services and one of the things they are finding is that that reduces pressure on the criminal justice system and enables it to get on with responding to the more serious offences. Of course, there are recommendations in the Lammy Review around specific needs for BAME women to have opportunities to be diverted out of the criminal justice system. Wales is well worth looking at and is profiled in our report Fair Cop, which we have --

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Certainly shall.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): Thank you.

Joanne McCartney AM: Just on Melanie’s point about police officers saying they do not want to be social workers, we get that quite a bit but another way of looking at it is to say it is actually crime prevention and it is central to your job.

Melanie Sheehan (Director for Female Offender Services, Advance): That was part of our training that there are benefits for you in this and there are benefits for women and there are benefits for the wider

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community. It takes a bit of time - some more than others - for that penny to drop, but once it does it is very effective.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): That is very much the take in Scotland. They have set up a new community justice agency [Community Justice Scotland] to steer a turn, a change of direction there and the Chief Executive, Karyn McCluskey, of that service has said prevention is the way to go.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Thank you for that. We often say in this building that where London leads everyone follows but it seems to be, in this instance, quite the reverse. The last set of questions we have touched upon very much around support around women’s centres and the Mayor’s early investment and we just want to explore that a bit more deeply. Peter?

Peter Whittle AM: Yes. As Steve said, I want to talk a little bit more about the centres themselves. Perhaps Kate [Paradine] and Niki [Scordi], if you could give us a brief overview of the kind of support that the centres actually provide to how many women and over what kind of area; how many boroughs?

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): Lambeth support in the Beth Centre is focused on Lambeth women and so their borough of residence is Lambeth. The kind of support that we provide ranges from a substance misuse worker, parenting support. We have other services in Women in Prison around complex needs and mental health, substance misuse and all the range of root causes of offending. Domestic violence is a key issue as well, linking women up to group work and individual support, and advocacy is absolutely vital for most of the women we work with to help them identify root causes of their offending but also to access services. That is a key element of the women’s centre.

As well, it is important to acknowledge the whole community side of a women’s centre. A lot of women that come to us have experienced abuse. To build a community of support from peers, we have a peer mentoring process as well, where women who are further along in their journey are able to support other women we find that that is such an important element of the support that we provide; so the whole range of support. That is really the Corston model that Melanie referred to, which Advance and Women in Prison and others provide is around that holistic support. When women come to us we are not asking them necessarily straight away what their needs are. We are starting with what are your assets, what are your strengths, where do we need to get to and then we are talking about what their needs are, rather than pushing them through a funnel of having to approach services with a specific need.

The whole idea is to meet women where they are, which it is surprisingly unusual to find services now that meet people where they are; there are a lot of restrictions. In Women in Prison also, we are known for women coming back to us and developing a relationship with us rather than there being cut-off points that are strictly adhered to which is often a problem with services. We also provide support throughout the journey through the criminal justice system, so diversion is important but also after prison as well as during your time in prison.

Peter Whittle AM: You said in Lambeth it is just Lambeth.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): Yes.

Peter Whittle AM: How many women? Could you give a figure of how many?

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Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): Services are different in terms of different levels but 300 to 400 women would be a ballpark. This is very complicated because you have women that come in very briefly, others that develop relationships, and so the whole model of, for example, how much it costs per head is, as I am sure Niki [Scordi] will back up, very complicated in terms of costing and planning as well. That is the kind of level of support, but we do have other services in other parts of London, but much less now as a result of Holloway’s closure.

I do want to flag this because we did have two London Councils funded projects around domestic violence advocacy in prison and communities and housing advocacy as well where we would have workers work with women in the prison and then outside to support them to access housing and both of those projects have ended. What I would need to say about that is that we did not just seek funding from London Councils; we also sought national funding through the 'tampon tax'. We have raised directly with the MoJ - which was quite a chunk of money nationally available for women’s services - that across Government there was not sufficient acknowledgement of the need of women affected by the criminal justice system to access funding through that quite significant pot of money.

Peter Whittle AM: Could you add to that, Niki, please?

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): Yes. In terms of services across London, there are currently two main services funded and, as Kate said, one of them is based out of Lambeth and the other one is the Minerva service out of Advance. Advance is funded by a combination of funding from the London CRC and from the Mayor’s Office [MOPAC]. What that fund has is coverage of 16 or 17 boroughs for one-to-one support but not necessarily in the women’s centre directly, with the women in their boroughs and in their communities, often in conjunction with the [London] CRC or based out of the probation offices, which is a challenge because it is not the best place to meet the women when it is not a safe for only women space. It is certainly OK for the first appointment, but not necessarily after. Parking for a second, the Women’s Centre, there is support that is available there for half of the boroughs in London at the moment --

Peter Whittle AM: Half?

