Justice Committee
Oral evidence: Prison operational workforce, HC 917
Wednesday 29 March 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 29 March 2023.
Members present: Sir Robert Neill (Chair); Janet Daby; Maria Eagle; Dr Kieran Mullan; Edward Timpson.
Questions 209-285
Witnesses
I: Rt Hon Damian Hinds MP, Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, and Michelle Jarman-Howe, Chief Operating Officer Prisons, Ministry of Justice.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witnesses: Rt Hon Damian Hinds and Michelle Jarman-Howe.
Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to this session of the Justice Committee. Minister, it is good to see you. Ms Jarman-Howe, it is good to see you too. As soon as we have done the declarations of interest, we will get into introducing ourselves. I am a non-practising barrister and a former consultant to a law firm.
Edward Timpson: I am a former Solicitor General with a practising certificate, but I am not undertaking any court work. I am a former chair of CAFCASS, and my brother is the chair of the Prison Reform Trust.
Maria Eagle: I am a non-practising solicitor.
Q209 Chair: And if Mr Daly joins us, he is a practising solicitor. We are not sure if he is going to be able to make it or not.
Can we start, Minister, with where we are at the moment with the prison situation? The Lord Chancellor came and gave evidence to us in November, as you will know, and he said that not investing in the prison estate is a false economy. That was his view. He said, “If you lose prison places, you end up paying more to deal with it,” which I think we all agreed with. But here we are. We have non-critical maintenance work suspended, so that is exactly what we are doing, isn’t it? Why?
Damian Hinds: We are investing in the prison estate, Chair, and rightly so. We are expanding the prison estate very substantially. We are also investing, in different ways, in rehabilitation of offenders, improving our drug treatment, improving our education service, and improving employment and employability, so there is a very strong commitment to investment. Obviously, the theme of today’s session is mostly about workforce, and the investment in our workforce and our people is the most important of all, because they are our most important assets.
You asked specifically about non-essential maintenance, and we have not cancelled that. We are putting some non-essential maintenance back, but we are continuing with essential maintenance and a substantial programme of statutory fire safety improvements. But it does make sense at the present time. You will know that prisons are busy.
Q210 Chair: Is it because of the numbers?
Damian Hinds: It is absolutely right and sensible that when you are busy, as prisons are at the moment, if you can reschedule some things, you do so, as long as you maintain that which is essential and that which you are committed to. As I say, we are not cancelling these things; we are rescheduling them.
Q211 Chair: But you are putting them on hold because you cannot take the cells out of commission to do the maintenance on them. That is what is comes down to.
Damian Hinds: I am not sure I would use the word “cannot”. I think it is more prudent to make sure that we have headroom in the estate. Prisons are busy, but they are not full. But we want to make sure that we can continue to operate them at best efficiency.
Q212 Chair: I understand. Is there any estimate as to what additional long-term costs that might bring?
Damian Hinds: I do not think we are particularly expecting material levels of additional cost. Do you mean from rescheduling?
Q213 Chair: It is almost the Secretary of State’s point: if you put it off, it will cost you more in the long run. You are chief operating officer, Ms Jarman-Howe. What is your take on it?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: As the Minister has said, we still have ongoing investment, particularly around critical fire safety work this year. We have £50 million that we are looking to spend this year. I would say that, as the Minister has said, although we are being particularly cautious at the moment to make sure that we are optimising capacity, even in normal times—even in less busy times, to use your phrase, Chair—we always take steps to make sure that we sequence routine maintenance work, because that is the sensible thing to do. We always make sure, as far as possible, that we have accommodation offline for a short as possible period, so that we can maximise delivery across the estate. Although what we are seeing now are some particular deferrals, it is actually routine business for us to try to manage the estate whilst we have maintenance going on.
Q214 Chair: It does have an impact, but you are right: it is not directly impacting the workforce. But in terms of morale and working conditions, they obviously impact everybody within the prison. Any idea how long it is likely to be paused for?
Damian Hinds: I think we need a bit of a sense of proportion. The big works that we are doing—upgrading blocks of cells at a time for critical fire safety works—continue, and we are committed to them. To give an example, the sorts of works that we are rescheduling include roofing works at HMP Moorland and minor works at HMP Pentonville. Obviously, every project is important—otherwise, we would not do it—but I would not want the Committee to get a false impression of the scale of what we are talking about, which is out of proportion to what it really is.
Q215 Chair: I understand that. What about the issue around cell sharing? You kindly wrote to us, saying you have increased cell sharing in response to capacity pressures. Is that happening in those prisons that are running very restrictive regimes, or is it elsewhere?
Damian Hinds: Michelle will probably want to come on in this, but we have in place protocols about how we establish—it is done locally at the individual prison. It is ultimately a judgment of individual governors, taking into account factors around safety and decency. There is quite an established way of doing it, so when there is a review at a particular prison, they may revise the numbers up. The numbers can also be revised down, but we will only do it in a way that is safe and consistent with decency.
Overall, crowding rates have not changed that materially—not massively— over time, but again, when you are busy, it makes sense to review those things and make sure that you are making the most of what you have.
Q216 Maria Eagle: As a former Prisons Ministers who was doing the job when the prisons were pretty full, I know the tricks. One of the tricks is to keep people in cells when cells would have been taken out for maintenance. You have effectively accepted that that is what’s happening.
Damian Hinds: I would not want you to infer something in excess of what I have said. We are talking about relatively small-scale things.
Q217 Maria Eagle: But it is in order to make sure that you have the cells there to be occupied—that is why. Otherwise, there would be no reason to reschedule the maintenance.
Damian Hinds: Yes. I think it is prudent and right. You used the word “tricks” but I’m not sure I would use that word.
Q218 Maria Eagle: I was known to do it myself. I went looking in prisons and found cells myself that then got put back into use.
Damian Hinds: When the system is quite busy, as it is now, we need to make especially sure that we are making the most of what we have.
Q219 Maria Eagle: How many are there? Could you tell us—not necessarily today, but you can send us a note—how many have been rescheduled, just so we can see the extent of this in context?
Damian Hinds: We will happily follow that up.
Michelle Jarman-Howe: Let me add a point, because this is an important question. We are really clear about the level of crowding and doubling up that the system can facilitate. On this point, we are still really clear that if a cell is not usable, it is not usable. So we still have cells out for maintenance activity all the time, and that is on an ongoing basis, outside of investment. Just to be clear, we do not have people in cells that we consider are unfit for purpose at the moment.
Q220 Maria Eagle: But if a roof has not been replaced, there might be some leaks. It might be a bit dowdy, and it might not be a very pleasant place to spend 22 hours a day.
Michelle Jarman-Howe: Of course, and we have a large estate that continues to need investment, but we are clear about the fact that where cells are not fit for purpose, we have taken them out of use.
Q221 Chair: You have the Rapid Deployment Cells project back now. That has had a bit of a chequered history, hasn’t it? It really didn’t deliver to the numbers hoped. Why are we more confident now?
Damian Hinds: We are confident now because we are putting Rapid Deployment Cells in. We are deploying them rapidly, and the first ones are in place.
Q222 Chair: Originally, it was going to be a thousand by December 2022 and it delivered 48.
Damian Hinds: We are still looking at that same order of magnitude. Sometimes you need to do some ground works. Quite often, you need to do plumbing—well, you almost always need to do plumbing—provision of services and ancillaries, and so on. But we think that the Rapid Deployment Cells project is a material contributor, so we are pressing ahead with it.
Q223 Chair: What are we doing about any increase in staffing? When Dame Anne Owers was giving evidence, she said, “Okay, great. You have the extra cells, but aren’t you going to need extra prison officers to staff the cells?”
