Hansard

I absolutely concur with that. Several Labour members will touch on mental health. I would have more sympathy with Stewart Stevenson’s position, however, if his own Government had not cut research funding for mental health within the past few days. He is right to focus on mental health, but other mentoring projects exist, and the future of their funding is particularly pertinent for organisations such as Barnardo’s.

That brings me on to children. Two thirds of the women in our prisons have kids—at least, we think that is what the numbers are. We do not have exact figures because, understandably, women are not particularly keen to disclose, given the impact that that can have. We know that for the children of men who have been jailed there is a 95 per cent chance that they will go on to live with their mum. However, just 17 per cent of kids whose mum is jailed go on to live with their father, which means that there is a much higher propensity for children to end up in care when their mother is jailed. That should concern us all.

Barnardo’s runs a project at Cornton Vale that works with young women offenders under the age of 21. Not a single one of the mums currently has custody of her children. Just one third of the women who access another project that is operated by Barnardo’s—it mentors women who have experience of the criminal justice system—have custody of their kids.

Parliament has done great work on care leavers during this session, and we should be proud of that. Labour members were certainly proud to support the Government on the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill, but we must follow that through and focus on the needs of looked-after children all along the way.

The Angiolini report tells us that more children in Scotland are affected by parental imprisonment than are affected by divorce, and that up to 30 per cent of those children will go on to develop mental health problems in their lifetimes.

We need services that are focused on tackling the deep-rooted issues of poverty and inequality, and we need them now. We need to break the care-leaver trajectory that says that a looked-after child is far more likely to go to jail than they are to go to university. That, too, should concern us all.

Later in the debate, members will hear from my colleague Elaine Murray, who will focus on the particular issues that affect women who are on remand. I spoke at the 218 project to a woman who had been on remand for eight weeks. During that time, she lost custody of her children: it took her three years to get those children back. That was a consequence of an eight-week stint on remand.

My colleague Jayne Baxter will focus on community justice centres, in particular in Fife. Mary Fee will talk about families that are affected by imprisonment and the work that the cross-party group that she chairs has done in that regard.

My colleague Richard Simpson will come on to Labour’s record. It was particularly unfortunate to see a tweet over the past few days from Christina McKelvie, I think, which asked what Labour had ever done on this issue. We will hear more about that in the course of the afternoon. When in office, Labour did a tremendous amount of work on this issue—Richard Simpson and Hugh Henry both served Parliament in the role of Deputy Minister for Justice. They set up drug treatment and testing order courts. I spent an entire day at one with Dr Oliver Aldridge, who is a consultant psychiatrist and world-leading expert on these issues. Hugh Henry and Richard Simpson are also responsible for the 218 project’s inception.

In the past few weeks, I have said that Parliament is at a crossroads on female offending. We were about to spend £75 million on the wrong thing while funding for the thing that works was about to run out. Half that problem has been solved with the justice secretary’s U-turn this week, which we very much welcome, but the picture is not yet complete.

Once again, I congratulate all the organisations that have been campaigning and I emphasise the need for cross-party support in the future. I look forward to today’s debate.

I move,

That the Parliament welcomes the decision of the Scottish Government to abandon its previously published plans for a large-scale women’s prison; congratulates the coalition of views that helped to bring about this decision; believes that the report produced by the Commission on Women Offenders led by Dame Elish Angiolini provides a clear roadmap for a different approach to women offending; believes that adequate and sustained funding is needed for community-based alternatives to imprisonment, and calls for full cross-party and wider stakeholder support and engagement in the debate and delivery of the commission’s recommendations.