Justice Committee
Oral evidence: Prisons: planning and policies, HC 309
Tuesday 14 October 2014
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on Tuesday 14 October 2014
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Professor Yvonne Jewkes, University of Leicester PPP 31
– Dr Kimmett Edgar, Prison Reform Trust PPP 12
– Andrew Neilson, Howard League for Penal Reform PPP 06
Members present: Sir Alan Beith (Chair); Jeremy Corbyn; John Howell; Mr Elfyn Llwyd; and John McDonnell
Questions 66-110
Witnesses: Kevin Lockyer, consultant, former Regional Director for National Offender Management Service, John Podmore, consultant, former Prison Governor, Phil Wheatley CB, consultant, former Director General of NOMS, and Professor Yvonne Jewkes, University of Leicester, gave evidence.
Q66 Chair: Good morning. Welcome, everyone. We are very grateful to you for coming in to help us with our current inquiry into the prison estate. There is at least one face that is particularly familiar to some of us, although he has not been in for a while. That is Mr Wheatley, who used to appear in front of us when he was in charge; he is the former director general of NOMS. We welcome Professor Jewkes, from the university of Leicester. Mr Lockyer, you have worked in prisons and probation management both in the government and voluntary sectors over the years. Mr Podmore, you are a former prison governor. We are very glad to have you with us.
Mr Lockyer, you have stated that “no-one, if they had the choice and the metaphorical blank sheet of paper, would design the prison estate in England and Wales in its current form.” What works well about the current estate and what impacts most adversely on its operation?
Kevin Lockyer: I will take the second part of that question first, if I may.
Q67 Chair: That is the easy bit, isn’t it?
Kevin Lockyer: It is slightly easier. One of the inevitable consequences of building an estate over time, and opportunistically using sites that were available after the last war, for example, is that, broadly speaking, prisons are not in the right places. That leads to massive dislocation in terms of prisoners’ contact with families and other sources of stability in the community. You have the frankly hopeless situation of prisoners from London ending up in rural Wiltshire and, when I was governor at Portland, young men from Brixton ending up on the south Dorset coast writing letters to their mothers saying, “I don’t know where I am, but I think I can see France.”
That sort of dislocation of people does not help resettlement in the community or to reduce reoffending. It leads to massive structural costs in shipping people around the system and is not how you would design it. What works well is that some prisons are fantastically well run, with engaged staff doing their best in difficult circumstances. The human element of a lot of what the Prison Service does is really good, but hampered by the structural problems inherent in an estate that has grown like Topsy over the last 150 years.
Q68 Chair: Mr Wheatley, you will have been involved in decisions about where to locate new prisons. New prisons and closures are the only things that enable you to change the character of the estate. What sort of factors did you have in mind when advising Ministers on new prisons and prison closures?
Phil Wheatley: The first thing was to try to forecast demand carefully so that we ended up with the right number of places, because it takes a long time to build. If you are building a new prison, you are trying to forecast five years or so ahead; even for a house block, it is 18 months or so ahead. Inevitably, the Treasury never wants to release money against forecasts that might be different or better, which meant that what actually happened was that we were building at the last minute. At that point, the advice was really, “Where can we build—and build quickly?” Usually, by the time we got the money we needed the places, if not then, very quickly indeed, so “Can we get planning permission?” and “Do we own the land?” became the really important things. What was the prison’s infrastructure? A lot of what we built was expanding existing places, so was the prison’s infrastructure sufficient to support that number of prisoners or would we have to build a new kitchen or visits hall? If we had to build too much, it became too expensive, because there was not enough money—unless you spent it very carefully—to produce the places we needed.
With new prisons, we got quite good at finding places that matched what we needed: Altcourse, near Liverpool, where we had a shortage of places at the time, Forest Bank in Manchester, where we had a shortage of places, and Peterborough, which we thought would cover quite a lot of the midlands and allow travel up from London, because there is a really good railway line up to Peterborough and it is not far from the station to Peterborough prison. They were all quite carefully thought through as examples, but we relied on being able to get planning permission. The campaign against prisons, if they are built near well-off or middle-class people’s houses, is quite substantial. As MPs, you know that there is not usually a lot of enthusiasm for having a prison on your patch. In some of the places where we wanted to build, it proved very difficult to get planning permission. We could not afford to go with a site we were not likely ever to get to build on. That simply wasted a lot of effort. All those were factors that had to be thought about, and often produced a suboptimal result, but we did get enough places to manage the population without spilling out into police cells.
Q69 Chair: Of course, once prisons are in place, if you threaten to close them you are liable to get campaigns against closure.
Phil Wheatley: You do indeed.
Q70 Chair: One or two are running at the moment.
Phil Wheatley: To me, it is one of the most secure forms of employment—mainly of local people, who spend their money locally. It is not like getting a big warehouse where only a few people work and the money may well end up offshore somewhere. In prisons, most of the money is spent on staff wages, staff spend it locally and it is very good for the local area. If you are looking to have a thriving local area with good businesses and shops that work, you should campaign for a prison, but that is not normally how the local home owners who are going to abut the place feel.
Q71 Chair: Bearing in mind what Mr Wheatley has just said, does anyone want to comment on whether we should continue to be trapped in the “predict and provide” mode?
John Podmore: The biggest problem with the estate at the moment is over-securitisation. We should bear in mind that the categorisation system—A, B, C—is predicated on the Mountbatten report in the 1960s and, to my knowledge, it has not been reviewed recently. We need to bear in mind that we release something like 80,000 prisoners a year, at various stages, so a large percentage of the prison population is relatively close to release.
I would advocate the building of more open prisons. We have now closed virtually all of the women’s prisons; it is well recognised that there are very few dangerous women. The costs of imprisonment come primarily from security. It costs a lot more to keep someone in Belmarsh than it does in somewhere like Kirkham, an open prison, but we have the nonsense of locking up Andy Coulson—whatever you think of him—in Belmarsh for however long. We misuse the estate that we have.
I agree with Kevin that we would not start from here, but the resources are not there to start again. It is a case of how we make the best use of what we have, and I do not think we are. One of the ways we could do it is by not just reconfiguring the estate as to where it is but as to who runs it. I am an advocate of having an estate for long-term, dangerous prisoners run centrally, but having local prisons and resettlement prisons run by the communities they are there to serve.
Q72 Chair: You may recall that in the past this Committee has recommended that devolution of responsibility for local prisons and resettlement prisons could make a lot of sense, because it allows the same people to make the decisions about various kinds of sentencing provision.
Professor Jewkes: Can I come in on the issue of over-securitisation? I am currently conducting research into prison architecture and design, and interviewing prison architects. There is a model at the moment. Prisons are built to a one-size-fits-all model, which is category B standard—in layperson’s terms, high security. Part of the reason for that, officially, is future-proofing, so that, if at some point in the future an institution has to take higher security prisoners than currently, it avoids the need for expensive retrofitting of security paraphernalia. Part of it, apparently, is familiarity, so that prisoners and prison staff moving across the system are familiar with any prison they go to.
I think it is a very dangerous thing. Accommodating medium security prisoners in high security conditions reinforces negative labels and notions of criminality, and very often elicits the very behaviour that it is seeking to avoid. Over-securitising prisoners is not conducive to rehabilitation.
Q73 Mr Llwyd: May I follow up immediately on that point, Professor Jewkes? Does this one-size-fits-all approach in fact result in the loss of specialist provision, for children and young adults, for example? Is it an inevitable consequence of a policy of reducing per capita costs of the prison estate?
Professor Jewkes: Yes. It is very difficult to meet the needs of any particular groups of prisoners in the large, warehouse-style prisons that we are building in this country now. Some of the smaller, older prisons that have been closed recently—Shepton Mallet, Northallerton, Kingston and so on—
Q74 Mr Llwyd: Shrewsbury.
Professor Jewkes: Indeed. Those prisons could cater for prisoners with particular needs and were among the highest performing prisons in the estate.
