The 15 women’s jails in England and Wales should be closed within ten years and replaced by a network of small custodial units, a report commissioned by the Home Office urged yesterday.

Only women sentenced to more than two years would be housed in the units, which would be located in city centres and run by “families” of up to 12 women. Money to build the units should come from the £1.5 billion earmarked by John Reid to build up to 8,000 prison spaces by 2011, the report recommends.

Baroness Corston, the Labour peer, who delivered the report on women in the justice system, called for responsibility for the units to be removed from the Home Office and transferred to Ruth Kelly’s Department for Communities and Local Government.

“There are many women in prison, either on remand or serving sentences for minor, nonviolent offences, for whom prison is both disproportionate and inappropriate,” her report concludes.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal, QC, the Home Office Minister who commissioned the report when Charles Clarke was Home Secretary, promised that the Government would look carefully at its recommendations.

However, Whitehall officials indicated privately that the Home Office has neither the money nor political will to implement its most sweeping proposals.

Lady Corston’s report outlines a multi-tiered system for tackling female offending in which only those sentenced to more than two years would be taken into custody.“I have concluded that those women for whom prison is necessary would clearly benefit from being in smaller units closer to home or more easily accessible for visitors, such as city centres,” the report says.

The remainder would receive community sentences; be required to attend women’s centres; or live in residential centres that would include accommodation for children.

Lady Corston compared the current £77,000-a-year cost of jailing a woman with the £750 annual cost of a place at a community centre providing support to vulnerable women.

Lady Corston also urged ministers to create a high-level “champion” in government to oversee policy on women offenders, end routine strip-searching and improve jail sanitation. She said that reform was in the interests of society. Her review was prompted by the deaths of six women at Styal prison, Cheshire, between August 2002 and August 2003.

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: “Most women in prison have committed petty offences. Very many have been victims of serious crime and sustained abuse.”

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