Damian Hinds: The short answer to that is yes. We are employing additional prison officers. As you know, Chair, we already had a programme to employ more prison officers, but for every site, there is a target operating model—a staffing level—that you are aiming for. If it is one or two cells, it doesn’t change, but if there is a material change in the physical capacity, there is a change in the staffing requirement.
Michelle Jarman-Howe: We have a sizeable recruitment programme in place, which we have had certainly over the last year, as we came out of covid, and we will have an even more ambitious recruitment programme in place for the next 12 months. Following what was a challenging year in 2021 in terms of recruitment, we are absolutely confident that we will make the numbers in our ambition in 2022.
Q224 Dr Mullan: I apologise in advance; I have to nip out shortly after asking a few questions.
The impression we have is that there are not the physical cells. Are there any incidences in the current estate where you have physical cells, but you do not have the staffing to enable you to use them? We talked about that being an issue in the future. Right now, are there wings you cannot use because there isn’t the staff?
Damian Hinds: We are really clear that if we cannot staff safely, then you do not use those cells. There are cases where we have cells out of use for that reason. I do not know if Michelle is able to say a little more about that. That will continue to be our policy.
Michelle Jarman-Howe: We take a range of decisions, in terms of how much capacity an establishment can safely and decently take even when it is fully staffed, to make sure that we keep the balance right, but we also have a process to maintain stability in a prison. We need to make sure we have effective staffing in place, and safety. Both Woodhill and HMP Swaleside, have accommodation out because we are not confident we can safely staff the prison—
Q225 Dr Mullan: Obviously, our inquiry is looking at workforce, so we are trying to understand how much of capacity is due to workforce and how much is an estate issue. It would be good to have an understanding of the scale—perhaps you could write to us. You have given two examples there, but a more authoritative overview of where workforce, not estate, is impacting on capacity would be good.
Damian Hinds: I think Michelle has just said that. It is not that there is a massive list that we are hiding from you—that is the answer to the question.
Q226 Dr Mullan: Thank you. Building on the issue of the impacts of capacity, you will have seen the Court of Appeal decision to overturn a custodial sentence in view of the fact that there are challenges in capacity. There has been reporting of other cases where similar decisions are being made by judges. Does it concern you that people who would ordinarily be going to prison are not going to prison at the moment?
Damian Hinds: That clarification was around judges being able to take into account what prisoners would be going to and so on, in the event of a custodial sentence, but judges can still and do still, of course, make decisions based on all the facts of the case and all the circumstances, and they do so independently of us.
To be very clear, there are places available in prisons and of course people are being sent to prison, and people are being recalled to prison, and people are being retained in prison and so on. Our job is to make sure that we carry on having the capacity and the headroom to be able to do that, and to be able to run productive regimes with purposeful activity to get people off drugs and through education and back looking at getting into work. Absolutely, those things are what we are focused on.
Q227 Dr Mullan: Would you prefer that judges were not making those remarks and not making it clear that it was factor that was leading to people in some circumstances not having a custodial sentence when they otherwise would have done?
Damian Hinds: As I say, judges will make their decisions based on the facts of the case in those circumstances. Custodial options are of course absolutely there, as they always have been. There are also strong non-custodial options. Judges operate independently of the Ministry of Justice.
Q228 Dr Mullan: But would you prefer to be a Justice Minister, reading through these things, seeing that not happening?
Damian Hinds: I do not want to say there is a particular thing that I want the judiciary to do, because the judiciary are independent of the Executive, and quite rightly so. They are not a branch of Government. I want the judiciary to have the full range of options available to them, which of course include going to prison, but also include drug desistance orders, tagging, various other community options, and so on.
Q229 Dr Mullan: The use of Operation Safeguard is the tipping point in terms of decision making. How much longer do you think Operation Safeguard will be in use?
Damian Hinds: We will keep Operation Safeguard as an option for as long as we need. I am not putting a firm end date on it; I think it would be wrong of me to do so. We don’t use most Operation Safeguard cells most of the time—the vast majority of Operation Safeguard cells are not being used. But in a system like ours, where there is quite a degree of variability in what happens—we will talk about this no doubt more during the course of the hearing—you need to be ready for the unexpected. That is why it is right that we have those contingencies in place, while we continue to invest in the estate overall and make sure we are expanding our capacity and our capability to get people away from crime.
Q230 Dr Mullan: So you do not have at the moment any particular plan or expectation that is going to finish at any particular point.
Damian Hinds: We are not going to keep it going longer than necessary, but we will keep it going, as I say, as a contingency or option for as long as it is prudently right to do so. And, no, that does not involve me being able to point at a particular square on a calendar.
Q231 Dr Mullan: What is the current uptake? What capacity does it offer to you? What are you utilising at present?
Damian Hinds: It offers us up to 400 cells a night, and there are different degrees—in a particular region, you would say, “We need them to be stood up to a greater degree of readiness.” I do not have the precise number in front of me, but I am happy to write to you. The percentage utilisation of 400 cells multiplied by the number of nights is small, but the facility is there, and that is important.
Of course, in a system like this you can also get quite substantial regional variations. You can get pressure in one particular place, and that is why it is important for us to have that flexibility.
Q232 Dr Mullan: Finally, the other stakeholder group in all of this when it comes to decisions about custody will be victims and their families, who may feel disappointed or that justice has not been served by someone not having the custodial sentence that they otherwise might have had. I have asked this before at previous Committee hearings with the Department’s officials, but how do you, as a Department, measure how effectively you are delivering justice from the perspective of victims to help you weigh up your policy decisions? You could say, “We want to use Operation Safeguard, because we want to be sure that we are delivering justice for victims,” but how do you measure that as a Department?
Damian Hinds: Justice is clearly at the heart of everything we do. It is in the name of the organisation. When people are found guilty of something, we need to ensure that the sentence that follows delivers on all the aims of imprisonment or the other options that are there. That includes punishment, deterrents, keeping the public safe and rehabilitation. I do not know whether there is a single measurement or survey that one can do at a particular time; we are trying constantly to make sure we are optimising those things. Of course, the sentencing guidelines come from the independent Sentencing Council, and they do some direct—
Dr Mullan: They ask in the round.
Damian Hinds: They ask about people’s perceptions of justice, and that is very important. I think there is also somebody on the Sentencing Council who is there specifically to represent the victim perspective. In everything that we are doing the Ministry of Justice we try to take a victim perspective, because—
Q233 Dr Mullan: I guess what I am getting at is how you know whether you are delivering that. Would it be so crazy to ask people when the perpetrator of their crime has been sentenced, “Do you think that delivered justice?” Why is that such a big thing? Should we not be intellectually curious in the system about whether victims of crime feel that justice is being done?
Damian Hinds: No, I do not think that what you say is a crazy suggestion. I think what you just described is professional curiosity, and I do not think that is a bad thing. We do have things like victim impact statements to give them a role in this process, and of course we meet here on the day that we have published the Victims and Prisoners Bill, putting the victims code on to a statutory footing and being clear to all layers and stages in the criminal justice system about the listening to and supporting of victims that must be central to everything we do. I also take with me your challenge of finding that out in a more direct way. I think your point is a good one.
Q234 Dr Mullan: Perhaps you could ask officials to look at what the options and what the Department’s view might be and write to us. Would that be okay?
Damian Hinds: Sure.
Dr Mullan: Thank you very much.
Q235 Janet Daby: Minister, I just want to go back to a previous point. I am hearing that cells are out of use because there are not enough staff, and Michelle mentioned two estates where that is happening. Obviously, that means there is increased overcrowding in cells, and I just want to know what the knock-on effect is—the challenges and pressures. Also, what is the exact number of cells that are not being used in those estates?
Damian Hinds: We are minimising the number of cells that are not being used. I do not want to sound like I am dodging the question, because you say you want an exact number. In my job—Ms Eagle will remember this—you go to places and see blocks of cells; sometimes, people say, “These used to be cells,” and you would probably take the same view I do, which is, “I’m glad we no longer use this particular piece of real estate.” We are not counting those now as part of our available stock, because we have a way of saying what we think is safe, and we use this word “decency” about what people are housed in.