Q75 Mr Llwyd: Do you have any particular observations about the suitability of existing provision for particular segments of the custodial population: for example, high security, women, juvenile or young adult offenders? How can their needs be best catered for under a more affordable system? This is for the whole panel, but I will start with Professor Jewkes.
Professor Jewkes: My particular research is in male establishments, but it worries me and a lot of my criminology colleagues that two open women’s prisons are closing. That does not seem to be good practice. It is encouraging that certain sectors of the youth prison population are falling. In general, we should be looking to build small, specialist institutions close to the regions people come from. That goes right across the different populations that you have mentioned.
Q76 Mr Llwyd: Does anybody wish to add to that? Shall we start with Mr Wheatley?
Phil Wheatley: This is difficult stuff—the amount of change within the prison population. We tend to talk about the headline figure, which is 85,600-odd today. That is roughly what it was when I left in 2010—it was 85,200 on my last working day—but within that there has been a lot of change. I was locking up 2,000 juveniles; we are now locking up fewer than 1,000, if you look at the current figures. There is quite a lot of change. Similarly, the women’s population has gone up very rapidly—much faster than the male population—and then shrunk, but not in a way that anybody predicted. It is difficult to say, “We will design for lots of specialist populations,” if the buildings are going to be there—and you expect them to be there—for 100 years.
There is no easy answer. Ideally, you design exactly for whom you are going to lock up and you keep on changing the design. I doubt whether Parliament would want to vote the funds on that basis, so we end up constrained by the fact that there are limited funds and a population that has quite a lot of volatility within its different parts. I have mentioned a couple of them. In high security prisons, there are no exceptional-risk prisoners at the moment. In my day there were quite a lot, and they proved it by escaping. When I first joined the service, the remand population was about a third; it is now something like a twelfth. You just have to take account of the fact that it changes over time and nobody predicts it. You predict from the past, which means that you predict from a trend. When the trend changes, you end up with a different prediction, but my experience is that usually you cannot spot when the trend is going to change.
Q77 Mr Llwyd: You will be aware that there are plans to build a super-prison—a Titan prison—in Wrexham in north Wales. In principle, is there any reason why a small, purpose-built youth wing and a small female wing could not be included on the estate?
Phil Wheatley: No, there isn’t. I will give you examples. Woodhill is a good prison—quite an expensive design, because it used an American-style approach that worked rather well in practice but was expensive to build—and it has a lot of small, discrete units in it. They have been carefully built, are very secure and allow you to change populations; they have been very useful. Peterborough prison was built with a separate prison within it so that we could, if we wanted, hold a separate population. I think it is still a women’s establishment, but it could be something else. Within a big prison, you can put in units that are flexible, and I think that is quite a good approach, but knowing that, although you are using it for juveniles at the moment, it may have to have another function over the course of its lifetime, unless you really want to put a lot more money—capital—into building new stuff every time the population changes.
John Podmore: Architectural design is very important. I commend the work of the King’s Fund on enhancing the healing environment, which had some projects in the prison system. I disagree with Mr Wheatley: I do not think that large, multifunctional jails work. There is a tendency to operate to the largest common denominator. A good example is Belmarsh, where the high security bit dominates, even though it is supposed to have a resettlement function. That would be very difficult in the context of Britain’s most secure jail.
We should not lose sight of how jails operate. They operate on the basis of relationships. I have seen big prisons, small prisons, old prisons and new prisons, some working well and some working badly. Good jails—and there are many good jails around—work on good relationships between staff and prisoners. How do you run a prison? You run a prison on co-operation. If you try to run it on coercion, you had best get the cheque book out, because you will need a lot more staff. How do you get those good relationships? It starts with the governor. There are issues there about training and length of tenure. It is about staff, staff training and what goes on in the prison regime. While design, architecture and the estate are important, we should not lose sight of the fundamental issue about running prisons, which is staff-prisoner relationships.
Kevin Lockyer: Last year I wrote a report that set out some ideas for the way in which one might restructure the prison estate to address some of the issues we have talked about this morning. I recommended closing a number of small, inefficient prisons and replacing them with large, multipurpose establishments. In reaching those conclusions, I considered really carefully what the evidence is around effectiveness of large prisons. As Professor Jewkes says, the received wisdom is that large prisons do not work. The evidence is actually to the contrary—that large prisons can work as effectively as smaller establishments. There is some really good evidence—for example, at Parc prison, which is one of the largest but also one of the best establishments in the estate—
Q78 Mr Llwyd: But Parc grew organically—it was not plonked on north-east Wales in one big lump.
Kevin Lockyer: Indeed not, but it is nevertheless a large, multipurpose prison with a specialist unit for young people that has worked really well over the course of that prison’s operation. In fact, the evidence is that large, multipurpose prisons can be effective. They need to be well managed, and implemented and developed effectively, but the evidence is that if large, multipurpose prisons are not run as warehouses, if they are run purposefully and designed to achieve the kind of outcomes that we might want from prisons—good resettlement, good rehabilitation and decent conditions—they are perfectly possible and can be run more efficiently than the current estate. There is an answer. Part of the answer is about multipurpose prisons and prisons that give you the flexibility to change the configuration of a particular facility over time, to respond, as Mr Wheatley said, to changes in the profile of the prison population.
Q79 Mr Llwyd: In your view, does current Government policy—for example, in relation to the incentives and earned privileges scheme and the abolition of legal aid for much of prison law—strike the right balance between compassion and punishment?
John Podmore: If I may be blunt, incentives and earned privileges are something that should be left to the Prison Service and not to Ministers. Incentives and earned privileges are a very complex concept. My two colleagues here have worked on it, as have I, over many years. The clue to incentives and earned privileges is in the title. Having one size fits all, with diktats coming from above, is unhelpful. I am sure you will be seeking the views of current serving governors, but I do not think it is helpful to determine that at ministerial level. It depends on the prison, the prisoners, the relationships and where people are in the system. It is hugely, hugely complicated and not something that should be handed down from above, in my opinion.
Phil Wheatley: This is another very difficult area. It is a difficult area for Ministers, because it is perfectly possible for—usually—the tabloid press to out some apparent outrage that makes you think, “Hey, why has this happened?” I think of the Hallowe’en party at Holloway as an example. In the face of a newspaper saying, “This means that prisons are in a terrible state,” the tendency is for Ministers to want to control from the centre. I understand why that happens, and I have to accept that we have to make changes to take account of that and make it less likely that that sort of thing would happen in the future.
At the same time, in a very varied estate, with lots of different sorts of prisons and lots of different architecture, it is much better if governors are able to tailor their own incentives in their establishment, against a framework that has to be robust enough to make it less likely that they will do things that are difficult to defend when exposed in the tabloid newspapers. But that involves Ministers taking a risk on 130-odd governors’ good judgment. Not all Ministers feel confident about that, and it probably doesn’t get you a lot of accolades in the same press for having allowed that discretion. When you are busy thinking about what votes will be in an election that is not too far away, saying, “We have tightened up,” probably looks a more attractive political option.
Q80 Chair: Would you ever advise Ministers to take less notice of the tabloid press?
Phil Wheatley: I have advised them on lots of occasions to do that. Ministers of all parties, because I go back quite a long way—back to the early ’90s in terms of dealing with Ministers—have had to pay attention to the politics, and have probably become increasingly reluctant to take a brave stand because of the electoral consequences, as they see them.
Q81 Mr Llwyd: That is something we hear fairly often in this Committee. It is a great shame, isn’t it? Does anybody on the panel have any observations on the Government’s policy of benchmarking public sector prisons and retaining only the provision of core custodial services? Is that a prudent means of reducing the costs of running the prison estate?
Phil Wheatley: I can answer on benchmarking, which was invented on my watch as a way of reducing cost. We were trying to make prisons more efficient so that we could continue to lock up a large population—which is what the then Government wanted and, I think, what the current Government want—although there was going to be less money available. It meant that we were looking at the most efficient way of doing everything, observing it somewhere, saying, “Hey, that works,” and then telling everybody else to do it that way. To me, that made sense if money was in very short supply and it was very difficult to reduce the amount of work we were doing.
