Justice Committee
Oral evidence: Rehabilitation and resettlement: ending the cycle of reoffending, HC 469
Tuesday 8 July 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 8 July 2025.
Members present: Andy Slaughter (Chair); Matt Bishop; Pam Cox; Sir Ashley Fox; Warinder Juss; Tessa Munt; Sarah Russell; Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst; Mike Tapp.
Questions 298-316
Witnesses
I: Lord James Timpson OBE DL, Minister for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending, Ministry of Justice; Richard Vince, Executive Director (Security), HM Prison and Probation Service; Matt Grey, Executive Director (Rehabilitation), HM Prison and Probation Service.
Witnesses: Lord Timpson, Richard Vince and Matt Grey.
Q298 Pam Cox: We have been conducting a rehabilitation and resettlement inquiry, and that is what we will focus on this session. As you have said, 80% of offending is reoffending, so that transition from prison into community is a key moment. What is happening around the moment of release in terms of ensuring that people have a roof over their head and some form of income support, income maintenance, or a job?
Lord Timpson: The system we inherited with the early release scheme—ECSL—was chaotic. Far too many prisoners were released from prison in an uncontrolled way. Unsurprisingly many of them were recalled, often pretty quickly, because they did not have housing in place, they did not have the soft landing that was required for their drug use, and so on.
As I mentioned before, I am a big fan of intensive supervision courts, which provide that wraparound support so that we can divert people away from prison in the first place, but accommodation is the big issue. I have met a number of probation officers who say they are really housing officers, because so much of their time is spent looking for accommodation for people who are leaving prison. We know that if you do not have accommodation, there is a 30% chance you are going to be recalled pretty quickly.
I am going to hand over to Matt on the policy work we are doing, but I am very aware that when people leave prison it needs to be controlled, which is why I really like ROTL, release on temporary licence. For the cat D estate, we want to push ROTL as hard as we can. If someone has a job before they are released, they are far less likely to reoffend, as I know from personal experience.
It is about a combination of a soft landing, a job and accommodation, but also strong family ties. When I was going into Isis a few weeks ago, a young man was being released. He was met by two friends with their hoodies up and covid masks on, and a flashy car parked outside. That is not the release I want. I want it to be controlled, with a support network around them.
Matt Grey: In terms of preparing for release, the resettlement period for prisoners starts around 12 weeks before their release date. We try to work with them quite intensively to ensure that they have everything they need to have a settled release point.
You specifically mentioned accommodation and income support, so I will focus on those, but we have recently rolled out an increase in the number of specialist roles in prisons. We want to really think about how we find the right opportunities when people are ready to be released, both to make sure that they are given the right skills and training so they can get jobs more easily and, on the income side, doing more work to match them up with local employers. We have prisoner employment leads in custody who try to find local employers who will come into the prison and give people jobs.
We have also been working with the DWP to improve the process by which individuals can enrol for universal credit when they are released, so that if they do not have a job, they can swiftly access income support. We are making really strong progress on trials of universal credit, so that we are ready to enrol people straight away on release so they can then get the support that the DWP offers, not just the money.
As Lord Timpson says, one of the biggest challenges we have is about where we put people after they get released. Accommodation is ultimately the responsibility of local authorities, but we know it is challenging; our cohort is not prioritised. A number of years ago we rolled out some CAS3— community accommodation service tier 3—which is accommodation for up to 84 nights for people who are at risk of being homeless or rough sleeping. That has been really positive in terms of how it has been received by probation and people in prison when they get ready for release, because we know we can put them somewhere. We will have around 3,200 beds across the country by the end of this financial year, but that only gets us to a staging point of extending the cliff edge.
The real priority in the probation space is about how we work with local authorities to identify homes for people, and that takes up a lot of time for probation officers. We have homelessness prevention teams embedded in probation now who do much more of that link work to try to find opportunities and find housing, but I will not pretend it is easy. We know that there are pressures on local housing across the country; we are looking across Government at how we can do that more effectively.
The Office for Value for Money at the Treasury, in collaboration with the Home Office and MHCLG, has been looking at different ways of obtaining temporary accommodation to see whether there are more efficient ways of doing that, but the key for us is to make sure we have that support, and that probation provide that.
It is really important for us that homeless accommodation is not just anywhere you can put somebody. We need to recognise that we are supervising people on release as well. We have people who have been released and are still on tag, so we need to make sure we think about their accommodation needs, both in terms of their resettlement support and by making sure we can provide public safety supervision.