Q236 Janet Daby: But that stock would be available if you had the staff.
Damian Hinds: No, not some of the things I am talking about, which are taken out of use for a variety of reasons. As you will know, some of our prisons were built a very long time ago. Various adjustments have been made over the years to make them more appropriate to what we would expect today, but there are some parts of places where you cannot necessarily do that.
On the general point about how many cells are out of action, we are trying to minimise those, aside from maintaining our statutory commitments and requirements to upgrade fire safety. I will ask Michelle to talk specifically about places where, because of minimum staffing levels and safety requirements, we have cells out of use.
Michelle Jarman-Howe: To come back to the first point in your question, where we have taken cells out of use because of SERS—a strategic enhanced resourcing support panel—we are basically saying that we cannot run this prison safely, without risk of disorder, unless we close accommodation. We have that currently only, as I say, in HMP Swaleside and HMP Woodhill, and we have 176 cells out between those two sites. Obviously, we continue to monitor the estate really carefully for safety and stability. So SERS continues to sit, and we will continue to keep that number under review.
You made the point that, where we take cells out, that means crowding elsewhere in the system, but that is not the case. Crowding arrangements for each individual establishment are assessed separately from the SERS process. Over the last two years, we have had a range of panels, and every single prison in the country has been included in that scrutiny process. We have considered what level of crowding, if any, is safe for that prison. Something that happens in another prison does not therefore mean that you are required to crowd more, above a safe crowding level, in another establishment. We simply take down the amount of people we can hold.
Q237 Edward Timpson: I wish to change tack slightly, although this is still relevant to the prison population and the pressures on ensuring that there is sufficient capacity in the prison system to accommodate it. Just under a year ago, magistrates’ sentencing powers were increased from six months to 12 months under the Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022. Less than a year later, a statutory instrument laid by your ministerial colleague—Mr Freer, the Minister responsible for courts and legal services—reduced that back to a maximum of six months. Could you explain a little more, from your perspective as prisons Minister, the drivers behind that decision and how long we are likely to have to wait for a decision to be made to reintroduce that 12-month sentencing power for magistrates?
Damian Hinds: The first and really important thing to say is that it is absolutely no reflection on magistrates and the way they have used that capability, which has been exactly as asked. It is the case that when we brought in the increase from six to 12 months, we said—I say we; it was not me but the Department—that we had to retain the flexibility to be able to change it in future. Having the capability for the six to 12-month sentencing has brought forward more people going to prison. It does not mean a change over the long run in the number of people going to prison, but it does change somewhat the moment at which people are going to prison.
That has been happening at the same time as a number of other factors, and it is quite difficult to isolate the magistrates’ sentencing powers factor. It has happened at a time of quite a lot of change and variability in the day-to-day and week-to-week numbers of people entering the secure estate. Changing it back—it is changing it back, of course, to what was normality for a long time—will bring us back, at least for that factor, to a more normalised flow of people coming into custody. We do not expect it to have any effect over the long run on who goes to prison or for how long, but it does change the sequencing.
Q238 Edward Timpson: Do you know how many additional people were handed down a custodial sentence as result of the extension of magistrates’ powers during that period?
Damian Hinds: No, and you cannot really say so with pinpoint accuracy, because there is no counterfactual. In our assumptions, we do not think there is a change to the number of people getting a custodial sentence; it is just a change in the timing. It has brought them forward.
Q239 Edward Timpson: I think that is really important, because when you look at some of the initial data—I understand that the Department wants to look more closely to understand all the moving parts here—the early trawl through the evidence suggests that the number of elections for triable either way offences at the Crown court was largely stable, at around 17%. The number of appeals to the Crown court has remained consistent. In relation to sentencing trends, monitoring by your Department has not shown that magistrates are giving sentences that would be any different from those that would have been handed down by the Crown court. Are you really saying that the main reason for pausing the extension of the magistrates courts’ powers from six months to 12 months is to help to ease the pressure on the prison population?
Damian Hinds: It is to even out the demand pattern, and bring it back closer to what it has been historically. On our assumptions and our modelling, we do not think it changes in the long run the demand on prison places, but it does change the timing.
Q240 Edward Timpson: In a letter of reply from your ministerial colleague Mr Freer, he did set out that one of the consequences of reducing the magistrates courts’ powers back to the longer term six-month limit is that it could have an adverse effect on the Crown court backlog. We have to be careful here that we do not just move the pressure somewhere else in the system. How will that be monitored to ensure that when you do make the decision to return to what the Act last year intended to be a long-term change, we do not again end up in a position where there are further pauses and suspensions?
Damian Hinds: I take that point on board. May I offer to write? I do not want to stray too far outside my role as prisons Minister; obviously the two things are very closely related. You are absolutely right that there is a displacement effect in one direction, and there will be a displacement effect back in the other direction. I would not want to push too far the impression I am trying to give of my closeness to those exact numbers on the Crown court backlogs, but we will come back to you.
Q241 Chair: It seems to me that the magistrates might think, “This is worth nine months,” but they do not have the power to give nine months, so they send it to the Crown court and it will take longer for people to get sentenced. That is the rather cynical view of it, isn’t it? They will get their nine months sooner or later, but you are just pushing it back down the track because it will take longer to get heard at the Crown court.
Damian Hinds: We are putting it back to the status quo ante—the system that was in place previously. As this Committee knows, there has been an awful lot of upheaval as a result of the coronavirus and other factors. This does not quite bring us back to something predictable, because there is still a lot of unpredictability in these things, but it is back to something more like the model that we had in the past.
Q242 Chair: What the maximum powers of a court should or should not be is surely a matter of principle, and it ought to have certainty. Either it is right in principle that magistrates can sentence for up to 12 months or it is not. You can make the case either way, but is it really in the interests of justice to tinker around with magistrates’ sentencing powers—switch them on and switch them off—to meet demand because the Prison Service cannot cope for whatever reason?
Damian Hinds: I want to be very clear about our appreciation of magistrates and the work they do. I do not think increasing the maximum sentence was an exercise in tinkering. Of course, we have said that we will review that, and it is right that we do that. You know, because your Committee has had hearings about the Prison Service and the Court Service, that there have been quite a lot of—as they say these days—headwinds to deal with one way or another, particularly with the backlog effect of the pandemic and other factors.
Q243 Chair: I see. So it is not an issue of principle, then? You have no idea when you might return to it or if you will?
Damian Hinds: I do not want to seem like I am dodging the point. We have said that we will review it, but it is always important to look at the evidence. Mr Timpson is quite right that we need to do the full analysis. The figures that he gave, by the way, were absolutely spot on. As you know, there are a lot of different factors operating at the same time, so we need to be able to look at them in detail and reflect on them.
Q244 Chair: Will that data be published when you have done that review?
Damian Hinds: I do not know exactly what data we publish, but we will certainly, in the usual way, explain why we have done what we have done, and we will rightly be held to account by you, Chairman.
Q245 Maria Eagle: This is another one of what I referred to, perhaps unkindly, as “tricks”. I understand, in the circumstances, why you are looking at everything you can do. On 14 March, it was reported that you were asking probation staff to redeploy to prisons—about 90 qualified staff, I understand. Probation services have been told that if they do not come up with the 5%, they are going to be asked for 10%, so you are determined to get these people redeployed to prisons. Why are you moving staff from the probation service in the community, which is itself under significant pressure?
Damian Hinds: It is headquarters staff positions that we are talking about, not community—
Maria Eagle: I hope you are not suggesting that headquarters staff do not do valuable and important jobs to keep the probation service running.
Damian Hinds: Ms Eagle, I am not and I did not.