In my view, that was what benchmarking was about. It did not necessarily imply that you were going to offload other bits of the prison by a process of letting contracts. Indeed, as I left, I was very keen on integrating what we all did, rather than splitting it up so that education just did education and worried about how many exams people got, health only did health and worried about the number of times people went to hospital and how long they lived, and prison staff just did the hotel function and maintained security. In my view, that is not a good way of running a prison. From a prisons point of view, you are there all the time. If it does not feel seamless and if people feel as though they are operating in silos, they may well work against each another and they certainly will not maximise the effect you are looking for.
There are two separate things. If benchmarking is done properly, we are not too gung-ho about it and we do not end up with staffing levels that are too tight, it is a sensible way of making sure that the public’s money goes a long way. To me, integrating what happens in prison is crucial. My wife was in hospital last year for an operation. The team that looked after her communicated with the ward staff and worked in an integrated way, which was very good. It was a national health service hospital, and I was very pleased with it and impressed by it. I would not have thanked you if the people who were working in the ward did not know what operation she had had and were only concerned about whether she got her meals or whether her bed was tidy. I liked the fact that they knew what to look for and the whole thing was integrated. We need to do the same thing in prison. Having too many separate contracts, particularly if they are not well let, threatens that.
Kevin Lockyer: I have one observation on that. I do not quarrel at all with anything that Mr Wheatley said about the need to take money out of the operation as quickly as possible and about benchmarking providing a good way of doing that. My only observation is that if you have a prison estate with structural inefficiencies built in—the kinds of things that I described earlier—you are still left with those structural inefficiencies, and fewer staff. Putting all of your eggs in the benchmarking basket, therefore, is not necessarily a long-term solution to an estate that has those kinds of structural inefficiencies built in.
Q82 John McDonnell: How does NOMS measure whether a prison regime is safe, secure and decent? What sort of indicators should we look at to identify whether there is a serious problem or a crisis?
Phil Wheatley: We measured it, and I think still measure it, on a whole basket of different measures, supplemented by visits from real people who went and felt it and talked to it; they walked the floor, did not go around with an escort and drew their own keys. In my day, they were area managers; they are now called something else—DCMs—but they are still the same sort of function. We listened to independent monitoring boards and paid attention to what they said. Some were better than others, but what they said was always interesting. We relied on the inspectorate. We also audited and used a measure that Cambridge Institute of Criminology had invented—a quite complex survey done by psychologists—that assessed prisoners’ attitudes towards a prison. Occasionally, if we were beginning to be worried about somebody, we used a similar measure that was designed to measure staff attitudes and feelings about a place. If you put that lot together, you had a pretty good picture of whether a prison was operating safely and decently. Key figures such as the rate of assault and the rate of attempted suicide were crucial, but so were levels of indiscipline, the number of serious incidents, the number of complaints and whether the prison was doing things properly.
In my day, I remember the scandal of prisons where escapes were taking place, where we got all the right instructions but things were not done. The first people at the centre knew about their not being done was when something went wrong or a bad inspection report came in. I vowed never to let that happen again. The profusion of KPTs and things gets criticised—not least by the Justice Committee, which has expressed doubts about it—but it is very important that we keep constantly on the lookout for jails that are slipping. It is not easy to make a place improve, and when you have made it improve it is very easy to let it slip. Once it has slipped, it is difficult to get back again. Running prisons well is a very difficult thing. It requires high quality governors and really good staff, who need supporting. You need the right staff and the right discipline, the right encouragement and the right praise for them. If you do that, you can make a prison work decently, but “Watch everything” is my view. There are some key data, mainly around violence and self-harm, which stand out as particularly important.
John Podmore: I endorse everything that Mr Wheatley said. I was governor of Brixton between 2003 and 2006. It had something like 15 or 17 inspections and audits of various types over the three years, as well as the day-to-day KPIs and KPTs. I am not sure how helpful that was.
I am sure that you will have spoken to Nick Hardwick. It appears to me now—because I am at something of a distance from the system—that Mr Hardwick is going in and, it would seem to the outsider, finding something that the internal audits and inspections in the prison system have not found. I think that is an issue. That should not be the case, because there is a plethora of individuals, organisations and bodies monitoring and supervising prisons beyond the governor. It concerns me when, as a result of a bad inspection, there are managerial changes, which is code for sacking the governor; whether there is any other responsibility there I am not sure.
One very significant and useful measure that I would commend to you, if it has not been done already, is Cambridge university’s measurement of the quality of prisoner life. That is a superb tool. It is better, if I may say so, than the prisoner questionnaires that we in the inspectorate used. But what prisoners think and say can very often be dismissed as, “Well, that’s just prisoners.” We should be listening very carefully to what prisoners say. I very much advocate user involvement and prisoner councils. Some years ago, Kimmett Edgar, to whom you will be speaking later, wrote an exceptionally good paper on prisoner councils. If you want to find out what is going on in prison, ask a prisoner.
Q83 John McDonnell: I think that sums it up. The number of full-time equivalent staff in the prison estate has dropped, according to our figures, by 28% so far. The POA has made clear that it is concerned about the lack of interaction between prisoners and prison staff as a result. To what extent do you think a safe environment depends on a sufficient number of officers to police wings, to intervene to deal with antisocial behaviour and so on?
John Podmore: I do not think there is a direct correlation between the number of staff and the safety and security of a prison. Clearly there is a tipping point. I am glad that I am not out there at the coal face in a prison at the moment, given the levels of some of the cuts, but I go back to what I said earlier; it is about relationships, training and motivation of staff.
I work abroad primarily, at the moment. The current project I am looking at, for UNODC, is corruption. I am looking at prison officer training around the world. Ours is probably some of the worst; it is certainly the shortest. To become a prison officer in Norway, it is two years to a degree. That is not to denigrate prison staff—there are some excellent prison staff out there, doing a superb job—but the corollary of reducing the numbers is reducing the experience. It is no good going out emergency-recruiting new prison officers. It takes a long time for them to develop the skills, beyond the initial training; it is about leadership and management. There is not a direct correlation, and there will be a tipping point, but we should look at leadership, management, skills and training as well as numbers.
Kevin Lockyer: It is as much about what staff are doing as it is about how many of them there are. One of the arguments I advanced last year is that there are things you can do with vaguely modern technology that enable prisoners to do things for themselves that in a lot of prisons they rely on staff to do for them. Basic transactional relationships with the prison—booking visits, checking how much money they have in their account and things like that—can be done through the use of technology rather than through staff, freeing staff up to do better work with prisoners that enhances the kind of relationships Mr Podmore has spoken about. It is not just about how many staff you have; it is what they are doing that is critically important.
Professor Jewkes: The problem with an over-reliance on technology is that you are dealing with a population that is antisocial by its very nature—that is the nature of offenders. If you have low staff ratios and you are relying on technology, you are locking prisoners up for longer and longer periods of time in cell, so they are not getting out to work, education and training, they are not engaged in purposeful activity—all those things require staff to escort them—and you are not teaching them pro-social skills. Prisoners are being locked up for up to 23 hours a day. Some of these technologies are promoted as a brave new world—prisoners do not need to go to court any more; they can do it by video link—but that means that prisoners do not have to have any human interaction. That is fundamentally a bad thing.
Phil Wheatley: I am sure we had staffing levels in a number of establishments that were more than we needed to do what we were doing. Benchmarking has flushed out that real issue, because we have seen a reception that works perfectly well with three staff for 20 in, 20 out a day versus one doing the same job but has five staff and is not doing it any better. That does not make a lot of sense to me. However, I am sure we need enough staff time to interact with prisoners. It is not just time out of cell; you can give prisoners a lot of time out of cell but not interact with them very much, and they will behave like they would on a street corner, if you don’t watch it.