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): I have circulated which boroughs and you have information for that. That service is with a keyworker or an advocate worker who is linked to the woman for a period of up to 12 months, initially quite intense. It is once a week or a fortnight, where we help her with practical needs initially first around homelessness, GP appointments, benefits and so on, and later on in the process helping her navigate what are the services in her community that she can access. A lot of that is signposting and linking her up, but staying with her through the process for about 12 months to make sure that she can make sense of what is there; it is quite complicated.

Remember these are already traumatised and often victimised women and therefore have quite a lot of emotional needs and their lives tend to be challenging enough and chaotic. Having a consistent level of support for at least a 12-month period, which is what we work with the London CRC very closely in their communities, is often absolutely the minimum that we should be doing.

In addition to that, we get some support and funding for a pilot project from the Mayor's Office [MOPAC], that funding is ending in March this year [2018]. I mentioned earlier that we are, both ourselves and Women in Prison, seeking funding for 22 boroughs across London to extend that service. That is based around additional support, much more longer term, responding to the fact that, as we talked about earlier, the root

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causes and the challenges of women’s needs are much more than the initial practical three to six months. Making that support last up to two years, having much more contact and that is, as Kate earlier said, one-to-one support, it is advocacy, often going with women to the Housing Office, to the professional services and other statutory agencies that may not understand the needs of a female offender if you want to call her that. She may not trust the system or understand the system and we often act as her voice or supporter in finding her own voice, if that is possible and empowering her to get the help that she needs.

Then in conjunction with other aid partner organisations we offer tailored services to address, often referred to as the nine pathways, but the range of needs that a woman would have around domestic violence, around mental health, substance misuse, financial challenges and debt, parenting and caring skills and so on and so forth. All of our services are tailored to the women. We spend a lot of the time talking about where she is at in her journey and those needs change through the journey. Therefore, you might say how many need support for domestic violence. Initially I might say 55% or 60% of the women but, as the relationship builds and her confidence builds in the services that we provide and we get more trust, that need might change. Her ability to disclose what she has experienced and therefore ask for help for what really is the underlying cause becomes much clearer. That is the main challenge at the moment.

We talked earlier about the need for long-term sustainable funding not only pilots, either diversion or women’s centres or enhanced support services that usually last for six to 18 months. By the time you have embedded the service and really understood what the needs are and built the relationship with the woman who really wants to stay with you, the funding often runs out and you have to then scale back your services.

You have asked about the number of supported women at the moment. In the last 12 months, we have supported about 800 women.

Peter Whittle AM: About 800. Can you -- Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): That is only across the 16 boroughs and so it gives you the scale of the need and the challenge.

Peter Whittle AM: I have not been to one of the women’s centres. What is staffing like? How many staff do you have?

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): Again, I would say it is a mix of the women that are based out of the women’s centre and the women that are based in the community as an outreach. Often the words “women’s centre” are used to describe the holistic support that we use rather than the physical space. Kate [Paradine] will, I am sure, support me in saying that on average we look for one of our keyworkers per borough, on average, to work locally. The majority of the work that she does is usually quite intense and therefore, at any point in time, she would be able to support between 25 to 30 women and so in the space of a year maybe up to 50 women and that is for your more complex needs and more enhanced support.

I am not in any way saying that that is the level of the need, remembering that the majority of the women that we work with are already sentenced and under the support of the Probation Services. Therefore, we are not supporting women who have offended in general or who are at risk of offending, only the women at the moment who are coming through Probation Services.

Peter Whittle AM: You have one key worker per borough?

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): Correct.

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Peter Whittle AM: In terms of the centre, if I were to go there now, what is your permanent staff?

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): It is a combination of women that work with us directly and services that we buy in, if you like, or partner in or contract in with subcontractors and that changes on the type of demand that there is. Therefore, usually we run between eight to ten programmes a week and it would take about one to two of our facilitators or other partner facilitators to support each programme. I would say, if you wanted a ballpark figure, three or four people per centre per day. It is not --

Peter Whittle AM: That is really small, is it not?

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): It is very small to support up to 400 women per region, let us say.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): Chronically understaffed. On the point about the fact that you can staff the women’s centre in quite small staff, often women working for us - and I am sure it is the same for Advance - are part-time. We do employ a high number of part-time staff because we have a women’s support team, but we are chronically understaffed on a pretty much permanent basis.