Maria Eagle: Good.
Damian Hinds: In these circumstances, if we were not looking at the headquarters establishment and saying, “Are there people who have the skills and training in some of these areas and could support at the frontline?”, you would rightly be asking us why we were not doing it. In most organisations I have worked for over time in the private or public sector, there was rightly periodically a review to see whether it was absolutely maximising its talent at the frontline. That is not to say, of course, that the headquarters functions do not play a very important role, but we have been looking for some very specific skillsets, particularly around the categorisation of individuals, and experience on OASys. A lot of this work can be done remotely. Some of it in some cases would be in prisons, but nobody would be asked to take on a prison officer-type role unless they were already a prison officer.
Also, it is important that we keep the numbers in perspective. The 90 that we are talking about is around 3% of those headquarters staff.
Maria Eagle: They have been asked to transfer 5%.
Damian Hinds: I do not want to cut across operational management decisions, but in jobs that I have done in the past, if you needed to get 3% of a certain headcount from one role to another, you quite often would ask for 5%.
Maria Eagle: You asked for 5% and threatened to demand 10%.
Damian Hinds: Ms Eagle, we must not throw around words like “threaten”. We have been trying to maximise—I think it is absolutely the right response and proportionate—where people can make the most difference, where we can harness the great talent and experience that they have. We have a lot of people in headquarters—I welcome this—who have frontline experience and have come from the field. It is one of the great strengths of the organisation, but part of that strength is being able to be flexible in how we deploy.
Q246 Maria Eagle: Let me quote from the email. It says: “I am asking you all to immediately identify 5 per cent of your staff to be released to assist the front line. Staff identified will be directed to temporarily move to priority front-line roles. If these numbers do not meet the demand, this ask could increase to 10 per cent.”
Damian Hinds: That is not quite the same as you were saying before. I think you used the word “threatened”.
Maria Eagle: It is a gentle threat.
Damian Hinds: Michelle may or may not come in on that. As I say, these are operational management decisions, and it would not be right for Ministers to second-guess and cut across them. But I can tell you from my own experience of similar things in different roles in different parts of the economy and society in the past that it is not an unusual thing to do. If you need 3% of people to be identified, you have to ask for more than 3% of people to be identified because not everybody is necessarily going to be suitable.
Q247 Maria Eagle: I understand that, but this is only happening because of the shortage of skilled people in the Prison Service itself, otherwise you would not need these people redeployed, would you?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: May I come in?
Damian Hinds: Of course.
Michelle Jarman-Howe: The role of headquarters is to support the frontline. That is fundamentally what headquarters is there for. I think you are quoting from an email there, and you are absolutely right that the original ask was for 5%. The 10% was a recognition of the fact that we might need a larger pool of people. At the moment we have up to 90 employees, which is the 3% identified, but those staff have not all been deployed, so the number of deployments is much lower than that.
The challenge at the moment is to make sure that we have prisoners progressing through the system in an appropriate way. That is the challenge always. Are they in the right category of prison? Can we get those prisoners that are eligible for open estate moved into open estate so that we are not holding them unnecessarily in the closed estate? Are we managing risk effectively?
You are absolutely right in the sense that there was a recent request. It is not the first time that that request has been made. We made a similar request for headquarters to support the frontline during covid and followed through in a similar way. Those skills are really helpful for the frontline. At the moment we are using them effectively, but the numbers are very low, and in respect of probation even lower. There are very few probation staff working at headquarters and very few of those, if any, have been deployed.
Q248 Maria Eagle: Thank you. I want to move on. On 15 March a High Court ruled that the Lord Chancellor’s changes to parole board rules were unlawful. Can you explain why the changes were found to be unlawful? What is your understanding of it?
Damian Hinds: When you ask whether I can explain why they were found to be unlawful, obviously we have seen the judgment. I am not sure it would be right for me to unpack how that judgment was come to.
Q249 Maria Eagle: I am not asking you to explain how it was come to. I am asking you to give the Committee your understanding of what was unlawful about what the Lord Chancellor’s changes were to the parole board rules.
Damian Hinds: This is about different report writers recommending what should happen in these hearings. It is not about the evidence they give, which is unchanged, but about whether there is a recommendation attached. I should say we are disappointed by that result and we are looking at our legal options just now.
Q250 Maria Eagle: The judgment was quite strikingly bad for the Department, because the High Court held that the rule change “amounted to an unlawful interference with the independent judicial determination of the legality of detention, contrary to common law and/or Article 5(4) of the European Convention…was irrational”, and that the guidance was “unlawful”. That is a pretty tough judgment to be on the other end of. The judgment included: “The decision to make the rule was an attempt by a party to judicial proceedings to influence to his own advantage the substance of the evidence given by witnesses employed or engaged by him and an impermissible interference with a judicial process.” That is pretty tough reading, if you are on the other end of the judgment, I would say. What steps has the Department taken? You have said you are examining your options about whether to appeal, but is that all you are doing, or are you perhaps looking at complying with the judgment, in case you decide not to appeal?
Damian Hinds: As we sit here today, we are considering our options. Right now, there is not something more to say about that. There will of course be in due course.
Q251 Maria Eagle: Okay. The court said that the unlawful guidance may have resulted in prisoners being released who otherwise would not have been released, and prisoners not being released who otherwise would have been released, so what actions have you taken to ascertain how many people might have been affected, one way or the other?
Damian Hinds: We know of no evidence to say that people have been released who otherwise would not have been. It is important to lay out that the changes did not restrict the evidence that was put forward, at all. It was about the attachment of recommendations, but the evidence is still there for the Parole Board to make the decision on the whole of the evidence on all the facts of the case.
Q252 Maria Eagle: Again reading from the judgment: “One of the Secretary of State’s principal purposes in making it was to suppress or enable the suppression of relevant opinion evidence which differed from his own view in cases where he expressed one. That purpose was improper.” That is from the judgment. Perhaps you would like to have a think about whether you might try to identify anyone who had been adversely affected, because if you decide not to appeal the judgment, you are going to have to put right what has gone wrong, aren’t you?
Damian Hinds: I don’t want to sound repetitive, but as I say, right now we are considering those options. I have certainly heard what Ms Eagle says.
Maria Eagle: Thank you, Chair.
Chair: Okay. Thank you very much. That is helpful. Ms Daby.
Q253 Janet Daby: It seems to me that there is a bit of a crisis in retaining and recruiting prison staff at the moment, partly to do with the need to deploy staff, and partly to do with having cells out of use, due to not having enough prison staff. The Committee surveyed prison staff and had nearly 7,000 responses: 75% of those responses indicated low staff morale. The Prison Service is facing serious challenges retaining its staff, with a leaving rate of 15%. Why are band 2 and band 3 to 5 officers leaving the Prison Service in such high numbers?
Damian Hinds: I want more people to join the Prison Service or, to start with, to think about joining the Prison Service and to consider it as a career option, and then for all of them to apply and join. Once we have that talent attracted into the service, I want people to stay. Not quite everybody, because it is not quite for everybody—it is a very unique job, but we want to have high retention rates.
The overall picture over the past few years is that in the Prison Service, as in many other walks of life, during covid the rate of people changing jobs went down a lot—more people stayed put. Straight after covid, there was a massive rise in people changing jobs. That also coincided, as you will know, with unexpectedly low levels of unemployment—considering we had just had a pandemic and so on—and a very intense labour market.
We had a higher than normal leaving rate in that period. The most recent data shows things starting to come back to something more like normal, but—and this is not just for the Prison Service, this should be true for lots of workforces in the public and private sectors—I think you genuinely need to look at it over a number of years.
The other trend that is relevant and, again, is relevant in the whole of society, including in the Prison Service, is that over time there has been a trend away from staying in one job or one career for life. We still have quite a few people who do, but many people choose to do something else at different points in their life. There is a longer-term sectoral tendency in not just the Prison Service, but a number of workforces, towards shorter tenures.