I know that there is a problem at the moment; Nick Hardwick identified that. The Prison Service appears to have let more staff go in its VERS programme than was really a good idea and is now below even the minimum staffing levels for maintaining a reasonable regime. That is one of the reasons for the series of very critical inspections. The sooner that is corrected, the better. I do not know why that has happened, and I know correction is taking place, but we need a lot of new staff. As Kevin said, they will be very new staff and they will take a bit to learn how to do the job properly, because even with really good training there is a lot of learning to be done by seeing how it works in practice and becoming more skilled through doing it.
Q84 John McDonnell: It is a 28% reduction, which is significant.
Phil Wheatley: It is a really big cut.
Q85 John McDonnell: The rush to recruit new members has identified the problem Mr Podmore was describing. We have even had inspection reports that say there are insufficient staff, for example, to take prisoners to the work regime that they are supposed to be undertaking.
Phil Wheatley: The 20% reduction in funding, or whatever it is, that has been required of NOMS and the Prison Service since I left is a phenomenal reduction, and that can only be done by reducing staff, in the short run, because staff are what you spend your money on. In the longer run, new buildings and things will enable you to do it better, but in the short run, if we expect prisons to do the same job for substantially less money, they will have to employ fewer staff—or less time from staff.
Q86 John McDonnell: To what extent have the recommendations of the Mubarek inquiry become standard practice?
Phil Wheatley: The answer to that is that we were doing our best. The Mubarek inquiry mattered to me. I was around when it happened; I was the deputy director general on the day Zahid Mubarek was killed. A lot of my time as director general was spent making sure that we changed the way we dealt with all of the issues around diversity, particularly race, and that we got better at protecting people and were more alert to the people we had in and the risks that they presented to one another, through cell-sharing risk assessments and those sorts of things. That made a difference. I would not want to claim that we had achieved perfection. Achieving success in that area, so that every member of staff is alert to all the issues and behaves impeccably all the time, and prisoners, whatever their background, feel included is quite a task. You keep working at it, and I would be foolish to think we ever succeeded. Trying hard is what I left us doing. I do not see any sign that that has changed.
Chair: We will return to that in our next session.
Q87 John Howell: I want to look at the idea of working prisons and resettlement prisons. What should the concept of a resettlement prison mean in practice, and how does that differ from the Government’s proposals for the creation of such establishments?
John Podmore: A resettlement prison is about its ethos. A true resettlement prison would be linked with the community, because that is where it would be effective. There is a big problem at the moment in that suddenly, out of the blue, the Government designated something like a third of the prison estate as resettlement prisons. All of a sudden we have resettlement prisons, and that includes Belmarsh. Quite frankly, Belmarsh as a resettlement prison is nonsense. You can go through the motions of relocating prisoners to certain establishments that are close to their home, but those must have a true resettlement ethos, so they are working with the local community and there is a metaphorical open door, with the local community coming in and prisoners moving out. Doing that in a place like Belmarsh—or any secure local prison—is very difficult.
Where size is important is around resettlement. We missed the boat, with the Dorchesters and Northallertons, in turning them into city centre resettlement prisons, where the focus is on people who are close to release. One of my ambitions at Brixton was to make it not a local prison but to turn it into a city centre resettlement prison. The service has gone some way down that road, but simply to redesignate jails as resettlement prisons is a bit of a nonsense, in my view.
Kevin Lockyer: When Mr Wheatley was chief executive of NOMS, I spent several years helping to manage the prison population. At the time, it was simply a matter of getting people into empty beds, without much regard to where they ended up and whether or not it would aid their resettlement in the community. Anything that is aimed at getting prisoners closer to home for the tail-end of their sentence, whether or not it is a resettlement prison in the terms that Mr Podmore just described, has to be a step in the right direction. Having prisoners closer to home, being released from Belmarsh rather than from Erlestoke or somewhere that is a long way from the home they are going to return to, is a step in the right direction.
The uncertainty is the role that community rehabilitation companies will play in those resettlement prisons in the model on which the transforming rehabilitation programme is predicated. If CRCs genuinely have the ability to pick prisoners up in the last three months of their sentence, to work effectively with them and to start the process of community reintegration, that is a significant step in the right direction. If on the other hand they just become another contracted provider of some services that are bolted on to the side of Belmarsh or anywhere else, they will be much less effective.
Q88 John Howell: To what do you attribute the failure of end-to-end offender management?
Chair: “Not much” is the answer to your question.
Phil Wheatley: I was involved at the start, as we declared that we were doing end-to-end offender management. Looking back on it, I know that a number of things were done that, with the benefit of hindsight, we should not have done.
I can give examples. The OASys tool, which we created as an assessment tool for prisoners and for probationers in the community, is a very elaborate and time-consuming assessment tool. There are lots of others around, in other parts of the world, that are quite robust and do not take anywhere near the same amount of time. One of the problems of having a very complex assessment tool is that you spend a lot of money on assessment and not much on doing. It is a bit like going to hospital and getting a CT scan for everything, but then finding that they can only give you aspirin when they discover something wrong with you because they have spent it all on the machine. It has proved very difficult to pull back from that. Any Minister who said, “I think I am giving up OASys. I think it is over-complicated,” would be castigated for not caring about the safety of the public and so on; it is difficult to make a change.
We required probation officers to be offender managers, but very often they were a long way from where the prisoner was. We assumed it was going to be a relationship for life; that paid no attention to how probation officers move around, change jobs and get promoted. I still go into prisons today, and I keep meeting prisoners who tell me that they are on their third offender manager, have not seen the last two and had a video link with the one before last, and that was the height of the relationship.
We did not train offender supervisors properly. We do a lot of assessment—they keep OASys up to date—but we did not really think about how we could make them do things differently. The idea was that the offender managers would tell them that, but the offender managers do not know anything about prison. I think we devised a model that was over-complicated and over-expensive and underestimated the difficulties of trying to give the probation service the lead in prisons—certainly for long-sentence prisoners, many of whom will be in prison after the probation officer concerned has been made chief of a CRC, or whatever the current promotion opportunities may be. We really need to rethink that model, but rethinking it will be quite difficult. You cannot dig everything up at once. At the moment in this world, lots of things are already changing. It will be politically quite difficult, because lots of people will complain if we try to pull back from a very elaborate assessment scheme, which I would love to have done at an earlier stage.
Kevin Lockyer: I echo Mr Wheatley’s comments. The system was over-engineered, over-complicated and designed and driven in the wrong way. It was invented at the centre, without as much regard to the practical implications as there should have been. We probably ought to dig up some of it and start again. The transforming rehabilitation programme starts to do a bit of that and ought to do it in a way that enables genuine innovation to be grown locally, with local stakeholders and the development of vehicles that are fit for purpose in particular CRC areas, rather than everybody having to have half a Bentley that was designed in London and does not work particularly well.
John Podmore: For a long time we concentrated on the wrong end—the secure end. Rightly, there is now emphasis on the fact that locking people up is easy but letting them out is the difficult bit. Unfortunately, I do not think that the CRC model is the one that will work. I go back to what I was saying earlier and what you have looked at: where are the communities? Where are the local communities? At Brixton, I worked with a local crime and disorder reduction partnership, which was a very useful tool. I knocked on their door and they were glad to have me, although I am not sure whether they still exist.
Police and crime commissioners are there—love or hate them, vote for them or whatever anyone did. I have never met or spoken to one, but if I did I would say, “What is your involvement with prisons?” I do not think they have one, but they ought to; again, the clue is in the title—they are police and crime commissioners. My real concern is that the new community rehabilitation company system will bypass the local communities that prisons are there to serve.
Q89 John Howell: Mr Podmore, I think you said that the “holy grail of quality prisoner employment” is outside the scope of the Prison Service. To what do you attribute that?
John Podmore: Could you repeat the question? I am not sure what I said.
Q90 John Howell: You concluded that the “holy grail of quality prisoner employment” was outside the grasp of the Prison Service.