Q299 Pam Cox: Could you update the Committee on your liaison with MHCLG on that scheme? That would be very helpful.
Lord Timpson: In the release prisons, we also have banking and identity administrators. One of the things I was aware of when I was doing my employment work was that many people were leaving prison with no bank accounts at all. They found it very difficult to get universal credit and all the other things that we take for granted. The role had a slow start, but they are making a massive difference now, especially as the team we brought in has learned how to do it. I have met people in prison who had never had a bank account before, and now they are leaving prison with a bank account. Admittedly there is not much in it, but they are set up in a way that they have never been set up previously. Before, they were set up to fail. As we become an increasingly digital society, it is really important that we set them up while they are still in prison.
Q300 Pam Cox: Just going back to an area my colleague raised earlier—time out of cell and accountability for that—you said it is not measured as such. Who is accountable for ensuring that time out of cell increases?
Lord Timpson: The data I have is on the amount of activity across the estate. On average, it is 67% in high-security long-term, 66% in reception, 58% in cat B, 65% in cat C, and in training prisons 73%—you would expect that. For open prisons it is 96% and women’s prisons 80%. So there is a lot of inconsistency in the amount of time people spend in purposeful activity.
The regime will obviously vary depending on the security situation at the time, but I will hand over to Richard—from your experience both governing prisons and your leadership roles, how can that vary and why? Obviously, we want our prisoners to have more personal activity and more time out of cell.
Pam Cox: As Minister, are you accountable for that, or is it individual governors?
Lord Timpson: It is more HMPPS.
Matt Grey: To answer the question, time out of cell is not a formal metric. The last Government talked about it, but we never formally measured it. What we have said is that governors need to find ways to get people out of cell for two hours, but we measure that through purposeful activity. Those are the statistics that Lord Simpson just gave you.
In terms of responsibility, nationally HMPPS is trying to put arrangements in place in every prison to ensure that people can access purposeful activity and an effective regime that supports their needs, but that is going to be the responsibility of the prison. We have a national regime model, and there are regime plans that every governor has to have for their prison. Those plans set out how they will improve, and continue to improve, time out of cell or access to purposeful activity.
We set national priorities for people. Over the past 12 months a real priority for us has been getting people into education and maximising our classroom space, but it is up to each individual governor to think about how they utilise everything available within their prison and find local partners to do that. In recent years, thanks to Lord Timpson, we have rolled out employment advisory boards. They work to support the governor, for example by bringing in businesses to provide workshops in prisons, but there has to be an element of accountability at prison level and national level for us to support them.
Q301 Pam Cox: There is a significant divergence there because contracted prisons are fined if they do not meet targets on time out of cell, but as I understand it, public sector prisons are not incentivised to meet that requirement in the same way. Should we have minimum levels of time out of cell as a statutory requirement?
Lord Timpson: In principle, I like trusting governors to run their prisons. They know their prisons, their cohort, their staffing, the limitations of the buildings, and the regime that they want. Certainly, listening to the direction and the areas of inquiry from your Committee, Chair, it is around understanding what level of freedom governors should have to run their prisons. My instinct is that I would like to trust our governors to do what they can to reduce reoffending, rehabilitate people, and run safe regimes. Do you have anything else to add on that, Matt?
Matt Grey: Not really; I fully agree. The challenge for the way we set up contracts with providers is that we stipulate a minimum service level. If we took a service-credit approach with some public sector prisons, it would be a perverse incentive to governors, because it would penalise them for what is often not in their control. They may have difficulty with the estate, such as a lack of workshop space to get people into. Governors apply incredible levels of ingenuity to find space for people, and I think that is what Lord Timpson is saying about letting them come up with those ideas. If we penalise them for not creating things that might be very hard to do in the establishment they run, that will create a perverse outcome.
Lord Timpson: Do you mind if I add one other point? HMP Millsike is a brand-new prison; there are 280 prisoners in there now, but they are going to go up to 1,400, I think. The prison has a huge workshop potential. They have great spaces, and when the prison is full, there will be a lot more opportunities for prisoners to go in them. Older Victorian prisons—for example, the ones around here like Brixton—have too many prisoners for the space that they have to do personal activity.
Q302 Tessa Munt: For the earned progression model, the sentencing review said: “The criteria for compliance should also include the expectation that the offender will engage with purposeful activity and attend any required work, education, treatments and/or training obligations where these are available.” Are you going to legislate for that? Is it going to be included in the legislation?