One point I would like to make is the importance of independent provision within the system. A lot of women that we work with do have really low levels of trust in the authorities, if you like. A third of women in prison have grown up in care and so it is really important that there is a partnership between the state and the other services. The model in Beth is about the co-location of probation officers but they are very separate to us. We work together but we are clearly separate and there are real advantages, it is true to say, to the system of being able to refer women and others to other services.

With the transform and rehabilitation and privatisation of the Probation Service, the referral pathways have been massively disrupted. We have not even touched on that here, but this group should really acknowledge and where necessary make the point to the Government about the disruption that has been caused by the whole change of transform and rehabilitation.

Peter Whittle AM: I can utterly appreciate that. If you have two centres and you have tiny staff and you have a position now, particularly in London - I say particularly, we will talk about London - of massive increases, for example, domestic abuse, etc, essentially you need at least another two centres, do you not?

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): At least. Actually --

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): In fact, you will find --

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): Pardon me, Jenny.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): -- there are ten in Manchester. The very minimum that we should have in London is ten.

Peter Whittle AM: Yes, exactly.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): There are 32 London boroughs and, ideally, there should be a women’s centre in every borough. Local councils are

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aware that women’s needs should be championed and met. We need much more co-commissioning, collaborative commissioning, particularly between the victim funds and the offender funds, if you like. We are very pleased that Claire Waxman, London’s Victims’ Commissioner, absolutely understands that relationship between women’s histories of victimisation and current offending and she is very much on-side with getting the join-up better.

As everyone has already said, we need to see sustainable infrastructure for women’s services so that it is not a piecemeal funding arrangement based on existing involvement in the criminal justice system. You need women’s centres that are funded to support women who self-refer, who are diverted by police, who are referred by the court. That is a lot of different funding streams and they need to be co-ordinated at London level and at borough level, there needs to be co-operation. We need to see all 32 London boroughs engaged in developing solutions.

Peter Whittle AM: My colleague is going to ask you shortly about the funding aspect of it. It is an appallingly inadequate situation, is it not? It is terrible.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): The London Crime Prevention Fund (LCPF), which Niki has referred to, Lambeth have been co-ordinating a bid with various boroughs but having women’s centres does not mean a space available 24-hours a day or even five days a week. We are working with Pecan about providing one or two days in Southwark. You can have a women’s centre that is not necessarily all-singing, all-dancing. In terms of the best centre, the idea is that it is a hub for other services and boroughs to link into. There are lots of innovation possibilities in London, but I totally agree with what Jenny has just said.

Peter Whittle AM: You might have already slightly answered what I was going to ask. One of my questions was what happens to the women who, if you like, are not covered. You are stretched as far as you can go, but what about the women who are not covered?

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): The point that Jenny [Earle] made earlier and I tried to make it as well is that it is not even just the women that are outside of the boroughs. There are women right now that we are not supporting even in the boroughs that we are in. That is because that is not what we are funded to do and we do not have the resources. We only work with women who are referred to us from the London CRC. If she is not in custody right now and under licence with the [London] CRC she does not get any services. We do the best that we can and if we have got availability and capacity we will do it and fund it ourselves but that is not even a provision currently. We need to be careful that we do not think that there are 17 boroughs in London, including Lambeth, that are getting support for every woman that is in the criminal justice system that needs support; that is not the case.

Therefore, the opportunity that we both talked about, and that I am sure you will come to, in terms of the London Co-Commissioning Fund under the LCPF is that we open the referral pathways, that we allow more women to be supported by both women’s centres and by local centres. We are working very closely currently with the boroughs to develop that proposal to make sure that each borough takes responsibility for finding women only safe spaces in each of the boroughs. We are then able to support a key worker based out of that borough as well as at the very least three or four women’s centres across London, the two that are currently there plus at least one if not two more.

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The funding is limited and therefore we could ask for ten, but we would be lucky to get three or four. We would be thrilled to get one more because it would give a whole range of boroughs in north and east London something where at the moment they have nothing or very little.

Peter Whittle AM: Thank you. Can I ask, Helga, how you make the decision to refer if you are going to refer to one of the centres? How do you do that?

Helga Swidenbank (Director of Probation, London Community Rehabilitation Company): We refer women who have come to us through the court who have been sentenced to community sentences or from prison. Again, that is quite a narrow pathway given the level of need in London. It is quite specific, we are commissioned by the MoJ to deliver low end risk probation services to all of London and, as I said, we have 4,000 women who are on our books at the moment. Those are our referral pathways.