John Podmore: Yes. For a long time prisons have employed prisoners for various jobs. I ran Swaleside back in the ’90s and I used private companies. I brought in local private companies to provide employment for prisoners. Then—this was in the late 1990s—prisoners were earning up to £100 a week. Prisoners really wanted to be there; they would work an eight-hour day and have half an hour for lunch. They would stop, have a sandwich and a cup of tea; they would not go back to their cells for three hours and have a sleep—they worked a normal working day. The companies were happy. I had to make sure that nuts, bolts, nails and screws went out of the prison gate, but no prisoners, and that we counted the nuts, bolts and screws in and counted them out again. I made money for the prison, the companies made money for themselves and the prisoners earned good wages. I think that is the model to have.
The evidence is there. The prison system has tried very hard, but you have 80,000 people you can employ for less than the minimum wage—a quarter or a tenth of the minimum wage. Although some of those are difficult, damaged, chaotic and disordered people, we ought to be able gainfully to employ them for the benefit of the system and for them as individuals and make some money out of it.
I do not think the prison system has those skills. I am not a great advocate of the private sector, but I am a great advocate of a mixed economy. What I tried to do as a governor was to make use of that mixed economy. The skills are there. Of late, Timpson is a good example where you can use local business and local entrepreneurs, because ultimately you want that throughput. The Timpson operation works; they are employing people at the latter end of their sentence and then taking them on afterwards. It is the through-the-gate bit. I know it sounds a bit of a cliché, but through the gate is the trick; it is about releasing people properly. Again, I commend to you the transitions work of the RSA—a plug for something I am involved in—an alternative method of getting people out into the community through employment.
Chair: We are running very short of time. I want to leave sufficient time for our second panel of witnesses, so we will deal with just a couple more topics.
Q91 Jeremy Corbyn: Can I ask you to turn your attention to the situation at Wormwood Scrubs? We had evidence from Angela Levin, whose serious and very real concerns about Wormwood Scrubs were not taken seriously by the Ministry of Justice or NOMS. This is perhaps a question first for Mr Podmore. It seems to me that the diminution of the role of governor in prisons is possibly at the centre of this. Do you have a particular comment to make on that?
John Podmore: I have no real active involvement at Wormwood Scrubs at the moment, other than what I read, but I think there are real issues about the role of the governor. What is the role of the governor in benchmarking? It is very top-down. If you want to save money in prisons, there are ways of doing it. One of the ways is to start talking to prison governors. I am really worried that they have been bypassed in all of this.
Top-down managerialism, bypassing governors, is one thing. There are also issues about length of tenure. Questions have been asked in the House about the average length of tenure of a governor. I am not sure what it currently is; in some prisons, governors have been there for a while, but there is a relatively rapid turnover. My perception is that in London—the Scrubs, Pentonville and Wandsworth—there has been a relatively rapid turnover. We need to be careful about that. Governors should be given three to five-year contracts and should be managed on that basis.
There are issues to do with training. It probably shows, but I spent 11 or 12 years at the most senior operational grade and have never had a day’s training in my life. That probably shows in how I perform. There are issues that need to be taken account of. The role of governor is much more complicated than it ever was. There is a dilemma—what are they responsible for? They are contract managers: no doubt about that. They are increasingly managing external contracts that are given to them. Do they have contract management skills? Do they have the people around them? Do they have the managerial skills? There is a bit of a chicken-and-egg. There are governors out there who are doing a fine job—I don’t envy them at the moment, with the demands they are under—but are they getting the right skills and training? Are they given the right amount of autonomy? Are their skills and competences being used in the right way? Those are serious questions that need asking.
Q92 Jeremy Corbyn: I have some other questions, but any comments other witnesses want to make on this one would be helpful.
Phil Wheatley: One of the things you ought to bear in mind is that if we have taken out whatever the current level of funding is—15% or something since I left the Prison Service in 2010—and we are still locking up 85,000 people, we have done that without major disaster only because most governors have been very good. That does not mean that there are not problems, but we ought to give credit to governors and prison managers for what they have achieved; it is quite a trick. I look at it with some amazement. I do not look and think, “Hey, I could do better if I were there;” I look and think, “I am simply amazed that they have got so far and done so well.”
Q93 Jeremy Corbyn: Can we go back to the monitoring point? All of you have mentioned the problems of outsourcing of contracts and contract management. First, do you feel that there is value for money? Secondly, are we controlling what these contractors do, given the tensions—or whatever you want to call them—between NOMS and the role of the governor? It is sometimes unclear who is supposed to be responsible for what.
Phil Wheatley: Where we have contracted out things like prison catering and the prison shop, those things are all working reasonably well and make reasonable sense. My worry is slightly greater about things like education, which has been contracted out for years—it is not a new contract—but the latest version of the contract is very driven by the results that can be achieved and does not seem to me to incentivise education to work as part of offender management; it is a separate view of the world.
It is probably sensible to get experts to do things. Yes, contracts have to be managed well, but what we need to build into our thinking is that we have to integrate this into a whole. I think that has been missing. To some extent, it has been driven by the decision to make education the responsibility not of the Ministry of Justice but of those who are responsible for education. Unless Ministers themselves are working very closely together—I remember the Prison Minister and Health Ministers working together very closely at one point—the systems will pull apart. I worry about that. I do not think it is a bad thing to contract some things out, but you must manage contracts carefully.
John Podmore: The evidence is that there are huge problems. There was the debacle with the tagging contract. A lot was said about what G4S and Serco did or did not do, but there seemed to be fewer questions about what the civil service did or did not do. I heard Gus O’Donnell say on a radio programme that the problem with the civil service is that it is not good at procurement and setting and managing contracts. That is a bit of a pity, because that is a large part of what Government is doing at the moment. There is a real danger from a governor’s point of view—from an operational point of view. To what extent are governors involved in setting those contracts? I as governor of Brixton had at least one resetting of the education contract. Was it based on a needs analysis of the prisoners in the jail? No, it was not. Was I asked what I thought the educational needs of my prisoners were? No, I was not, but I was given a contract that I was then required to manage. I tried to have the right people on my senior management team and would send people away on contract management training.
There is a problem across Government; it is not just the Prison Service. You see it in the MOD—there are some things out there that are beyond outrageous. We see it in IT contracts as well. Going back to the original question about governors, at the prison level I would certainly want to see much more prison governor involvement in that process, but they need the skills, the training and the recruitment to do that.
Kevin Lockyer: I would like to make a brief observation on both those issues, because they are linked. When I became a governor in the mid-’90s, it was in the immediate aftermath of two catastrophic operational failures that Mr Wheatley described, with prisoners escaping from Whitemoor and Parkhurst. There was a real sense that there were governors out there who either did not know what was happening in their prison or knew what was happening and that it was not what was supposed to happen. As a direct result, there was a conscious and highly desirable shift towards a more managerial approach in the service. If that had not happened, we would have had a string of similar catastrophic operational failures. Personally, I welcomed that.
My question is whether or not the pendulum has swung too far and we now have governors who are very good at doing what they are supposed to do but have possibly lost some of the critical edge that they might need to push back sometimes. That applies equally to issues around contract management. Whether or not the governor of a particular prison has engagement in the design of an education contract is as much a product of that governor’s ability to make a noise and to get some grit into the system as it is of anything else.
Q94 Jeremy Corbyn: Can I ask one more very quick question on this section before we finish? It is about the prisoner complaints system and prisoners’ inability to access legal aid when they have complaints. Do you think that what we have is good or that we need to rethink the prisoner complaints system? The question is for all of you.
John Podmore: There are real issues, certainly with the effectiveness of the day-to-day system and of the prisons and probation ombudsman. I go back to my original point; it is about relationships, and the key to relationships is having outlets for complaints—I am not sure how many. I worked briefly with an organisation that was setting up prisoner councils, and you may want to talk to Kimmett Edgar about that. They are a good ventilation system.
