Welsh Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Prisons in Wales and treatment of Welsh offenders, HC 113
Tuesday 28 October 2014
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 28 October 2014.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– HM Chief Inspector of Prisons
– Youth Justice Board for England and Wales
Members present: David T. C. Davies (Chair); Geraint Davies; Jonathan Edwards; Nia Griffith; Mrs Siân C. James; Jessica Morden; Mr Mark Williams
Questions 1-59
Witnesses: Nick Hardwick, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, and Dusty Kennedy, Head of Youth Justice Board Cymru, Youth Justice Board for England and Wales, gave evidence.
Q1 Chair: Good morning. Mr Hardwick and Mr Kennedy, thank you both very much for coming along this morning. This is the first evidence session of our report into justice in Wales, and we are very grateful. It is not going to be a tense political affair, so feel free to give us your opinions as you wish. If you see me twitching, I might have to try to cut things a bit short, or to speed them up if we get behind time.
Mr Hardwick, may I ask you to begin by giving us an overview of the performance of prisons in Wales, based on your most recent inspections? I was looking through the papers and saw that Prescoed seemed to have done quite well. To be slightly parochial, that is of interest to me, given the large number of people who seem to abscond from there on a regular basis.
Nick Hardwick: Overall, I am pleased to tell the Committee that we think that Welsh prisons are performing better than English prisons. In particular, Prescoed is an effective prison; it is one of the most effective that we see. I shall say a little more about that later if I may. Parc, in Bridgend, is again a very effective prison. Despite a lot of people having concerns about its size, we think that it is effective. Cardiff was doing okay last time we were there, although we are dealing with a population that has a high level of needs—a complex population that was shifting, with high throughput.
I was in Swansea myself for our most recent inspection, which was at the beginning of this month. We think that it had deteriorated a bit—not vastly, but it was not quite as good as it had been. Swansea is very overcrowded, but what it has is good relationships between the staff and the prisoners. The staff know the prisoners well, so that mitigates some of the procedural weaknesses. On the employment, training and education side, it was certainly not performing quite as well as it had been overall but, generally, it would be a more positive picture than we have seen elsewhere.
Q2 Chair: Do you have any thoughts on that, Mr Kennedy?
Dusty Kennedy: I echo what has been said, particularly around the under-18 unit in Parc. Performance there is better than average.
Q3 Chair: On the specific issue of the number of absconsions from Prescoed, is that a matter of concern?
Nick Hardwick: There was an issue about absconds and failures of the ROTL process in open prisons throughout England and Wales. You may be aware that the Justice Secretary asked me to do a review of the circumstances of three of the most serious failures.
What we found at Prescoed would be no exception to this. The system for managing the risk of people being held in open conditions had not caught up with the fact that what you were getting coming through was a significant number of IPPs—prisoners who had committed serious offences and had one of the old public protection sentences. The systems were not adequate for managing the risks that those men posed.
What has happened subsequently is that systems have been tightened up. We have not been back to Prescoed to see what has happened since, so I could not say for certain, but in the system as a whole, generally, we think that things have improved. The systems needed to be tightened up and they needed to be made more rigorous, and overall we think that that is what has happened.
Q4 Geraint Davies: I represent Swansea, so you will not be surprised that my questions are specifically about Swansea prison. You pointed out that, as we know, it is the most overcrowded prison in Britain. I know that it is difficult to answer this question, but do you feel that, if the number of inmates in Swansea went down to what it was supposed to be, the level of repeat offending would be lower?
Nick Hardwick: Obviously, I cannot give an exact answer. It is important to understand about overcrowding. The issue of overcrowding is not really one of prisoners being doubled up in their cells or of their living conditions, although these were poor in Swansea. The problem of overcrowding is that you do not have the activity places and resettlement processes that are adequate for the size of the population. What we found last time we were in Swansea is that they were simply not getting enough people into work and training activities; there were not enough places for the size of the population.
In my view, one of the things that does help the resettlement process is to keep people busy and occupied while they are in prison, so that they are learning. If they are getting the skills and habits and experience that they need in order to have a better chance of getting and holding down a job when they leave, then that should improve rehabilitation prospects. To that extent, you can say that overcrowding is likely to harm all outcomes.
Q5 Geraint Davies: One of the points that you mentioned in your introduction, which mitigated the problems of more repeat offending through overcrowding, was that in a small prison there was a better relationship between the prison officers and the prison community. Just jumping ahead for a moment, in north Wales we are moving towards a super-prison. Does it not follow that it would be more effective if we had a number of little prisons rather than a great big one where there is not this personalised relationship?