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): Therefore, between us, we support under 1,000 of those 4,000 women but the need is greater: no support for National Probation Services and so on and so forth, through the courts, other statutory services, women who want to self-refer, the police, diversion and so on and so forth; no support at the moment in London.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): The difference with the Beth Centre though - and this goes back to my earlier point about where you route money and the fact that money recently in London has been routed via the [London] CRC - is an important issue because it means that the diversity of provision across London from organisations that are not tied so much to that referral pathway has been less. That is another issue, that is from the past but it is important to learn from mistakes as we go forward in terms of funding.

I did also want to mention funding because commissioning in London, I think there are issues around payment in arrears, about not acknowledging the hand to mouth existence of many charities and the push to co-commission and to commission at a high level does cause significant problems for some organisations like ours and I would really plead for you to understand what it means. Clinks - an umbrella organisation - recently found that on average criminal justice charities have 1.6 1months of reserves and so, if you think about what that means, that means if you are paid two months in arrears you can barely make ends meet, literally. You are looking [going into] administration in the face regularly.

I know because we are a national provider that that is not true across the country and I would really ask that there is a close look at commissioning and payment terms, payment by results included. In Manchester, there is no payment by results for charities because it is acknowledged that the result of reducing reoffending is down to all of us and it is not put on the shoulders of small charities to get their money after they have proven that they have reduced reoffending. That is happening in London and it needs to be addressed as a matter of real urgency now.

Peter Whittle AM: You are very right to say it.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): We are now getting to that stage where we want to be framing some recommendations. You have given us some ideas. Particularly that last point was a really good one about the sustainability of funding.

1 After the meeting Dr Kate Paradine clarified this was 1.7 months reserves 29

Unmesh Desai AM: The recently published David Lammy report commented on the fact that BAME women are over-represented in the female prison population. I must say I am quite surprised that there has been very little reference to specifically issues of ethnicity this morning. Dr Earle, you probably mentioned it earlier in an answer to one of the questions.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): I did, yes.

Unmesh Desai AM: How do you cater services for specific characteristics such as ethnicity? Can you tell us a bit more about the work in practice?

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): I would include all the points that I have made about funding advice of BAME specialist providers in London. The point about foreign national women and Hibiscus’s provision, all of these issues are around having services that address specific needs. There are systemic issues in the criminal justice system and we were part of the Lammy Inquiry, we conducted focus groups and other consultation with women about their experiences. There is something about addressing the particular pain that has been borne by BAME small charities providing niche provision and what that means for the whole system. That would be my response there.

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): I would add to that, giving a similar answer. Given the strain on funding at the moment, the majority of the money is going to generally support services like ourselves and Women in Prison and it is left to us to find a way to commission specialist services. In the proposal, we are putting through for the development of the Co-Commissioning Fund we are specifically identifying foreign nationals and BAME women as a service that should be funded separately or at least, if you like, identified as additional support.

Having said that, I would echo the same that there are providers out there that are specialist that should be supported but they are not big enough to be able to undertake, if you like, the bidding and representing themselves in the way that a larger organisation can. Neither of us are particularly large but in the world of charities for female offenders we are the largest in London and that is a sad testament to the size of the women’s services for female offenders that have been left to survive and provide the support that is desperately needed. Yes, it has been one of the losses.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): Yes. Can I take the opportunity to mention our report Counted Out: Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Women in the Criminal Justice System? I will leave a copy with you if that is all right, it provides a lot more detail about the impact on BAME women, of their involvement in the criminal justice system and particularly imprisonment. It talks about issues such as the extreme stigma that women from some communities can experience as a result of imprisonment and that being an extra factor, if you like, an extra punishment that they experience. In terms of the numbers, in London 9.8% of women are black but black women specifically made up 20.7% of first time entrants to the criminal justice system so there is something going on there that needs addressing.

We have made quite a number of recommendations, specifically around improving outcomes for BAME women in this report and we also refer to the Bangkok Rules which I think need a mention here because they provide a framework UK-wide that could be particularly implemented, if you like, or reflected in London’s approach to criminal justice. They provide specifically that prison authorities need to recognise that women from different religious and cultural backgrounds have distinctive needs that need to be met. They also talk about the need for, as I mentioned before, more creative and tailored sentencing responses.

