Yesterday (11 June 2025), the Chancellor set out the government’s Spending Review to Parliament, presenting the government’s funding allocations and priorities for the next three years.
We welcome the government’s pledge of £700 million per year to ease the pressure on the probation service, which is desperately needed for the resettlement and rehabilitation of people in the criminal justice system. Currently, the probation service’s capacity to support people is constrained by dangerously high caseloads, chronic understaffing and the impact of years’ worth of funding cuts.
However, we are disappointed by the lack of commitment to funding gender-specific support or wraparound support services. Notably, the Review makes no reference to additional funding for women’s centres – despite clear recommendations in the Independent Sentencing Review. While the Spending Review states that it will “provide the funding necessary to deliver the reforms based on [The Sentencing Review’s] recommendations” (1), it stops short of committing any dedicated investment to these services. Women’s centres help address the root causes of the issues women are facing. Prisons are often traumatising or re-traumatising, while women’s centres operate on a trauma-informed approach that work to improve outcomes for both the woman and her family. They also represent good value for money, with current data demonstrating that investment in women’s centres is roughly 12-42 times more cost effective than prison (2).
Instead, the government has committed a £7 billion investment to create 14,000 additional prison places. While we recognise the urgent need for investment to address prison overcrowding and poor infrastructure of many prisons in the UK, this solution overlooks a more effective route: meeting people’s needs outside of prison. Especially for women, who predominantly receive short sentences, community-based alternatives not only address root causes like poverty, domestic violence and homelessness, but also significantly reduce reoffending:
(3)“The proven reoffending rate for adult offenders starting a court order (community order or suspended custodial sentence) was 30.6%. The proven reoffending rate for adult offenders released from custodial sentences of less than 12 months was 55.1%.”
The Spending Review shows a continued reliance on custodial sentences, rather than the evidence-based alternatives that are shown to reduce reoffending. The government must commit sustainable funding to community-based alternatives, otherwise women in the criminal justice system will risk being trapped in a system that was never designed with them in mind.
Alex Clarke
Policy Officer
(1) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/spending-review-2025-document/spending-review-2025-html
(2) https://www.wbg.org.uk/publication/the-womens-centre-model-the-financial-case-for-alternatives-to-prison/
(3) https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5804/ldselect/ldjusthom/27/2706.htm