There is a danger with the pressures we are under at the moment. You can reduce the availability of legal aid, but one of the most effective outlets for prisoners’ complaints is a prison officer—a prisoner being able to go to a prison officer with whom he has a relationship, whom he knows and whom he sees on a reasonably regular basis to say, “Hey, this isn’t right. I don’t agree with it.” My worry at the moment is that because of the ratios, because of the experience and because of the attendance systems for staff, who may be on for three or four days for long hours and then off for a long period, the continuity of client contact militates against that relationship and the ability of prisoners to complain. That is a starting point for where relationships break down. If relationships break down, we have significant problems.
Chair: Unless somebody fundamentally disagrees, I want to move to a final question.
Q95 John McDonnell: We are short of time. The Prison Officers Association said that politicians just do not understand the professional work that they do. The Committee has taken the view before that there is a need for a comprehensive review of the role of the prison officer. Do you agree?
Phil Wheatley: Normally politicians do not understand the complexity of the work that prison officers do. I am not sure we should expect that. You probably know more about it than most people because you have spent some time looking at it; many of your fellow politicians will not have done that. It is complicated work. Professor Alison Liebling described it best when you were taking evidence back in 2008. I thought she gave very persuasive evidence about the way in which fine judgments are made. Nobody in Prison Service management is in any doubt that that is what happens, and that prison officers are absolutely crucial and theirs is professional work that is much misunderstood by the public and by politicians. Let us recognise that.
You and I would probably agree on the fact that there is much greater professionalism among prison staff, and that it is a much more complicated job than the average member of the public thinks, so I am not sure that a fundamental review is the best way of proceeding. Reviews do not necessarily lead to action. What I would like to see is wider recognition that it is complicated and difficult, as well as better training, better support and recognition from everybody who is involved that that must be built into the funding formulas that are used.
Kevin Lockyer: I have one very brief addition. I do not disagree with any of that, but I think that there is a failure to understand the complexity of any client-facing service or user-facing role, whether you are talking about prison officers, police officers or nurses. There is a whole range of professions that interact with difficult and damaged people in high-pressure circumstances that the public and politicians probably do not understand as well as they might.
John Podmore: I suggest that you go and see Norwegian prison officer training. I commend it to you.
Chair: Thank you very much. We are very grateful to you all.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Dr Kimmett Edgar, Prison Reform Trust, Andrew Neilson, Howard League for Penal Reform, and Imtiaz Amin, Zahid Mubarek Trust, gave evidence.
Q96 Chair: Welcome. Mr Amin, you are the chief executive of the Zahid Mubarek Trust, which you were involved in setting up in commemoration of your sadly lost family member. Dr Edgar is from the Prison Reform Trust and Mr Neilson is from the Howard League. We are very glad to have your help. As I did in the previous session, could I start by establishing how differently you would design the prison estate if you had a blank sheet of paper?
Andrew Neilson: That is very difficult. We do not have a blank sheet of paper; we have the existing estate and a situation where currently there is not the political will to look at the size of the prison population particularly. The emphasis is on finding cuts to the system without reducing demand on the system, but we are getting to the point where that will not be tenable in the future. Certainly on the other side of a general election, if we are looking at the Ministry of Justice facing more cuts, we will have to look at the size of the population.
Even if we look at the system as it is right now, I would agree with Mr Wheatley in the previous session that governors and managers have done a pretty good job of managing a very difficult situation and not having really serious disturbances and incidents break out, although we have seen some disturbances and lots of problems. If we are not looking at radical sentencing reform, there are a couple of things that we could be looking at right now. One is making it easier for people to achieve release. We have a lot of people on indeterminate sentences lingering over-tariff in the system. Other prisoners are finding it hard to progress through their sentences, because in the end some of the cuts are falling on their ability to complete courses—the things they need to do to progress. The Parole Board needs more resources. A lot more is going to be asked of it, but not necessarily with more resources to do that.
The other thing that could be done, which does not cost anything, is to look at political rhetoric. Of late we have seen a ratcheting-up of punitive rhetoric about prisoners and the criminal justice system. That comes with a cost, because it influences the behaviour of the courts, prison governors and prison officers in adjudications. They take a steer from the top of the Ministry of Justice. If the steer is that they should be punitive, that is what they will do.
Recently we published some research on remand. It was quite interesting, because in the LASPO Act we saw various measures taken by the Ministry of Justice to try to reduce the use of unnecessary remand. The Ministry of Justice brought in the “no real prospect” test, but when we looked at the figures for the use of remand we found that it is now above pre-LASPO levels. Remand has not gone down. A directive can be made from the centre in legislation, but the day-to-day rhetoric from the top is much more important. These are ways we could be trying to address the size of the prison population, before we even get to radical questions about who we are sending to prison and why.
Dr Edgar: As Andrew was saying, the start of the solution really has to be to look at how people go there and to apply the lessons we have from the reduction in the youth population to short-sentence prisoners and to women prisoners, in particular. Andrew mentioned remand and the “no real prospect” test. That is a great help in reducing the unnecessary use of custody for remands, but there are still too many people who either get a non-custodial sentence or whose cases are thrown out. There is room for further improvement on that.
Taking you seriously about the blank page, for prison to work well you would start with much smaller prisons, much closer to home and with a much better staff-to-prisoner ratio than we have right now. The Committee’s report on the role of the prison officer made clear how central prison officers are to rehabilitation. We have seen the breakdown of rehabilitation where prison staff numbers have been cut to the extent that the prison cannot work efficiently. Those would be some of the pointers.
Q97 Chair: Are you confident of the evidence base for the first of the characteristics you describe—that is, smaller being better? That was questioned earlier this morning.
Dr Edgar: Yes. I appreciate that there is a position from the Treasury and a position from a prison management point of view. I did a little digging prior to coming here, looking at inspection reports and prisoner surveys. If we take five large, new prisons and five small prisons, in almost everything that matters it is very obvious that prisoners are worse off in large prisons. On safety, something like 22%—I can give you the exact figures—felt unsafe compared with 15% in smaller prisons. In terms of knowing who to approach for help with accommodation and employment, again smaller prisons were clearly providing a better experience for prisoners. It may well be that there are advantages from a budgetary point of view—
Q98 Chair: My question was not really about the budgetary point of view, but about whether the evidence base was sound.
Andrew Neilson: I agree with Kimmett that if you look at the inspection reports you can glean that small is better. In fact, the inspectorate did a report in 2009 that looked through its findings in generality and came to that conclusion. But it is difficult to find hard and fast evidence, partly because we have not built any small prisons recently in this country; therefore any comparison you are making is not just about large versus small but large and brand spanking new versus small, old and deteriorating Victorian estate. That is not a fair comparison.
Q99 Chair: We know from evidence that newly built large prisons experience a range of problems in the initial stages anyway, as Mr Llwyd pointed out by comparison with Parc.
Dr Edgar: But some of those problems are the consequence of a large institution that is unmanageable. I will give you a couple of points. A large catchment area inevitably means that families are further away. The inspectorate report on resettlement made clear how central families are to resettlement. If families have to travel further, it creates a greater impediment to their being involved in the resettlement of their loved ones. In general, a large establishment means that people feel depersonalised and anonymised. As I said, survey evidence indicates that they do not know who to turn to for help because they feel anonymous and forgotten.
Lastly, a really important but general point is the dominance of prisoner culture. As a manager, if you have a prison of 400 you can imprint that culture a lot more effectively because staff know their prisoners, and prisoners know the staff who are looking after them. In a large prison, the economies come about by moving staff all over the place; consequently, there is not the continuity of personal relationship that John Podmore spoke about in your earlier session.
Q100 John Howell: How do you respond to the Secretary of State’s suggestion that there is no pattern to the rise in self-inflicted deaths?
Andrew Neilson: I was at the session where he gave evidence on this in the inquiry into the role of the Lord Chancellor. I heard him say that there was a parallel rise in suicides in the community. If there had been a rise of almost 70% in suicides in the community in the space of a year, it would be on the front page of every newspaper, so I do not think that is something that can really stand up. We have seen a really shocking and very sudden reversal, after years of progress on suicide reduction in prisons. Given that it has taken place at the same time as we have seen the impact of 30% staffing cuts, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is some kind of link.