Lord Timpson: I cannot talk about something that has not been published yet.
Tessa Munt: No, but you would have an intention; you would have an idea.
Lord Timpson: It is my intention that prisoners have an incentive to behave, not to take drugs, not to be violent, and not to have contraband that they should not have. To make that more likely to happen, we need regimes that they can positively respond. We need libraries that they can engage with, classrooms that they can go into, and purposeful activity. We need to help them to maintain relationships with their families as well. The way I see the progression regime is that it is around behaviour, but we need to make sure that we create an environment where they are more likely to behave.
Tessa Munt: It sounds to me as if you are not intending to legislate; you are going to do this by willpower.
Lord Timpson: I cannot talk about legislation that has not been introduced.
Q303 Tessa Munt: What would you do if a prisoner, or a large group of prisoners, was not engaging?
Lord Timpson: Remand prisoners, for example, do not need to engage at the moment. When you go into a busy remand prison, there is far less activity going on. In fact, Richard and I were talking about this earlier today: we know that people who are convicted for very long sentences may not engage with the regime at all for the first few years. It may take up to 10 years until they start responding to all the support there is for them in prison.
I want prisoners who are engaged and really focused on getting out. I met a number of ex-offenders last night for dinner, and one gentleman was telling me that when he was in Feltham as a 17-year-old, he went into the library and saw this book on the stock market. He did not know what the stock market was, but he became fascinated with the financial services industry. He is now a vice-president of a large American bank. So there are opportunities, but we need to present those opportunities on a plate for them.
Richard Vince: People’s engagement will shift over time and, depending on the circumstances, they will come in and out in terms of how engaged they are. If there is a punitive response to when people disengage—for whatever reason that may be—that can be counterproductive. We refer to it as getting them on the hook. There comes a point where you get them at the right time, and they will engage and take advantage of things that are available to them. It is not a linear process, if that makes sense.
Q304 Tessa Munt: I am interested in, and have read a lot about, what Charlie Taylor has said about ADHD, and similar conditions, in the prison service. The numbers seem to be incredibly high, although we do not have any screening per se. I am hoping there will be some consideration of how we engage people who have a specific learning need in appropriate activity, and make sure that we address those needs, screen for those needs and understand how people learn.
Lord Timpson: We have neurodiversity support staff in every prison. The awareness of ADHD and other challenges is far better than I have seen over the last 20 years. I am also interested in autism in prison and where we have autism wings and parts of prisons. I remember going to one at Wakefield prison; it was world-class, and it made a huge difference to the stability of the prison. We need to be increasingly aware of these people, and we need to support them, because it helps them and it helps the regime. Matt, do you want to add anything on policy?
Matt Grey: I fully agree that, as society gets to understand mental health and neurodiversity more, we are seeing more and more people in prison who we can identify with those needs. Our screening is not as perfect as we would like it to be. We identify quite a few people, although it can take time, but whatever our screening currently says, there are definitely more people in prisons who have neurodiversity needs.
As James said, we have rolled out a neurodiversity support manager in every prison and youth custody site in recent years. It has made a huge difference for people to be able to identify those needs and really think about how we provide the right supportive regime, both in terms of how to structure education provision but also just thinking about how the wings are operated. It has also helped us think about how we give better staff training, and that has informed our enable programme, so that staff are better able to start understanding people’s different learning styles and how they can engage with them more.
We have also been doing work to understand what is going on behind how people front in prison. When they are not engaging with the regime, is that because they are being difficult, or is it because they had a bad phone call from their mum the night before? That can influence behaviour. We are much more psychologically informed about our engagement.
We are also looking at some specialist provisions. In all new custody sites, we have special education co-ordinators to help to inform those provisions because of the special needs of children. We also run specialist services for education and employment. We run something called the creating future opportunities programme in custody, and in the community for people who are furthest from the jobs market, who cannot or will not engage in mainstream provision. We have also been trialling enrichment officers in a number of prisons that work with those who cannot engage with most of the normal regime or what we offer, and thinking about how we can create some bespoke activities.
I was really lucky to sit at a table with an enrichment officer who is operating on the Stamford Hill site at the moment. He is doing some really interesting work with prisoners, thinking about what they need and what they can engage with most effectively. It makes a big difference when we are getting to that informed way of engagement.
Lord Timpson: I would like to mention attachment as well. For many years, my family have been interested in attachment; we have funded lots of work on attachment and it was a subject on which I spoke to the Governor and the team at Eastwood Park last week, especially in the mother and baby unit. I was really pleased that the staff were aware of the issues around attachment and what we can do to help mums and their children with their attachment issues.
