To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to ensure that, when convicting women, sentencers consider using community sentences and residential requirements rather than custodial sentences.

The Female Offender Strategy sets out our vision to see fewer women in custody by developing more options for supporting women in the community. Across government, we are investing £5 million of funding over two years in community provision for women. The first tranche of this funding was announced last month, and saw £3.3 million invested in women’s provision, including enhancing existing services, creating new services for women with specific needs, such as domestic abuse, and supporting the development of new women’s centres.

As part of the Female Offender strategy, we also committed to working with local and national partners to develop a ‘residential women’s centre’ pilot in at least five sites across England and Wales. The aim of the pilot will be to develop a robust evidence base about what could be effective, sustainable and scalable models for improving outcomes for female offenders and reducing the numbers and frequency of women entering and re-entering custody on short custodial sentences.

We are making sure the National Probation Service’s pre-sentence reports – which assist the court in making sentencing decisions - offer the courts robust community sentencing options which balance punitive and rehabilitative requirements and set out how women will be supported to comply. This may mean that, in some cases, the courts will sentence a woman to a community order rather than a short custodial sentence.