Dr Edgar: I would also point to the concern about changes to the IEP system. We know that the first period of custody is a high-risk time for suicide and self-harm. There is consistent evidence on that. Logically, making that period of adjustment more difficult for people would put them at greater risk, so there is concern about the way people are received into custody.
Q101 John Howell: To take it up a level, how can self-harm, suicide and violence prevention in prisons be improved?
Dr Edgar: The first thing is please keep those separate. The factors behind suicide are different from those behind self-harm, and the factors behind both of those are very different from the concern about prison violence.
Perhaps I should talk first about prison violence. Here again, I cannot over-emphasise the importance of prison staff. If you appreciate that currently there are more people dealing drugs on wings than there are prison officers, you can understand that there is potential for wings to become criminogenic—to become areas in which crime flourishes. Where prisoners are not protected from theft, exploitation and intimidation, they turn to more defensive means of protecting themselves, by which I mean weapons and a greater willingness to fight to protect their interests.
Officers are the first line of defence against that kind of atmosphere of trench warfare, if you will. For officers to be effective, they need to be present in sufficient numbers. If an officer hears two people arguing, hears threats and intervenes, that may—in fact, probably will—prevent a fight. I remind you that that fight will mean that officers are called away from duties in rehabilitation. Later they will have to testify at an adjudication in front of the governor. Almost certainly, the police will be called in to investigate the circumstances, and it may sit in front of an independent adjudicator—a judge. I am just drawing your attention to the fact that that one violent incident costs a lot of money. If we are looking to save money, it would make more sense to bring in more officers, so that they could be better prepared or better equipped to prevent violence.
Going back to that officer, if they are the only officer on the wing who is in direct contact with prisoners, it is really difficult to expect them to go down and challenge the two people who are shouting at each other. It is far more likely that they will look after their welfare, as the only person operating on that wing, and step away until there is a fight they need to respond to. I really hope we are not moving towards a prison in which people feel they need weapons in order to look after their safety, or in which prisoners feel that staff will not look after their interests.
Imtiaz Amin: Kimmett rightly talks about the differences between the violence that occurs and the suicides that happen; they require a different approach. The one thing that should bring all of these together is having robust enough means of reporting any issues that arise. In most of the complaints we view, there is a small percentage in which the complainant talks about feeling that they have suicidal tendencies. Going back to what Kimmett said, there is simply nobody who is equipped to deal with a lot of the issues that are facing the offender at the time. A robust complaints system is another means of doing that.
Q102 John Howell: Mr Amin, the inspectorate found that a number of establishments had violence reduction strategies. To what extent have those become standard practice?
Imtiaz Amin: We see very little effect on the ground, to be honest. The policies are there, but there is very little happening on the ground in terms of their being followed through. Nowadays there is a reliance on technology, which very few understand. Training itself has become online, so there is very little monitoring of who is doing the training and, therefore, who is equipped with the knowledge to deal with any issues of violence that occur, or the variations of violence. That is pretty much what we have seen in our experience.
Dr Edgar: I agree that it is mixed. Some prisons have appreciated the need to protect all prisoners from antisocial behaviour and aggression. Others take an approach that leads staff simply to look out for the worst offenders. I was in a prison with about 1,200 prisoners. In any given month, there would probably be about 100 assaults, as an estimate. They had four people on an anti-bullying programme. You can see from the numbers that there is no way that identifying four individuals was having an important impact on the assaults that were happening on the wings.
Where violence reduction is effective, it is through consultation with prisoners and involving prisoners as violence reduction reps. I was in Bullingdon prison, which had violence reduction reps who were known on each wing, just as the listeners are. Any prisoner could go to the violence reduction rep and discuss their problems with them. But there is a huge range in the way violence reduction reps are trained or made use of. I go back to saying that it is not consistent across the piece.
Andrew Neilson: There are also signs that the cuts to staffing are having an impact on what progress has been made. Just today the inspectorate published a report on Cookham Wood young offenders institution. It says that the inspectorate saw very good violence reduction strategies and procedures in place in the prison in previous inspections, but those seem to have fallen away in the most recent inspection. Indeed, the main finding of the report is the prevalence of violence and the problems that are arising.
Q103 John McDonnell: Coming on to working prisons, how is current prison work fundamentally different from the Howard League’s concept of real wages for real work? To what do you put down the slow progress of the roll-out of working prisons?
Andrew Neilson: It is very different from our original conception of real work in prison, which was unashamedly radical. We were talking about prisoners being employed by businesses on the outside, more or less full time, being paid the going rate for the job in the community and paying tax and national insurance. We achieved that for a brief period in a project of our own at Coldingley prison—a graphic design studio called Barbed.
We did a lot of work on this issue with the Conservative shadow Bench in opposition, and it was reflected in the Conservative manifesto. We also did a lot of work on the issue with the Ministry of Justice in the early days of the coalition. It foundered on a number of things. The biggest thing it foundered on was the reality of funding. I am sorry to go back to it, but we had a situation where the Department had to make cuts. In the end, the decision was made that the cuts would be on regime and staffing, rather than on trying to reduce the size of the prison population. Straight away that started to make it very difficult just to get prisoners out of cells, before we even got to conversations about how you got businesses in and paying the going rate, and how you worked that in terms of competition with the community.
We did a lot of work on that and published a report called “Business behind bars” looking at all of those issues. They are all very difficult issues in and of themselves, but when you say right at the beginning, “We are looking to cut staff,” you cannot get the guys out of the cells to do that kind of work. We are struggling to get prisoners out to do even what work is going on in prison.
I can go into great detail—I can certainly write to the Committee to go through all the other issues—but that was the problem front and centre. Even if we were going to come to some kind of compromise on what real work means—whether a working prison was going to be the Howard League’s ideal or some kind of more pragmatic Ministry of Justice version—we just saw a shift in priority. Working prisons were seen as a priority. Then about two years ago, we stopped hearing about working prisons and started to hear about transforming rehabilitation. The focus moved to through-the-gate and resettlement, and not what happens when people are actually spending years inside. We have seen that reflected in inspectorate reports, where purposeful activity measures have just bottomed out. That is very disappointing, given that the Conservative party in opposition published a report called “Prisons with a Purpose.” Purposeful activity is not something that is happening now in our prisons.
Dr Edgar: Picking up on Andrew’s point about purposeful activity, I think it is important that, given the current concerns about funding and so forth, prisons look to other ways of employing prisoners, by which I mean prisoners as volunteers. There are options in some prisons for prisoners to work as volunteers. Listeners are an example I have used before. There is Toe by Toe mentoring, and there are prisoner representatives on various committees. There is a huge range of ways that prisoners can be involved actively in the running of their prison and can contribute to the prison community. They are not being fully exploited by prisons, by which I mean that sometimes I have been speaking to a prisoner and have found out that he is the diversity rep, the listener, a drug treatment mentor and, at the same time, a tutor on another programme. That means that he is lucky to be doing four, but there are three prisoners sitting in their cells who could have been doing that.
I will make one last point. This is a lesson that I took away from Brixton prison; I hope it is to the point. It is about ROTL. When ROTL is decided strictly on risk grounds, you will almost never let anybody out the door. What Brixton was doing was interviewing the prisoners who were interested in ROTL about what their interests were. In that way, they got placements that matched the person’s own enthusiasm and interests and the things that motivated them. If I was going out to a job painting railings, I would not look at that as a long-term career, but if I had an interest in antique books and got a placement in a bookshop, I might just stay with it because the activity that was provided engaged with my interests. That is something we need to look at more. Broadening purposeful activity to include voluntary activities can do that.
Q104 John McDonnell: Is there any evidence that the changes with regard to release on temporary licence have had any detrimental effect on release and resettlement?