Tessa Munt: I am really glad to hear that. I feel that, perhaps as a nation, we do not recognise the things that people can do as opposed to the things that they cannot, particularly in relation to people who are on the autistic spectrum and those who have ADHD. I do not know whether I am using the right language, but it is about having a future.
Q305 Warinder Juss: I want to say very quickly that we sometimes get parliamentarians saying that we are not punishing offenders enough. I agree with you that if prisoners were given proper choices, they would go along the route of trying to get out of prison. Do you therefore believe that as a Government, or as a country, we should be putting more resources into rehabilitating prisoners rather than focusing on punishment?
Lord Timpson: Victims have to come first, and we need to do what we can to have fewer victims. Punishment is what the courts give and prison needs to be a place where people are punished, but we also need to rehabilitate them while they are there. Probation should offer punishment outside prison, but again when 80% of offending is reoffending, something is clearly going wrong. It is my clear view that we need to be experts in punishment, and we need to be experts in rehabilitation.
Q306 Sarah Russell: We know that KPIs are complicated things and can drive perverse incentives, so they are not necessarily a magic wand, but when you ran Timpson, did you have KPIs for yourself and your senior leadership team? Do you have them here?
Lord Timpson: In my previous life, I had two: how much cash was in the bank every day compared to the same day last year, and how happy my colleagues were, because there was a direct correlation between how much profit the business made and how happy colleagues were. It was literally a direct correlation.
We do not have a happiness measure for the stats that I look at now, but we do lots of staff surveys. Sometimes I worry that I am asking for so much information from the team that has never been asked for before, because you need to get under the bones of HMPPS. It is about measuring the capacity every day. I am interested in staffing levels, disturbances and violence, succession planning, and the building of new prisons and the timeline. I am really interested in spending public money wisely, so I question a lot why things cost so much and how we can do things for less. I also look a lot at probation and workload. Those are the ongoing issues that I look at.
I am also looking at various projects—for example, I get weekly updates on what is happening with sorting out the buildings in Manchester prison. I am really interested in the new security room for staff at Winchester prison, because when I went there it was unacceptable. I follow the various projects until they are done and then they drop off the list. In some ways I am trying to do my job in a similar way that I ran the Timpson organisation, but I am not the executive; I am the non-exec supporting our fantastic colleagues.
It helps that I have known Matt and Richard for a long time before doing this job. I am well aware of the talent in the organisation, but I am also aware of where I need to put the pressure on. For example, the organisation is very aware of capacity, because it has been a conversation that has been going on in the Department for many years, but I want to move us to a point where things are more sustainable and we can really start to develop new things rather than trying to fix the holes. The way we can progress both probation and prisons is by really developing what we do, embracing technology and embracing change rather than looking behind.
Q307 Sarah Russell: The plan is to put more police on the streets; there will be more arrests and more people coming through. How will you manage to do all the stuff that you are doing and want to do—and I believe are genuinely personally committed to—when the number of people coming in the front door increases? I know that the idea of the Gauke reforms is that we will manage to stem the flow and stabilise the system somewhat, but how will you manage this?
Lord Timpson: We are creating 14,000 more prison places, so by the time of the next election there will be more people in prison than ever before. There will also be more people in probation on tags, home detention curfews and so on. The size of our organisation and the volume of work we will need to do is going to grow, which is why the £700 million of extra funding for probation is really important and needed. That will be going on accommodation, extra tags, extra staff, extra technology and so on.
I am also really aware of the investment we will put into diverting people away from the criminal justice system. For example, the goal of the Women’s Justice Board, which I chair, is to reduce the number of women in custody. We also want to grow intensive supervision courts, which again will help to solve the problem of why people are prolific or hyper-prolific offenders. Many of the reasons for that, as you are well aware, are around mental health, drugs, lack of accommodation, and dysfunctional relationships, especially when it comes to women. There was an interesting quote from one of the senior staff at Eastwood Park last week. She said, “Every woman in this prison is a victim themselves.” So we need to focus on diverting people away before they come into the top end of the criminal justice system.
Q308 Sarah Russell: You mentioned women as victims; I am very interested in violence against women and girls and the Government have set significant targets to reduce that. What engagement are you doing on that issue, and where do you see it fitting within the rehabilitation process?
