My hon. Friend has had a preview of this answer! This Government’s plan to support women is clear and ambitious. The aim is to reduce the number of women going to prison. Our Women’s Justice Board will support that. The independent sentencing review’s recommendations on short, deferred and suspended sentences for women, which we have accepted in principle, will reduce the number of women in prison. We have also taken decisive action by immediately accepting Susannah Hancock’s recommendation no longer to place women in young offenders institutions.
I thank the Minister for his preview. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on women affected by the criminal justice system, I welcome the independent sentencing review’s final report. I note that the review encourages the Government to consider introducing statutory defences for victims of domestic abuse, including where coercion has been a factor in their offending, to prevent unnecessarily criminalising them. Will the Government look further at those proposals?
Yes, the Government will look further at those proposals. The Women’s Justice Board has been created to do exactly that sort of work, and we also have an excellent Victims Minister in my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones).
In March, the Government announced that girls will no longer be placed in young offenders institutions. How will the Minister monitor the implementation of that policy, and how will he ensure the public are protected from the small number of violent girls who need to be detained?
Every week I get a report of the number of girls in our youth estate, so I am monitoring it. There are no girls in a YOI, and there have not been since the girl who was in a YOI moved out soon after we came into government.