My Lords, I will speak also to Amendment 30 in the same group. Amendment 26 concerns rehabilitation activity requirements, which are essentially instructions to an offender to attend appointments or to participate in activities. There are imposed as part of a community order or a suspended sentence order by a responsible officer, defined for these purposes as a probation service provider.
This amendment will ensure that such requirements do not conflict unnecessarily with the caring commitments or family circumstances of the offender concerned. That object will be achieved by requiring the responsible officer to have regard first to,
“the suitability of any appointments having regard to any caring commitments the offender may have and the compatibility of activities with the offender’s family circumstances”,
and, importantly, by,
“the suitability of activities and place specified … if the offender is responsible for a child and it is desirable that the child accompanies the offender”.
This may well be the case for people who have responsibility for children, cannot simply leave them and have to take them along to the activity.
Amendment 30 is designed to achieve a similar outcome for any other requirement that might be imposed as a result of such an order. It would amend Section 217 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. That section currently requires the court to ensure that such requirements avoid conflict with, under Section 217(1)(a), “the offender’s religious beliefs” and, under Section 217(1)(b), the times at which the offender,
“normally works or attends any educational establishment”.
It would be entirely reasonable and desirable to add to that list of matters that are not to be conflicted with a requirement that orders avoiding conflict with the offender’s caring responsibilities. That is what Amendment 30 seeks to achieve.
These amendments are consistent with the Government’s desire to ensure that rehabilitation measures in this legislation are targeted particularly at helping women offenders, who often face particular difficulties within the criminal justice system. They would make the Bill more sensitive to those difficulties and to the demands of family life. The amendments are primarily aimed at avoiding conflict for women offenders who are the subject of community orders or suspended sentence orders, and are designed to enable them to fulfil the requirements of such orders without making it unduly difficult for them to meet the demands of caring for families. However, the amendments are gender-neutral, as you would expect, because many male offenders have similar commitments. It is important that appointments and activities can be arranged in a way that does not interfere unduly with family commitments, be those commitments to take children to school, to be at home when children are at home without alternative childcare or to look after elderly or disabled relatives. The same goes for all requirements, whether unpaid work requirements, curfew requirements or any others. I beg to move.