Lord Timpson: It is a very clear goal, and there are a number of policy areas that we are working on at the moment, not just in the sentencing review but in the Brian Leveson review, so I have to wait until that is published. One thing that is very clear is that the level of domestic abuse and violence is far too high. For far too long, women have not felt that they can come forward and talk about the difficult circumstances they are in. A number of those women are in prison, either because they have been coerced into doing difficult things or because their mental state has deteriorated so much.
For me, a lot of this is around how we can divert the women who come into the criminal justice system as a result of domestic abuse; that is a really important line of work for us at HMPPS. We also need to have the right courses for people who are in prison for causing this pain to women and committing offences against women, so that they understand the effects of their behaviour on their relationships. Far too many men come out and commit very similar offences against different women. They need to understand the consequences of that and the impact it will have. I know there are a number of courses in prison. Do you have details of those off the top of your head, Richard?
Richard Vince: I am afraid I do not.
Lord Timpson: We can write to you to give you a flavour of those. It is something we really need to focus on.
Richard Vince: Just to clarify that point, we are about to move into a new suite of offending behaviour programmes, so I would be referencing programmes that very shortly we will not be delivering. I would not want to misguide the Committee.
Q309 Sarah Russell: It would be helpful to understand what has been delivered, what has been measured of what has been delivered previously, what is going to be delivered going forward, and whether that is only being targeted at people who have been convicted specifically of violent offences or if it is going to be offered across the board. You might be locked up for drug dealing, but it does not necessarily mean you did not also commit acts of domestic violence. In fact, the police tell me that sometimes women come forward to get their partners locked up for drug dealing because that will get them put away for long enough that they will stop hitting them, whereas a domestic abuse prosecution will not necessarily result in a long prison term.
Lord Timpson: I have heard that as well. If it is okay, we will write to the Committee with the details of the previous policies and courses and our plan going forward.
Q310 Sarah Russell: How does that work in the youth estate?
Lord Timpson: We will follow that up as well.
Sarah Russell: Thank you.
Q311 Chair: If none of my colleagues have further questions, I have one or two things with which I would like to conclude the session. First, you have talked about what you want to do with women prisoners; are there targets for that in terms of the reduction in the number of women in prison?
Secondly, in relation to the youth estate, Charlie Taylor identified growing levels of violence and the failure to achieve the levels of education set out. Are those areas of particular concern, and what are you doing in those areas?
Lord Timpson: On the number of female offenders in prison, it is our goal to close a women’s prison. The Gauke review into the presumption against short sentences found that 75% of women are sentenced to less than 12 months, so that could have a big impact on that number. We have not given a time scale for when that could happen, but in the meantime I am really keen on running our women’s prisons incredibly well and supporting women who are often the most vulnerable people in our society so that when they get out, they stay out. There are far too many women caught in the revolving door of drugs and violence at home going in and out of prison.
As far as the youth estate goes, Minister Dakin is responsible for that area, but I am well aware of the increasing levels of violence in the youth estate. My own experience of education in the youth estate is at HMP and YOI Parc. I had a look at the education provision, and I thought it was superb. I felt that the children should be spending more time in education, but when they were there, I thought it was very good. The staff told me that some young boys who were taking part could be incredibly disruptive and incredibly violent, which makes it very difficult to have straightforward lessons.
Richard Vince: I would probably point to the fact that they are young men, and we see a lot more impulsivity and volatility. Trying to balance the tensions out between those groups of young men can be very difficult, and that impacts regime provision, but the harm that they can do to each other and others is quite considerable, so I understand and agree with HMCIP’s report on that. There is a fine balance for governors between getting people into meaningful purposeful activity and engaging with the regime, while protecting the safety of both the children and the staff. It is really very much about the age group.
Q312 Chair: We have not yet touched on the IPP prisoners. We know about the action plan; could you tell us what progress is being made on that? Have you yet made any determination about how to respond to the recent Howard League report on ending IPP sentences?
Lord Timpson: We are considering the Howard League report; I am very clear that there are three ways of dealing with this. The first is to do nothing, but I am not in the business of doing nothing. Secondly, there is re-sentencing, but we are not in the business of re-sentencing either. Thirdly, we can pull every lever we have in the action plan as hard and as fast as possible to get IPPs ready for a successful release and to reduce the number of recalls. That is my plan.
