My Lords, Amendments 240A and 259C in my name and that of my noble friend Lord German, who has had to leave, call for the establishment of a women’s justice board. It has been pointed out in Committee that these are very long amendments. I understood from the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, that the second of them may be the longest in what is still, on day 9, an extremely full Marshalled List, but the drafting is modelled on the drafting of the legislation establishing the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. I do not propose to spend any time considering its detail.
However, it is widely acknowledged that the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales has been a great success. It has benefited from the effect of concentrating effort, research, learning and resources on youth justice. It has focused on recognising and addressing the difficulties of young offenders in the criminal justice system and on helping children to achieve their potential while aiming to minimise the harms that follow from young people’s contact with the system.
Perhaps most significantly, it has had the outcome of the number of children entering the youth justice system reducing year on year. Between March 2006 and 2020, the population of under-18s in custody in
England and Wales fell from 2,832 to an average of 780 in the year 2019-20. Of course, the remaining cohort represent the most intractable cases and present the most difficulties. Nevertheless, that success in reducing youth offending has been remarkable. It is the aim of these amendments to establish a women’s justice board that can produce similar successes.
Much has been attributable to the success of the Youth Justice Board in attracting extremely effective and committed leadership. On these Benches, we are very proud of the work that has been undertaken by my noble friend Lord McNally, but the leadership of successive chairs, such as Frances Done and Charlie Taylor, as well as the current chair, Keith Fraser, has been a major factor in the board’s success. Establishing a women’s justice board on similar lines would also be likely to attract effective leaders, who would bring immeasurable benefit to women in the criminal justice system.
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Of course, one can overstate the parallels between the particular needs of women and the needs of children, and I do not wish to do so. However, from reading the Youth Justice Board’s Strategic Plan 2021-2024, one cannot but be struck by the similarity between the challenges facing the Youth Justice Board in improving the workings of the system for children and those we face in attempting to improve the system’s response to the particular issues faced by women. Phrases used by Keith Fraser and his team in describing the Youth Justice Board’s vision have a cross-cutting resonance. I quote two passages from the strategic plan:
“These challenges can be multiple and complex in nature. Children may be vulnerable due to health, including; mental health issues or through their family/care circumstances or homelessness. Children with special educational needs, again, may be more vulnerable and many children have experience as victims of crime. All these vulnerabilities can lead to children being exploited or exposed to negative influences, hindering their ability to thrive.”
And:
“Evidence also tells us that contact with the youth justice system can increase the likelihood of children reoffending. This means that we should prevent as many children as possible from coming into contact with the system. It also means that we need to carefully consider how we prevent any longer-term damage caused to children who are in contact with the system.”
I suggest that debates in this House on the particular needs of women and girls show that there is a significant read-across between what is required as a strategy for women’s justice and what is required for youth justice.
In these debates in Committee, we have already considered a number of times the particular issues facing women and girls in negotiating the criminal justice system, most notably in the debates we had on sentencing women to custody. We have heard about the issues that so often bring women into the criminal justice system, such as histories of physical and mental abuse, both in adulthood and dating back to childhood; of mental health issues, often consequent on a history of abuse; of drug and alcohol dependence; and of homelessness. We have also heard of the appalling effect of custody on families, of sudden separation from children, of children being taken into care, and of the health, welfare and financial disasters for women that so often follow criminal convictions.
We firmly believe that efforts to protect women who come into contact with the criminal justice system, or who are at risk of doing so, could benefit greatly from the existence and support of a specialist organisation dedicated to practical action, as well as to research and to giving advice to government on tackling the issues they face. The Minister has shown genuine and reflective commitment since he took office to improving the response of the criminal justice system to the particular problems it poses for women and girls. We suggest that establishing a women’s justice board could be the single most effective measure the Government could take to bring real and lasting help for women and girls who are currently let down by the system, or at risk of being so let down in the future. I beg to move.