The long and the short of it is we want our leaving rate—our attrition rate—to come down. There are some encouraging signs on that front, but we want to improve it further.
Q254 Janet Daby: The Committee survey indicates that those prison officers who are leaving are moving towards jobs in the police or the Border Force. What is it that you think is attracting them to those roles that is missing from the Prison Service?
Damian Hinds: In my last job I used to have responsibility for Border Force. We used to worry that people were leaving Border Force first for the police, but also to some extent for the Prison Service. The truth is, Ms Daby, there is a certain overlap in the attractiveness of those different careers. The police, as you know, have been recruiting at very significant scale for the last three years or so, and that has had its own dynamic effect on that part of the jobs market.
We think being a prison officer is a very special role. There are other roles that are very special too, but we think this is something particularly special that attracts particularly special people.
Michelle Jarman-Howe: Might I add something? First of all, as the Minister said in response to your initial question, I think there is an absolute acknowledgement that we had a very challenging year in 2022 in terms of both recruitment and retention. As the Minister said, we are very confident that the next quarter’s figures will look more positive.
In response to your initial question about whether we understand why people are leaving, I think we have a really strong understanding. We have taken retention seriously for a number of years, but certainly over the last few years we have a really strong understanding about the reasons why people are leaving. I can give you the top three, the top five or the top eight, if that is helpful, and also the steps we are taking in each of those areas to try to improve. We are seeing an improved retention rate; we are going to start seeing those figures come through in the next quarter.
There has also been some specific work we have done with sites. The retention rate last year was particularly high in 10 sites, so we have been focusing lots of attention on those. Of the bottom eight sites specifically, six have now had a significant improvement, so we are casting our minds to the next eight that might get support.
We have also put a huge amount of retention work in across the whole system—a retention toolkit, for example—as well as looking at our offer and at if we can make our offer more flexible. Pay has obviously also made a difference. There is a huge amount of activity in this area, including in areas like wellbeing, career progression and leadership.
Q255 Janet Daby: Thank you for that, Michelle. My question was why do you think morale is so low, and why do you think prison officers are leaving?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: Our top three reasons are leadership, career progression and wellbeing.
Q256 Janet Daby: And wellbeing?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: Yes. Wellbeing is No. 1.
Q257 Janet Daby: Do you want to expand on that?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: I should say those reasons vary month by month, but they are typically the top three. Wellbeing is generally about how staff are feeling supported in the Prison Service and the establishment. Obviously, being a prison officer is a brilliant role—I have been one myself, many years ago—but it is a very challenging role, and we need to ensure that people are effectively supported in it.
We have put a range of steps in place over recent years, particularly over the last 12 months, to try to encourage better wellbeing. That includes things like new colleague mentors who have set up buddying arrangements in establishments. We are trialling structured supervision in a couple of prisons at the moment, too—that is about to expand to three prisons. We have improved our occupational health offer. We have an employee assistance programme. We have fast-track referrals for staff who have had traumatic experiences in establishments, including online and telephone counselling as well as face to face. We have self-referral arrangements for CBT. We have a range of initiatives. I am happy to talk more about those, but it is a real area of focus for us—our staff are very important.
Q258 Janet Daby: Charlie Taylor told the Committee last week that he was “close to” issuing an urgent notification on Eastwood Park following the most recent inspection. He said: “83% of women said they were suffering from mental health problems” and that levels of self-harm had almost doubled since the previous inspection. Dame Anne Owers told us that the situation at Eastwood Park is deteriorating, that staff are burnt out and that morale is the lowest it has ever been. What is your message to staff at that prison?
Damian Hinds: I was there in the last couple of weeks and met some of the amazing staff who work there with, I have to say, a very wide range of women in their care, including in what is now called the Cherry Blossom unit, which was part of the accommodation that was particularly highlighted in the report. I met some of the medical staff there as well.
There is no getting away from it—they are dealing with a challenging cohort of women. I think that there is a huge commitment on behalf of all the staff to do all they can to support those women. It is a place of incarceration—people have been in prison—but they are also people with, of course, their own difficulties. They have often been through great trauma themselves. They have often been victims before they were perpetrators and can have significant mental health issues to deal with.
I know—I saw it at first hand—that there has been considerable improvement in the physical set-up, particularly in those residential areas. There are also strong plans for the future in terms of improving things such as employability facilities and so on. But throughout the women’s estate, self-harm is materially higher than in the men’s estate. Self-harm is something that we have to be very vigilant about all the time. I think we are probably better these days at recording it, at least, and understanding the prevalence than in years ago.
Q259 Janet Daby: It is absolutely awful that self-harm has increased and is increasing. I want to redirect you back to staff. They are feeling unsafe and undervalued. What is your message to prison staff?
Damian Hinds: My message to them is that they do the most unique job in our society—a role that most people never get to see. It is very multifaceted. I know that they are valued—including, by the way, by prisoners—for what they do. But clearly the safety of our staff is absolutely paramount. It is one of the reasons why we need to make sure that we have the staffing ratios that should be there; we have very definite rules about what those minimum staffing ratios are. We need to make sure that, where required, there is the protective equipment and so on, but we also need to make sure that prisoners have purposeful activity, access to physical healthcare, which has come up in my discussions, and mental health support.
Q260 Janet Daby: Moving on, data from our prison workforce survey shows that at least 1,400 prison staff experienced bullying from a colleague in the last three months. Why is bullying among staff so high, and what urgent steps are you taking to tackle it? For example, 200 staff told us that they had experienced sexual harassment, and 56 had experienced sexual abuse. Is sexual abuse and harassment among the prison workforce something that you are aware of? You have not mentioned it. Are bullying and other forms of workplace abuse contributing to staff attrition? Again, you have not mentioned that yet.
Michelle Jarman-Howe: It is a really valuable point. Just to be clear, you have particularly pulled out the issue of female staff in prisons and that is something that we have been proactively addressing for the last few years. I am happy to provide more detail on that. Likewise, in terms of racially focused bullying, we are being really proactive in our thinking and our steps to address some of that challenge.
In terms of bullying itself, we have a reasonable understanding of bullying in the Prison Service. Clearly, while we have tried to be active on that over the last few years, we continue to recognise that we have more work to do. Several years ago, we took a number of steps, including, in 2020, setting up the Tackling Unacceptable Behaviour Unit across HMPPS. That was specifically set up to address issues of bullying, harassment and discrimination in the service, in recognition that we did have a challenge. So that service, for example, offers a confidential staff helpline. It has introduced a mediation service—which is being well used now across the service—so that staff can feel that their issues are being dealt with in an informal way. But we are also really clear that where formal concerns are raised, we want to make sure that those are absolutely appropriately and robustly dealt with.
We have introduced climate assessments proactively over the last few years. This is a specialist team who go into establishments and try to give the governors a personal handle on where their establishment is at and where their particular challenges are, whether that is about experiences of female staff, black staff or other cohorts of staff within the establishment or about any areas of the prison that are of particular concern. That is also available to our wider business units.
We have developed a specialist investigation service, because we recognised that investigations of this type are really sensitive and very difficult and complex to manage. So we have a specialist investigation team who undertake that work now. We are not stopping there, though. We have plans to develop further: we are going to increase the number of specialist investigators and increase the number of mediators.
