London Prisons Mission: Promoting Safe Homes for Women Leaving Prison
Advocacy and Campaigns, PR and Media Relations
The Challenge
Access to safe and secure accommodation is the foundation of successful rehabilitation after prison. Yet 6 in 10 women leave prison with nowhere safe to go. This has catastrophic consequences for the women, their families and for society. Securing regular employment, maintaining recovery, and ending the cycle of reoffending, all become practically impossible without secure housing.
The Tendo team was commissioned by the London Prisons Mission to co-ordinate the Safe Homes for Women Leaving Prisons initiative and engage with the Government to bring in measures to ensure every woman leaving prison was released into safe and secure accommodation.
Our Strategy
We implemented a programme of media and political engagement to build awareness of the initiative’s calls for action amongst key decision-makers. This included media sell-in, identifying powerful case studies and utilising new data to secure coverage in BBC News, The Independent, The Mirror, Evening Standard, iNews, and more.
Through our political engagement, we secured a parliamentary debate on support for women leaving prison, attended by MPs across the political divide, and organised a parliamentary drop-in event, attended by cross-party parliamentarians, including the then-Minister for Prisons and Probation Alex Chalk MP. We organised a further virtual drop-in event, joined by attendees, including Ellie Reeves, then-Shadow Minister for Prisons and Probation and Sarah Owens, then-Shadow Minister for Rough Sleeping and Homelessness.
Tendo collaborated with key stakeholders to spotlight examples of best practices across non-profit organisations and local authorities as models for replication. Tendo also co-ordinated a Safe Homes declaration, signed by leading charities and organisations calling on Government action to address the crisis and delivered to the Secretaries of State at the Ministry of Justice and Department for Levelling Up.
The Results
Our engagement with the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) and the London Assembly, led to a plenary motion calling for better support for women leaving prison to prevent a cycle of homelessness and reoffending unanimously passed by Assembly members.
While there is much more to be done in this space, we were delighted that the UK Government took action to increase the ‘discharge grant’ for prison leavers for the first time in 25 years, a first step to improving outcomes for vulnerable prison leavers. Furthermore, the Government updated its Accommodation Guidance to provide a clearer understanding of accommodation outcomes and has encouraged prisons to record planned accommodation outcomes 3 months in advance to allow time to identify and support women at risk of homelessness.