We were delighted to see SIG Safe Ground’s groundbreaking work referenced during the King’s Speech debate on criminal justice measures in the House of Lords last week.

Lord Lucas, a patron of Safe Ground and the husband of the charity’s founder, spoke powerfully about the impact our work has had on reducing reoffending and making prisons safer. An excerpt of his speech is below:

“I declare an interest as a patron of Safe Ground, a charity working in prisons that my wife founded about 30 years ago and which is now part of the Social Interest Group.

Safe Ground specialises in building up family ties. It is my observation, looking at its work, that by the time men are 25, but not much before, they begin to develop a sense of responsibility and interest in the world. At that point, you can really activate their interest in being part of their families, whichever bits of their families are still prepared to work with them—their children, often their wives, mothers, cousins or whatever—and you can build that into a structure that will nourish the prisoner once they get out of jail.

A job, family and housing: get those three right and you have a real chance of getting someone on the right road. That was the experience with Safe Ground. Not only did it reduce reoffending, but what was really noticeable was that it improved the behaviour of prisoners in prison, so it was very much supported by officers because having Safe Ground in your prison made it a much nicer place to be.”

The full debate can be read here and watched here.