We have an internal comms campaign about to launch. In terms of bullying, we are absolutely aware of how important it is for staff when they go into work; whether it is experienced by other colleagues, by line managers or by prisoners themselves, it is really important, because it does undermine their confidence in the system. So we have been very active in this area, but, like all public services, we have more to do and we are absolutely committed to doing it. I don’t know, Minister, whether you might want to cover some more—
Q261 Janet Daby: Michelle, I just wonder: to return to low staff morale, would the issues that I have raised meet your top three or top five priorities?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: Sorry, the issues that I raised previously were the reasons that staff gave us; it was what they were telling us were the reasons why they were leaving. But in terms of addressing issues of racial disparity, in either the prison population or the treatment of staff, that is absolutely a priority. Again, I can talk more about that. We have been very proactive in this space for a long time—
Chair: We are going to need to move on quite quickly, actually—
Michelle Jarman-Howe: That’s fine; I apologise.
Chair: Because there is quite a lot to get through as yet.
Michelle Jarman-Howe: Of course.
Chair: So we probably all need to be fairly succinct.
Janet Daby: Yes, sure.
Q262 Maria Eagle: Very briefly from me, then, on attrition rates, because you are losing a lot of the staff that you are recruiting—at 15%, the turnover is too high, and you have lost a lot of experienced staff. I wonder to what extent you think it is a factor that officers are exposed to violence, self-harm and the traumatic aftermath of some behaviours. If you are a younger, inexperienced staff member and don’t feel quite trained to cope, that is going to make you much more likely to leave, isn’t it? Certainly the independent advisory panel on deaths in custody has raised that issue as perhaps a problem for retention. So what are you doing about that?
Damian Hinds: Look, Maria, there is no doubt about that. It’s a difficult job, and you come into contact with some very difficult situations—they can be traumatic situations. That leads to two things. First, what Michelle and her colleagues are trying to do daily is to make prisons as safe as they possibly can be. Secondly, it raises the importance of mental health support and general peer support—being able to talk about things and disclose things among staff. There has been a lot of work on that in recent years. On the mental health side, it is through formal programmes, but also self-referral programmes—being able, as an individual, to get in touch through a hotline.
The new peer mentoring system is important, particularly because the people you mentioned are new in post and can be quite young. Apart from the formal line management mechanism, the ability to talk to somebody else who knows about the pressures, because they do the role too, and to open up is incredibly important.
Q263 Maria Eagle: Are you going to provide on-site mental health support in your establishments?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: Some establishments already do. There is certainly access to mental health support through OH for staff who need it, including staff who have been exposed to trauma. We have trauma-informed processes in place, but I can’t say it is widespread, in terms of every establishment having mental health support on site for staff.
In addition to what the Minister helpfully said about mental health support, the service is also taking practical steps around training, for example. Prison staff are exposed to very difficult things, so we make sure in their basic training there is support for some of the issues that they will have to deal with, in terms of both self-harm and violence. There are also practical issues around the roll-out of PAVA, for example, and SPEAR training, which I know other colleagues have given evidence on previously.
There is something about how we give mental health support to staff in practical training, and practical physical resources. We also need to demonstrate that we take it seriously for staff, so if staff experience violence, for example, we must make sure we pursue outcomes. That is why we doubled the sentence, for example.
Q264 Edward Timpson: Minister, you referred earlier to the importance of purposeful activity in prisons as part of the regime. In November last year, in a written ministerial statement, you said: “The majority of prisons are delivering a full or near full regime.” Do you still believe that to be the case?
Damian Hinds: I think the statement you are talking about is about recovery post covid and getting back to normal regimes. Yes, it is true. There are still sites with restrictions and difficulties, but in the majority of cases they have been able to go back to, as we call it, a full or near-full regime.
Q265 Edward Timpson: I will come back to that in a moment. The Committee has been trying to pin down, through all the evidence we have been given, what a full regime actually is, and we are yet to find a definitive answer. Perhaps, as the Minister responsible for prisons, you can help us out with establishing what a full regime actually is. In your role, what are your expectations for what should be playing out in prisons?
Damian Hinds: Very candidly, Mr Timpson, I understand why you have sometimes felt a bit frustrated in that quest. There is no single definition that says, “A full regime is x amount of time out of cell, x amount of education and x amount of employment.” Michelle will come in, no doubt, in a moment. The definition of a full regime is set individually, prison by prison, by governors, based on what it is possible to do in that prison. Of course, there are very different physical layouts of prison and different levels of facility, when it comes to things like workshop space and so on, so there is not a single national definition.
The other thing to say is that all of us want the opportunities for purposeful activity and education. We also want opportunities for meaningful work—productive work, purposeful work and employability work for getting ready for work on the outside. We all want those opportunities to be greater than they are, and to keep on improving.
Q266 Edward Timpson: Before Michelle comes in, can I give you an example that we had from Dame Anne Owers from the independent monitoring board? She told us that 50% of prisoners in Pentonville are not in work, purposeful, meaningful or otherwise, and are locked up for 22 hours a day. Prisoners have written to the Committee directly saying that they are out of their cells for only 45 minutes a day. I hope you will say that those examples clearly fall below a national minimum standard, as it were, of what a regime should look like. How can we as a Committee, and you as the Minister, be satisfied that there are no governors out there who are using the lack of a definition to reduce the amount of time available for prisoners to be out of their cells and engaging in the really important opportunities for potential rehabilitation, and so not returning to the prison system?
Damian Hinds: Michelle, do you want to take that?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: There are a couple of points. First, governors are very motivated to provide good regimes. They absolutely understand the relationship between a positive regime—a good regime—and the safety of a prison, and there is a balance to be struck in that. So I don’t think it is at all the case that governors are not motivated to provide a good regime; I think in some cases, though, there are inhibitors to being able to do that, whether that is the physical environment or the amount of work space. It is fair to say that workforce and lack of resource have impacted on regimes at some establishments and continues to do so, and we have a range of tactical deployments to try to support that—
Q267 Edward Timpson: I am sorry to interrupt your flow, but I think I will come in and give you a little bit more insight into what we have been told as a Committee on that issue.
What is becoming clearer, if it wasn’t clear before, is the absolute necessity for leadership and culture to drive good, well-run prisons, with prisoners who they don’t see again in the future. When Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, came to see us, he told us of Stocken in Rutland, which he had recently inspected. He said there are poor staffing levels, but the governor is very ambitious, as you say they should be, about getting prisoners out of their cells and into activity, and that shows in the amount of time that prisoners are out of their cells, even getting back to evening association as well. However, only 30 miles north of there, in Ranby, another category C prison—where there is much better staffing, so that should not be the issue—he found prisoners were locked up for far longer periods. First-class workshops that had been built, I am sure at great expense by your Department, were being left empty.
In trying to understand how these regimes are now starting to reappear, or not, across the prison estate, it seems to me that you have an issue with leadership. I think there are around about 122 prisons in England and Wales—
Michelle Jarman-Howe: There are 119.
Edward Timpson: So we are trying to find 119 great leaders, but the evidence that we have been given so far is that they are not all using that opportunity to improve the prospects of a full regime in prisons and the positive outcomes that that could have. What would you say to those governors who aren’t taking up that opportunity?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: I wouldn’t necessarily ascribe a differential in a comparison between regimes in two prisons as a failure of leadership in one of those sites.
Stocken has done a tremendous job. The acting governor at Stocken has done a tremendous job over the last few months. Governors, however, are responsible for designing the regime. Without wanting to get into the detail of those two specific sides, the governors of establishments, including those two prisons, will be taking into account a wide range of factors when they design their regime.
One is workshop availability and space availability, and I gather that that was taken into account by the inspector, but there are also other issues that governors have to take into account. What is the cohort? What is our population? What are the safety risks? Where, during the day, do those safety challenges present themselves? If we have very significant movements over the course of the day, is that a safety challenge and do we need to think about a way of doing that differently? What is the level of take-up in particular workshops and activity areas?
Governors are also trying to take into account the balance of other parts of regime. Regime isn’t just about how many prisoners we get into work during the core day, although that is a very important part of it, and likewise education. It is also about making sure that we get prisoners able to access specialist services, so that they can go and get their drug treatment, or access healthcare or visits, and all those areas. There is key work, for example, in making sure that we can manage things safely.