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The report also identifies and reflects what my colleagues here have already mentioned, which is the terrible absence of specific support services for women from BAME communities. Imkaan is a very important women’s organisation that is involved in the programme that I lead and we appreciate their expertise and input, but they will echo a lot of what has been said here about the need for more sustainable funding for these specific constituencies.

Sian Berry AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you for raising that question. We discussed the need for specialist support services particularly for certain cultural groups when we looked at support for people who were victims of domestic violence. It was absolutely vital that there were specific specialist services there and the fact that there seems to be almost nothing available in this sphere when we know how much overlap there is between victims and perpetrators is a really good point. We will look at that.

Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): Yes, absolutely.

Sian Berry AM (Deputy Chair): I wanted to ask about resources. How much do you need, essentially? We know that the Mayor has announced in January he was going to put an extra £500,000 in to boost services. I wanted to ask first of all how much of that has come through, what is it being used for, and how much impact is it having? If it is not through yet, what do you anticipate the difference being from that funding? I do not know if any of you have a comment on that.

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): What I would say is that we are not aware of the £500,000 coming to us or to indeed any other services. What we are in the process of bidding for, if you like, or putting proposals forward is around the LCPF co-commissioning pot. There is a £10 million fund that is being made available. Female offenders are one of the four priority areas that are being considered in two proposals, the one led by Advance which is for northeast and west London, and the one led by Lambeth in conjunction with Women in Prison that is for south London boroughs, is proposing to provide the services around the women’s centres and the whole system support that we have been describing, to extend that to 22 boroughs.

Our submissions are for 1 December [2017] and that decision will happen in January [2018] with a rollout from 1 April [2018]. Just to highlight how critical it is, if Advance, which is currently partly funded by the Mayor’s Office [MOPAC] for their women’s centre, does not get any of that money, then it means those services will stop and all we will have is the London CRC funding through the MoJ, which is for 16 boroughs’ core services and no women’s centres. It just gives you a clear picture of how critical and how tight our funding is from month to month. Therefore, I would echo what Kate has said earlier about such short-term planning and keeping our staff and our services and our financial commitments very tight because we will have two to three months to implement or exit services.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): I would say, for us - and I have been doing this role only two years - we permanently have staff at risk of redundancy. We are looking ahead with great trepidation to the following year and we are completely reliant on maintaining our services for the funding that we are applying for with Lambeth. The £500,000 that you are referring to is the amount that was routed via the [London] CRC for the Female Offending Service and you have heard from Niki --

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): Last year or a year and a half ago.

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Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): Last year. You have heard from Niki already how that is very specific to the provision of services within the [London] CRC which is really my point. That money, I know, was presented as an announcement but from the perspective of our organisation and others it did not really mean very much on the ground to us. I would say we have not benefited at all but that is for the past. It is about learning for how we fund in the future.

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): If the £500,000 question was for the fund that came through a year and a half ago, that was the point that I was making that that money was for a pilot for one and a half years and it did go through to Minerva and Advance to fund our Minerva Centre Services and it finishes at the end of March 2018. We have circulated the outcomes of that for the nine-month period of the 18 months and so you can see that the initial outcomes are very strong, well ahead of what we were expected to deliver and certainly, even though the data set is quite small still, we have seen 39% reduction in reoffending rates for the women that were part of that. There is, again, good seeding and good innovation and good experience. It is about turning that innovation into something sustainable rather than good examples and missed opportunities and we have had lots of missed opportunities; good examples, good initial results, no long-term sustainability.

I am sure it is not unique to our sector or our service, but it is certainly felt much more strongly than, let us say domestic violence, which we offer a service for. 50% of our programmes are around domestic violence and I see a real significant difference in the approach to funding and support of those, and indeed commissioning by local services or even London-wide services.

Sian Berry AM (Deputy Chair): Can I just clarify then? It seems like the money that has come in that follows offenders is for the quite basic service that you offer. You have provided us with some helpful flowcharts that show there are a number of appointments that are had, discussions but nothing holistic except within your enhanced services programme.

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): Completely, yes.