The number of never-released IPPs has come down by 14% in the last year. The process regarding the number of RARR recalls is working well. My goal is to have 90% of IPP prisoners in the correct prison to help them with their rehabilitation and prepare them for a successful parole hearing. We got down to the 70s, we are now around the 80s but I want to get up to the 90s. We also need to work out how we deal with the 233 IPP prisoners who are in secure mental health hospitals at the moment, because one of my concerns is that if they come back into the prison estate they are often going back into cat B locals, which is often not the right environment for IPP prisoners.
In the Lords, probably a third of the questions and time spent in debates is around IPPs. I recognise how important the issue is, and I recognise the challenges that IPP prisoners and their families have, and that is why I feel we need to make sure we do everything we can to release them safely into the community and that they stay out of prison. I have employed lots of IPP prisoners who have gone on to have really successful careers with us and other people, but some IPPs who have never been released are very far from being released safely at the moment, so we need to do a lot more.
Q313 Chair: You are right to say that there is a huge concern about this across the political spectrum. I do not think anyone doubts that you are putting a focus and resources into this. What seems to be missing is a strategy or target to get numbers down by an appreciable amount, perhaps not to zero but reducing the vast bulk of those who are in prison over a discernible time period. Is there a plan to do that?
Lord Timpson: At the moment I am working with the policy team on coming up with an idea of how hard each lever I pull will result in how many IPPs potentially either staying out of prison or getting out of prison. We are very careful not to put too many numbers out publicly as that would set expectations that could be detrimental to IPPs and their families. All I can do is reassure the Committee that I am pulling all those levers as hard as possible, but I recognise that we are dealing with some very complex, complicated people.
Every prison visit I go to, I meet IPP prisoners. I sit in their cells and talk to them and understand their challenges. Some are back on recall, and I can see why they could get out and probably live a pretty normal life. There are others who have huge challenges around mental health and drugs and so on. We are dealing with a very wide range of offenders.
Q314 Chair: I want to focus finally on either maintaining or building links for prisoners in the community when they leave prison. There seem to be more restrictions on release on temporary licence now; there seems to be more of a risk-averse culture in that way. Is that right, and are you going to look at that again to try to ensure that there is a greater attempt to reintegrate people into the community?
Lord Timpson: It comes back to the theme that we talked about earlier on, around inconsistency. If you go to HMP Hatfield, virtually everybody who can be ROTL’d out are ROTL’d out, whereas if you go to Thorn Cross—which essentially is doing the same job—the figure is much lower. Part of that is to do with internal processes, part of it is to do with appetite and how many employers are out there to take people on.
I am a massive fan of ROTL and have employed hundreds of people. I am not involved in the business now, but I am sure that Timpson are still employing hundreds of people on ROTL today. We know how powerful it is in reducing reoffending and getting people on the straight and narrow when they are released. It is one of the many things that I am working on so that we get more consistency, because if we can do it in Hatfield, why can we not do it in other prisons?
Q315 Chair: The first time we met, you emphasised the importance of prisoners keeping links with their families. An example you used was the telephone contract, which was expensive or difficult for prisoners to use under the existing BT contract. You said that would be a priority for you because it was thought to be a quick win. We got a letter from you last week that said that, whereas there had been a negotiation down by 20%, I think, in the prices charged, by modern standards it is still a very expensive business to phone out of prison on a regular basis for a decent period of time, and according to the contract that is unlikely to change until 2029. Is there something you can do about that?
Lord Timpson: Being a commercial person, I am quite pleased that colleagues got the price down by 20%, because it makes a big difference to the number of calls that prisoners can make to their family. It is a really important way of keeping those communication lines going, especially with people’s children and so on. Like all things procurement, which is often mentioned in these meetings, is very complex. In the old Victorian prisons the way the whole networking works is especially complex, but I am really pleased that our telephone partner has reduced its prices. We need to make sure that it delivers a good service.
Q316 Chair: I realise it is different from buying a telephone contract in the outside world, but the figure we were given was that prisoners who wanted to keep regular contact and have proper conversations it could be costing £20 a week, which is quite a lot of money given the rates of pay in prison and other resources. Is there nothing further you can do in the next four years?
Lord Timpson: These people are in prison; we are providing a service, and there is a cost to providing that service. I think a 20% reduction and a 20% increase in phone calls is pretty good considering that no one was looking into this before. I am quite happy that the team has managed to negotiate this, so I would see that as a positive thing.
Chair: Thank you. We are exactly on time. We will not take advantage of the fact that we know you have this hour free, although there are a number of other avenues we would like to pursue; perhaps we can do that on another occasion. Gentlemen, thank you very much for your attendance and for your co-operation today.