Let Me Count the Ways: The role of the Voluntary and Community Sector in the Women’s Justice Board

Let Me Count the Ways: The role of the Voluntary and Community Sector in the Women’s Justice Board

Birth Companions and other charities have driven myriad positive changes for pregnant women and new mothers caught up in the criminal justice system. Birth Companions’ Director, Naomi Delap, argues that the expertise of the voluntary sector is needed now more than ever.

The Government plans to reduce dramatically the number of women in prison and tackle the root causes of women’s offending. From the outset, the new Women’s Justice Board should put the voluntary and community sector (VCS) at the heart of shaping a justice system that works for women. How are charities an essential part of the solution? Let me count the ways.

Over the past decade, previous Governments have benefited increasingly from the work of charities to identify the unmet need, risk and injustice endemic in the criminal justice system (CJS). When we at Birth Companions launched the Birth Charter for Women in Prison in England and Wales in 2016, there were no mandated standards of care for pregnant women, new mothers and their babies in the prison system, despite the huge risks incarceration pose for this group. As a result, the care to which they were entitled was not being provided. Since then our work has shaped HM Prison and Probation Service’s first mandatory standards of care, HM Inspectorate of Prisons’ Expectations, and NHS England Health and Justice’s maternity specification and Health and Social Care Review, as well as leading to £5 million investment in perinatal mental health services in prisons.

A senior leader in the system once described Birth Companions as a necessary thorn in her side. We and other charities have a long and successful history of holding the system to account and driving change. At Birth Companions, we use a variety of levers, including working with journalists and academics to highlight risk, poor practice and poor outcomes. At the same time, we identify routes through which to change the system for the better. We were the first to advocate for protecting pregnancy and maternity via a specific mitigating factor in the sentencing guidelines, which led to the Sentencing Council announcing just such a factor last year. This change should result in fewer pregnant women and mothers of infants being sentenced to prison.

Developing, testing and delivering innovative solutions is another area of work in which charities excel. In 2019, Lord Farmer recommended trialling social workers in prisons to support family ties, but funding from the Ministry of Justice was not forthcoming. The Prison Advice and Care Trust, a charity supporting prisoners, people with convictions and their families stepped in and raised the money to pilot the approach. Evaluation of the pilot with independent social workers found better communication with social care in the community, improved contact with children and improvements in the protection of women’s mental health.

The VCS also has a unique role to play in supporting safe and trauma-informed lived experience input into innovating for change. In 2022, our Lived Experience Team played a core role in the Chief Social Worker’s review of Mother and Baby Unit (MBU) applications, ensuring the right questions were explored in the case note review, and reflecting on the findings. As a result of this review, prison MBUs have been included in the Working Together guidance on safeguarding children for the first time, and a new system for appointing and training MBU panel chairs has been implemented. 

We support hundreds of women and babies each year through frontline services so we understand what’s happening on the ground in real time. We can feed this live intelligence, along with lived experience insight into statutory efforts to improve the system. At the same time, we know more radical solutions are needed; our campaigning work to end the imprisonment of pregnant women and new mothers will continue throughout the formation of the Women’s Justice Board (WJB), sentencing review and beyond. 

Even the idea for the WJB came from the VCS. First recommended in 1998 by the Prison Reform Trust, the charity advocated for such a body for more than a decade. More recently, the National Women’s Justice Coalition, a group of 26 women’s VCS organisations working in the CJS, including Birth Companions, revived the idea and campaigned for a Women’s Justice Board before the 2024 general election, recognising an independent vehicle was needed to deliver the profound reform the system needs. 

Now on the verge of being realised, the Women’s Justice Board must embed the voices, expertise and energy of the VCS in its membership and programme of work. It can’t afford not to.