Sian Berry AM (Deputy Chair): Essentially, what is covered by the MoJ funding in all of that is the basic service. Actual provision of actual women’s centres is entirely down to money from MOPAC and the Mayor.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): That is the Government model. We would ask London to support other areas in lobbying Government so that we do not leave support for women down to local chance. There needs to be - and we are lobbying hard with the MoJ for the Female Offenders Strategy to have significant money which is allocated according to local areas so that this core of services can be provided and then you can be providing additional needs and building on those so we have a firm sustainable network. Sian Berry AM (Deputy Chair): Yes. It seems to me that we are at this crucial stage now where we are talking about devolution of criminal justice to London. We have this enormous opportunity at Holloway to use money from the sale of what you have all said was more or less a slightly out of date facility that we needed to do the new approach. That money could kickstart a new approach. You have talked, Kate, about the revenue needs of charities but the infrastructure that might come with a secure place to rent at a reasonable rate would contribute towards that as well.

We are near the end. Would anyone like to sum up? We do seem to be at this point where strong recommendations could be made to a number of Government and Mayoral authorities who could take action and so can you tell us one or two things that you think we should put into our recommendations?

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Jenny Earle (Programme Director, Reducing Women’s Imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust): Sustained leadership from here, from City Hall, would be absolutely critical to turning things around. As you say, we do have a unique opportunity now with the Holloway site and with devolution - a budget is coming up - to rescue the situation and create a brighter future for women in London. We need sustained focus and leadership to do that. We have had so many ups and downs over the last decade since Corston but more than a decade and if we do not seize the opportunity now we will reap the whirlwind in the future and we do not want to be doing that.

Dr Kate Paradine (Chief Executive, Women in Prison): For me it is the local commitment to investment which is not there and needs to be and then it is the voice of London nationally to tell the Government we do not need new prisons what we need is sustained investment in community support. We would just encourage Government to get behind the 20/20 campaign. You have heard how many women - about a quarter of women - in prison at the moment are from London. For London to take forward this agenda could make a national difference and we could become an international example of good practice rather than the current situation which is an international source of shame and embarrassment.

For me it is the opportunity and it is not just Holloway and the sale of it, it is also the Female Offenders Strategy. It is the perfect storm where this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for change in this area.

Sian Berry AM (Deputy Chair): Thank you.

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): I would add to that and say that female offenders seem to me to be at the top of the agenda of both the Mayor’s and the MoJ’s mind. What we need is actually action to follow. We have good examples of solutions, we have good examples of service delivery, we have acknowledged outcomes; we just need to turn it into real action that is sustainable. I am sure we have had these conversations or other people have had these conversations five years ago, certainly ten years ago. What we would like is to see it become reality and to know that we can build on it rather than stop and start, which does not take us very far other than lots of missed opportunities. Let us just not miss this one.

It is timing: decisions will be made in the next two months. Recommendations take another three or six months to come through. It does mean that we stop again and have to start later on.

Melanie Sheehan (Director for Female Offender Services, Advance): It is time to join the dots. We have all been operating in silos and doing some really good work but now we need everything to join up. That is where this Committee can really help to push Government, to push the Mayor’s Office to join those dots and to have real cross-departmental working because women offenders impacts every area of life and it is not just the criminal justice system. Health need to be involved. It impacts children; it impacts education. If everybody works together, there is a real opportunity to make some very good progress very quickly. We are ready to go and we just need the funding and the commitment to do it.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Let us be very clear: you are ready to do it?

Melanie Sheehan (Director for Female Offender Services, Advance): We have been ready for the last five years.

Niki Scordi (Chief Executive, Advance): We are going and stopping and going and stopping. It is like just support us to get on with it.

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Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Helga.

Helga Swidenbank (Director of Probation, London Community Rehabilitation Company): Being last, I get to repeat everything everyone has said! In terms of the Mayor and the Deputy Mayor with responsibility for this portfolio, they are uniquely placed to have a very strong voice both within London and London Councils but also to national Government to promote the whole system approach and much of what we have been talking about. For me it is a conversation around what the police do, what courts do, what probation do, what is happening in our prisons as well as what is happening in the voluntary sector. I would ask, and I know that this is the desire of the Mayor’s Office, that those dots are joined up.

Again, echoing what my colleagues have said, we need a call to action. I have been talking about this for my entire professional career and we have a point in time where we can do something. If you are able to join that chorus of voices, a call to action to make that happen, that would be great, and we would all feel much more professionally fulfilled than we do now.

Steve O’Connell AM (Chairman): Thank you. It has come across very strongly and we have been scribbling away about the recommendations, but we will do some more work around this. Thank you, first of all, for this morning it has been most helpful. We are going to continue this work. As I mentioned earlier, we are holding a [roundtable] meeting next week. If there is anything that you wanted to add, please do write to us, anything you may go away and think, “I wish I had made that point”. You have been brilliant this morning, but please do feel free to continue writing to us.

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