At some sites, particularly where we have an inexperienced staffing group, governors are also trying to balance that with getting the right time in development to develop those staff. They are trying to balance those issues around delivering a full and effective regime, as far as they are possibly able to. At the same time, they are trying to give staff the support that they need to make sure that we can develop them safely.
I think there is a range of issues and risks that governors are trying to deal with at the moment. We have an absolute ambition to try to improve the regime over the course of the next year. In fact, each governor will have to commit in their business plan over the course of next year to their regime ambition. We have a wide programme around future regime design—about how we can do that safely and how we can make regimes more bespoke to the individual prisoners that are located in that prison.
I go back to the point that governors are very motivated around delivering regime. They are trying to do that while balancing a range of risks.
Q268 Edward Timpson: I have just one last question on this. Maybe this is something the Minister can also help me with. In trying to ensure that there is consistency, as far as possible, across the prison estate around a full and open regime that meets all the elements that you want, how regularly is the Department having discussions with governors to try to work out what is holding them back so that we can see the progress that we need, since the ambition was set in train post covid?
Damian Hinds: Let me say a word on that first, and then I will turn to Michelle. Of course, the real answer is that it is fundamental to the line management discussions that are happening all the time through area directors to prison group directors, to governors and then to senior management teams within prisons.
From the point of view of Ministers at the MOJ, these days we also have a very comprehensive set of key performance indicators that we use to look at different prisons. There is a particular focus on employment and employability; use of ROTL—release on temporary licence—in prisons where that is possible; attendance of education and the number of people making progress in education; and completion rates on vocational courses. There is focus on a number of these things, and then we use that, as Ministers, to talk to the operation, challenge it and say, “Why would this be true in one place and not in another?”
Michelle Jarman-Howe: In terms of regularity—how often governors are held to account for their regime delivery—I would say very regularly through the line. In fact, we have just finished a very comprehensive exercise across the whole prison system about how regimes currently look, what the resourcing challenges are, what the particular challenges are and how they might be improved. There are very regular conversations from the director general of operations, myself, all the executive directors and through the line around that. We will continue to drive those conversations over the course of the year.
It is particularly important for us to identify blockers that are not necessarily about staffing, or not necessarily about prison officer staffing. For example, in some establishments where we have instructor vacancies, it might mean, unfortunately, that we have workshops closed, but that is less about discipline than about staffing.
I would say, just in terms of the regime offer more broadly, there are some things that every governor has to deliver—for example, things like time in the open air, exercise, access to showers and access to telephone calls. They have to deliver those core basics within a regime, but I would also say that regimes across types of prison are very different. There are very expansive regimes in all our open prisons, for example. I am very, very confident about that.
In large cat Cs, so your Stockens and your Ranbys, there are very, very big workshop education facilities in those establishments. They would offer something very different from somewhere like Pentonville, your first example. It is a local reception prison in London and has a very different population and capacity in terms of workshop education facilities. That has always been the case, so I think when we talk about coming back from covid, this is not about regime limitations in terms of governors’ ambitions; some of that is about the types of establishments and the very legitimate differences between those types of prisons.
Q269 Edward Timpson: Overall, then, based on what you have told us, how confident are you that in five years’ time, the prison estate will be able to safely accommodate 100,000 prisoners to a decent standard?
Damian Hinds: That is absolutely why we have a programme to add 20,000 places, first of all, to ensure we have the staffing to go with them and to keep on, as we have been, investing in and improving our education offer and employability work. We need to think about what happens on release. We have also been investing in accommodation and so on, so that is absolutely what we are working towards.
On the number—the projection, of course—as we were saying earlier, there is day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month variability. As with projections of the economy, you can’t be absolutely precise about where the numbers of prisoners are going to land, so we have to plan for a range of outcomes within that.
Q270 Chair: We are struggling with time. I am trying to think whether we can conclude the things we need to ask you in this session, because we have had some quite discursive exchanges.
Let me get on to this. There is an issue with retention of experienced staff. The number of people with over 10 years’ experience is dropping, particularly in the operational bands—band 3 to band 5. We have seen the statistics. You have had a reduction in those who have more than 10 years’ service in bands 3 to 5. At the same time, you have had an increase in those with less than 3 years. We have seen some of the reports from Dame Anne Owers and the IMBs. One in three of the staff at Bedford have less than two years’ experience. At Coldingley and Erlestoke, about 40% of the staff have less than two years, including about a quarter of the band 3s. So those are the key operational areas—the key operation offices at Wymott. What are the military doing to retain existing staff, and to ensure that there is sufficient monitoring and mentoring of those newer people? A phrase that was used with us is the passing on of jail craft.
Damian Hinds: That is a phrase I hear a lot as well. Running those prisons is essential to what this group of people do. I want attrition to be lower, but let is also not exaggerate it. We talked about 15%-ish rates in the Prison Service. The rate in the economy as a whole is most recently 14-something, so these are not dramatically different numbers. To be fair, the public sector rate is somewhat lower. But there are certainly sectors and industries—I used to work in one—where attrition rates are much higher and staff turnover rates are much higher than 15%. I want to make sure that when we have attracted talent and when they have learned their jail craft, we can retain them.
Michelle went through this earlier. The top three things we know from what people tell us about why they leave or are thinking of leaving are health and wellbeing, career progression and leadership. We talked about this a bit earlier, and Michelle talked mostly about the wellbeing side. We can talk more about what we are doing on career progression and leadership. It is important that people feel properly rewarded. Last year there was a strong pay settlement in the Prison Service. It is also really important, particularly in this kind of environment, that people feel safe. The sorts of investments we are making in body-worn video cameras, PAVA spray and so on are all part of the picture.
Q271 Chair: There is also the issue about the experience of those who are in managerial roles. There is a concern that some are very junior officers. For example, Charlie Taylor, looking at Woodhill, said it wasn’t atypical at all. Some very junior officers are being supervised by some fairly junior staff themselves. You would expect that, wherever possible—I accept the broader context, of course—there would be a means of ensuring a degree of monitoring to make sure that people really have enough experience to step up into those areas of responsibility. What is being done to deal with that? It seems to be an issue, according to the chief inspector.
Damian Hinds: I will let Michelle talk more about the detail, but I think we have done quite a lot on career progression. First of all, we have done work on encouraging people who might have that ability, talent and motivation to go into line management and leadership roles for the first time, to help them to think about it. We have worked on good selection and filtering processes to get the right people, and also for them to be able to reapply. It’s not a one-shot thing. The peer mentoring is part of it. We could explain a bit about what I mean by structured supervision. It sounds a bit like what any manager does, but it has a particular meaning in this context. We could talk more about that if it is helpful.
Chair: Okay, if you are brief.
Michelle Jarman-Howe: I will mention the point about inexperienced staff being supported by other inexperienced staff in terms of Charlie Taylor’s evidence. You are absolutely right: we have some young staff going up grades in the service. I was one of them myself many years ago. We absolutely attract a range of talent, and we want to make sure we are supporting them in terms of their career development.
In terms of inexperienced leaders, of course we always have a cohort of individuals who are early in their career and getting their progression. I think Charlie’s broader point, though, was that we have sites where we have very high levels of inexperienced staff—staff who are under 12 months or 24 months—which is why we have in place the new colleague mentors, who are setting up buddying schemes in 70 prisons at the moment to make sure that, where we have experienced staff working alongside them, those inexperienced staff feel formally supported.
The other really big initiative that we have introduced over the last few years is standards coaching teams. These are groups of staff who are selected specifically from prisons. They come together as a group, and we deploy standards coaching teams into establishments, including, for example, Woodhill. I think they have been into 19 over the last couple of years. These are very experienced staff whose sole job is to go into a prison, work amongst inexperienced prison officers and coach them literally every day on the landing for a period of around 12 weeks, to give them the support and confidence that they need. We have taken examples previously where establishments have benefited from that so much that we have extended the deployment of standards coaching team staff.