Dr Edgar: The interesting thing about release on temporary licence is how amazingly successful it is. Prisoners who have been institutionalised—I can talk for a long time about what that means—come out still more dependent than they were when they went in. This is the one way that they can gradually acquire the skills that we all take for granted. In effect, it is working really well. I say that knowing that there were three high-profile disasters, but, overall, the overwhelming proportion of releases on temporary licence are successful. It certainly does not need the heavy security measures of tagging or anything like that. As John said in the earlier session, what it needs is personal contact to make sure that the person is supported in their time out.
Q105 John McDonnell: Have the changes had an impact?
Andrew Neilson: Yes, I think they have. I do not want to make light of what happened over the summer, but if the particular high-profile case had not had a nickname, we might not have seen half the amount of media coverage that we did; “skull cracker” was very media friendly. That is unfortunate, because it clouded totally the overall trend that we see, which is that the number of absconds has gone down. It is not the problem that it would appear to be if you were reading about just those high-profile cases.
The Ministry of Justice was under a lot of pressure, and I can understand why they felt the need to act, but one problem that is happening is that if you are a high-risk prisoner in closed conditions, for example, you cannot get ROTL now. That creates a kind of Catch-22 position, because the assessment of your high risk will have been done earlier, and you may no longer be high risk. At least, there should be some way you can challenge that. My understanding is that even when governors want to look at putting a high-risk prisoner out on ROTL, when they talk to the probation service it is not interested in reassessing the risk. The probation service will do that only once they are in the community and under probation supervision, at which point probation feel they can assess the risk. That creates a Catch-22, because if you are a high-risk prisoner in closed conditions you cannot get ROTL, which may be important in terms of moving you towards release. You can see the problem that starts to develop.
Q106 Mr Llwyd: I should declare an interest—I am a member of the Howard League and have previously advised on an inquiry. How should prison officer training be adapted to accommodate recent changes in prison policies?
Dr Edgar: I would point to two areas where, again and again, prison officers tell me they would benefit. One is mental health. I say that with reservations, because currently far too many people with mental health problems unnecessarily go to prison when diversion could be improved. Having said that, we are never going to get away from the world in which people in prison have mental health problems. Officers are not at all well equipped to deal with them. They do an amazing job, but they are not trained well to work with people with mental health problems. There is a programme called mental health first aid. Its aim is to enable somebody without specialism to recognise somebody who needs to be considered by somebody with specialist knowledge—a psychiatrist or psychologist—so there are programmes out there.
That is the first issue. The second is conflict resolution. Quite a few prison officers talk to me about conflict resolution and say that in their work on the wings it would be invaluable if they knew a bit more about the basic principles of working with conflict. I should add that one of the main areas in which race relations are complicated is that a prisoner may perceive that the officer is racist, which creates a conflict that neither side knows how to resolve or work through, certainly not within the current systems.
Andrew Neilson: I will be a little bit more radical, just to remind us of the Norwegian model that Mr Podmore mentioned in the last session. I was in Norway earlier this year, for the second time. Basically, what we see in Norway very much emphasises the rightness of the Committee’s previous recommendations about the role of the prison officer. I understand what Mr Wheatley said about a review perhaps being an unnecessary delay, but there needs to be some kind of fundamental look at the role. In Norway, there is effectively a prison officer college to which all staff go. It is a two-year degree, one year theoretical and one year practical. When I was there this year, there was talk of lengthening the degree by another year. Talking to any officer, wherever they are, in a Norwegian prison, you certainly see the impact it has in terms of confidence and knowledge, and the difference that it makes for them.
Imtiaz Amin: There needs to be some training around social awareness, or the prison officer needs to demonstrate some relationship in a previous job to a social awareness role. Understanding the offenders you are looking after and some of the backgrounds they come from is crucial to developing a level of respect between the two, which is a key to success.
Q107 Mr Llwyd: That begs my next question, Mr Amin. Do you support the suggestion that prison officers should receive more training focused on Islamic beliefs, as opposed to diversity per se?
Imtiaz Amin: Prison officers need to be trained across the board on equalities. There is a concern around Muslim offenders and lack of understanding of them, but it is as much about resources within the prison. Many of the complaints that we get are deemed racism by the complainant, but on the other hand they are very much a resource issue—not being able to manage the population properly because there is not enough room. For example, what do you do if the room for Friday prayer can hold only 300 but you have 500 who want to go to prayers? They are then told to pray in their cells, and a plethora of complaints are submitted: “Because I am Muslim, I am not allowed to go to prayers.”
We see a similar lack of understanding around disabilities. One case that comes to mind is a complaint about disability that was submitted through the discrimination incident report form. It was referred back to the health care centre with the comment, “This has got nothing to do with us.” I would say that it is an issue across the board.
Andrew Neilson: We are also seeing a detrimental step that relates both to that question and to the last one. Because of staff shortages, particularly in the south-east of England, where they are finding it difficult to recruit, we are seeing a massive increase in the use of detached duty. You see staff being parachuted into prisons for a week. If they are new staff from the north coming down to the south-east, there are often lots of issues. One is that it has an impact on staff-prisoner relations, because they are not really of the prison for very long—it is all very temporary. There may also be issues with white, northern, working-class young men being sent down briefly to staff prisons that are very different in terms of their ethnic mix. There is an issue of whether they will necessarily be very able—particularly because they are only there for a week—to get themselves into the right mindset to interact properly with those prisoners.
Q108 Mr Llwyd: I have one brief, specific question for Dr Edgar. What evidence is there to support your view that succession planning, training and the development of leadership and management skills in the Prison Service are not as strong as they once were?
Dr Edgar: Good question. Our concern with succession and so forth is that the management structure is such that prison governors move on far too quickly and, therefore, what is good practice in the prison does not get embedded. Frankly, if I were an officer working in a prison and the governor brought in measures I didn’t approve of, I would outwait him; he is only going to be there for a little while and then he is off again. That is too frequent a problem with managing prisons.
We have statistics that I can send in about the turnover of managers in senior positions, but it points to a problem if the tone of an establishment comes from the top and it keeps changing. In the last couple of weeks, I was in a prison where the deputy governor and governor had changed twice in the last year, and there is a current acting governor who will not be permanent. When that happens, the prison as a whole has to run rather like an orchestra without a conductor; it does not have that lead from the top. That is our concern.
Q109 Mr Llwyd: That chimes with what the previous panel said in their evidence.
How effectively does the prisoner complaints system operate? Does the operation require a possible rethink in the light of restrictions to prisoners’ ability to report because legal aid is no longer available?
Andrew Neilson: I would agree with the views of the Joint Committee on Human Rights when they looked at this in the light of the legal aid proposals and said that the complaints mechanism was overstretched and inadequate. That is sadly the case. The prisons and probation ombudsman has a massive case backlog. One assumes that more will be expected of the PPO because of the legal aid changes, but there is no evidence that they are getting any additional resources to deal with that.
Beyond that, there are prisoners who cannot easily engage with a complaints process because of their vulnerabilities. Children in secure custody are meant to have advocates, but our understanding is that advocates see a child only for something like three minutes a week, so there is not a lot of time to get to the bottom of any issues. Prisoners with mental health problems—even prisoners just with literacy problems—may find it difficult to engage with the existing complaints mechanisms.
Then there is the problem of its being overstretched and there being a backlog, which brings up the issue of timing. It may take months or even years to resolve a complaint. If your complaint is about re-categorisation, or challenging something that happened to you in terms of unlawful use of force or being asked to move from closed to open conditions, and it is going to take months or years to resolve, you are starting to move into the area of its being academic by the time you finally get some kind of decision. There is a real danger that in the end the complaints system, by its very nature, cannot offer immediate remedy for some people who need it.
Q110 Chair: I turn to a final point. In 2011 NOMS reported that Muslim chaplains were beginning to deliver faith awareness courses. Have you had the opportunity to assess whether they have had an impact and whether they have assisted in dealing with radicalisation issues? Mr Amin? No? There is no collective knowledge here on this. We will look for it from another source.
Thank you very much indeed for your help this morning. We are very grateful.
Oral evidence: Prisons: planning and policies, HC 309 4