We also have a range of tactical issues—detached duty into prisons, for example—which often means that we put staff with more experience into establishments with less experience. We are pulling every possible lever we can to make sure that we are supporting those staff with inexperience.
Q272 Chair: But the evidence we have had is that detached duty is not a very satisfactory arrangement; it can only work on a temporary basis. It is not fair on the staff, people do not like to do it, and it demoralises staff when they are asked to do detached duty. That’s a sticking plaster, isn’t it?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: I don’t think so. Detached duty is a tactical deployment, absolutely. I would not suggest that it is a permanent state of affairs. I don’t necessarily think I would accept that position. Whilst we have very significant levels of detached duty in the system at the moment, we can get some staff who would not necessarily have volunteered for that, although we have only very recently moved to compel.
My experience of going into prisons—I was in Swaleside last week, where they have a significant number of detached duty staff. Generally, though, staff are making a really positive difference in the establishment. The staff I spoke to last week were really welcoming the opportunity to work somewhere different and get some experience.
We have some staff on detached duty who almost do nothing but detached duty, going from site to site to try to get different levels of experience and to share their knowledge. I would absolutely accept that there are some staff for whom that is difficult, but we also have a really good proportion who are really wanting to get some experience of working elsewhere across the estate.
Q273 Chair: I am struck by the complete difference between your evidence and that of everybody else we have had. Frankly, you are giving me a rather Panglossian view of it, aren’t you?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: It is certainly not my intention to gloss over things. I would absolutely accept that things are very, very challenging at the moment.
Q274 Chair: There are real morale problems in the Prison Service, aren’t there?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: I absolutely accept—
Q275 Chair: What are you doing to grip it?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: I absolutely accept that there are some establishments where we have morale issues. As we have spoken about—
Q276 Chair: It is across the whole service, isn’t it? It is not just some places.
Michelle Jarman-Howe: I think in some establishments it is worse. In some establishments, it is particularly challenging.
Q277 Chair: It is an underlying theme throughout, though, isn’t it?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: I accept that. I am certainly not seeking to minimise that at all, but I also think it is important to suggest that, where we have taken initiative—we have been really proactive in all these areas over the last couple of years—we are seeing some evidence that it is working. We are starting to see that in terms of retention.
It is genuinely my experience, from being in the operation and being in prisons, that we have staff who are doing an exceptionally good job of supporting their colleagues, and that we have leaders who are doing an exceptionally good job of supporting their colleagues. I am certainly not trying to gloss over it, but I do want some credit for those staff as well.
Q278 Chair: I think we all give credit to those people; we have seen them. Is there some strategy, which underpins that individual good work, as to how we improve retention in the workforce, progression and experience sharing?
Damian Hinds: I hope that in what we have been saying to you this afternoon, Chair, we have managed to convey some of the important elements of that. For the avoidance of doubt, they are around looking, in a very structured way, at what people tell us.
We do structured surveying around this, exit interviews and so on, to understand what the issues are. We track over time what is up and what is down, and we talked about the top three: career progression, leadership, and health and wellbeing. But we know that at an even more basic level, we need to make sure that people are feeling safe and then we also know that people need to feel rewarded.
Q279 Chair: It is part of it. The final thing I am going to ask you about is that we heard some evidence about the band 4 supervisory roles and I am just interested in that. Governors have said to us, and you probably agree, that that is essential to the operation of the prison. What specific support goes to the person who has moved up into the band 4 supervisory role? It’s quite an important step forward, isn’t it, in their careers and in their responsibilities?
Damian Hinds: Yes. I’m going to put this in very simplistic terms; Michelle will give you a more sophisticated explanation. But in broad terms, the line management is with the band 5. Day to day, on-the-job supervision—a lot of that is done by the band 4.
Michelle Jarman-Howe: That’s absolutely right. All our grades, of course, are very important, but band 4 is very important. They drive regimes in establishments on the wings; they also deliver case management.
However, in terms of your specific issue about the support that we give them, I think we need to do more about that; we absolutely recognise that. We have got a range of programmes in place for band 4s and band 5s. First there is the line manager’s core programme, for those new to line management roles. That is a four-month programme. We have got Optimise for those who have been in post for two years and are looking to go further. We’ve got two more packages being introduced in 2023: a team-leading package around coaching/mentoring; and a Learning to Lead package. We are certainly doing more to improve our support for those grades, which we recognise are very important.
Q280 Chair: We have heard that the band 5 custody managers may have about 20 staff to manage. Is that fairly typical across the piece?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: Generally, it is a maximum of 25. It does vary significantly by prison. I’m sorry—I know this is a bit of a theme of my evidence, about variation between prisons, but governors have the ability to change things. The grading structure has to stay the same, but governors have the ability to move between the number of band 5s and band 4s that they have. Consequently, you can reduce the line management ratio by having fewer band 4s and more band 5s, and a number of governors have chosen to do that. There is a significant variation across the fold about line management ratios.
Q281 Chair: I was interested in what level of control governors have over their promotion and appointment of staff. How much discretion have they got?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: Promotion?
Q282 Chair: Yes—in promotion and appointments of staff. You talked about some of the scope we have given to governors, but generally how is it?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: Yes—absolutely. In terms of promotion, it depends which grade. There are national assessment centres for promotion up the grades. The first one for those is at custodial manager, then functional head. So there is a formal promotion process that candidates have to go through. Governors do then select the individuals that they wish to appoint for their establishments through a board process.
In terms of appointments, are you talking more generally about prison officer appointments or about specific grades?
Q283 Chair: We are looking at those operational grades in particular.
Michelle Jarman-Howe: For the more senior operational grades, governors absolutely would select the senior operational grades for their establishment once promotion assessment had been passed. More generally for prison officer appointments, that’s done at a national level.
Q284 Chair: I see. Do you have any concerns about the quality of line management, or are concerns raised with you by representatives of the workforce about the quality of line management at all, or about the quality of communication, as to whether—back to our point—there is enough experience in the line management as well? Is that an issue that you are aware of as being potentially difficult in some places?
Damian Hinds: Chairman, in any organisation you are going to get a variety of people. We have fantastic people working for us, but in any large workforce some are going to be stronger than others.
A key point is that in the top three things that we look at around people saying why they might, or do, leave, leadership is one of them. Leadership can mean different things, of course; it can mean high leadership and it can mean immediate leadership. That is one of the reasons why we are running some of the development programmes that Michelle talked about. Did you cover the Leadership Journey?
Michelle Jarman-Howe: No, sorry.
Damian Hinds: There is a relatively new thing we have called Leadership Journey, and then there is Leadership Journey 2. One of those is a horizontal programme working with leaders across the organisation, getting them to work with their peers. The other programme is more of a vertical look, trying to understand, within an establishment, if there are issues around retention, what are people saying about leadership? What are the things they are worried about? It then tries to address those very directly.
Q285 Chair: Thank you very much. We are in the difficult position of being likely to become inquorate before too long. Rather than trying to shoehorn things in, because there are some important matters, my colleagues and I think it would be better if we break off and organise for you to return, if that is convenient for everybody. That way we can pick up on the remaining issues.
Damian Hinds: Of course, Chair.
Chair: It need not be terribly long, but these are important matters and we do not want to rush them in any way. We will do that as soon as possible after the Easter break. I hope that it will be helpful for everybody. We are very grateful for the information you have given us today—it is much appreciated. If we have to shoehorn something in at a different time, we will make sure it is done in such a way as not to inconvenience diaries.
Damian Hinds: Thank you, Chairman, and thank you to the Committee, the Clerks and all the support.