Nick Hardwick: With respect, it is slightly more complicated than that. It is true that smaller prisons are easier to run—that is on a commonsense basis. On the other hand, one of the most successful prisons in the country in our view is Parc, which is a big prison. What they have done at Parc is partly down to the way that it is run. First, Parc is a training prison, not a local prison, so you have a more stable population than you would in Swansea. The advantage of size in Parc, for instance, is that you can offer a range of activities and interventions that somewhere like Swansea simply would not be big enough to contain.
To make a comparison, one of the things that they were doing at Parc quite successfully was that they had good support for people with learning difficulties and for those with special educational needs, as they could put in specialist support for those prisoners. That is something that would be very difficult to do at Swansea.
Parc was well run so, despite its size, individual residential managers knew their bits of the population well. However, it is not a simple either/or. It depends on the purpose of the prison and on the quality of management, but I would say that, overall, smaller prisons are easier to run than larger prisons. At Swansea, despite some weaknesses, the staff there could have good individual knowledge of individual prisoners and could therefore tailor what was available on the personal level quite closely to what people needed.
Q6 Geraint Davies: You also seem to say that if there are too many people in a prison, and the labour market is not big enough to absorb that capacity, there could be a problem. In that case, if you get a massive prison in a rural environment, then it is going to be a disaster.
Nick Hardwick: The questions that I would have for the prison in Wrexham are around precisely that. To what extent can the local economy manage? There are jobs created in the prison, but then you have people learning, and there will need to be industry and work available for people in the prison. Where is that going to come from on a sufficient scale? What is going to be the impact on health services locally, and so on? I am not saying that there are not some big questions about Wrexham, but I personally am not aware of the answers yet. However, you cannot make a simple equation, with big equals bad and small equals good. That is not our finding.
Q7 Geraint Davies: In short, the Swansea issue could be improved. Is it your view that we should move towards fewer people in Swansea, in a nutshell?
Nick Hardwick: The level of overcrowding at Swansea is a problem, and it affects its overall performance and the success of its rehabilitation activities.
Q8 Geraint Davies: What about female inmates? Obviously, if there are no local women’s prisons, all sorts of problems are related to that, in terms of childcare, repeat offending and anxiety—and presumably even offending among the family in terms of dislocation. What do you think about that, and what should we do about it? Is there an opportunity to build female prisons as well as the male ones?
Nick Hardwick: The female prison for Wales is Eastwood Park, near Bristol. A high proportion of the women there are Welsh. To be fair, they do a reasonable job of trying to mitigate some of the distance issues and family connection issues that exist there. In an ideal world, I would like to see women prisoners in much smaller units that offer levels of support appropriate to what is a much needier population than the male population, but, in the current economic climate, the resources to do that are going to be difficult.
There are some lessons to be learned from the success of the juvenile unit in Parc. You would normally say that you do not want children in an adult prison. However, the best juvenile unit in the country is the juvenile unit in Parc, which is an adult prison, and they keep the juveniles completely separate. It is very self-contained there; indeed, we think that it may be a bit too self-contained.
The question that that poses is whether you could have a model that was similar for women prisoners. Again, this is not an easy answer, but one comparison might be with Peterborough prison, where there is a male and a female side on the same site, and that works quite well. On the other hand, in the past, we have seen women’s units in male prisons such as Winchester prison, Durham prison and the prison that we inspect in Northern Ireland, Hydebank Wood, where having women on the same site as men has been disastrous for the women concerned. They have a much poorer experience. Again, it goes back to how it is actually run, how the building is set up and how it is managed.
Q9 Mrs James: I, too, want to speak about Swansea, because I am the Member for Swansea East. As you can imagine, mine is a typical working-class constituency, so a lot of the—how can I say this?—constituents I visit are at the prison. I regularly go there. The special thing about Swansea prison is its restorative justice work. The Alpha project there, and the work that the chaplaincy is doing there, is fantastic. Do you agree that it is sad that a lot of this work is being done by volunteers? For example, the chaplaincy, off its own back, supports people who live in places like Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire and Aberystwyth. They take it all on board, yet they have not had a penny of funding.
Nick Hardwick: There are issues around funding. I would add that one of the strengths of Swansea is the work of Pact. It deals with families and does some very good family work in Swansea. I would not go completely with what you say. Part of Swansea’s success is that it feels when you go there like a real community prison. That is a real strength.
Q10 Mrs James: They know the prisoners.
Nick Hardwick: Yes, they know them—sometimes, perhaps, a bit too well, as in, “It’s nice to see you again.” There is a bit of action, but there is a bit where their expectations are not high enough. Sometimes, I seriously think that they know them too well.
However, one strength of the English and Welsh prison systems is the involvement of third-sector organisations and volunteers at lots of different levels. That is a strength of our system. Sometimes, I think that they are doing things that are not appropriate, but I certainly would not want to see less involvement of volunteers. However, I would want to see some better resources for more paid staff in some critical areas. I think that it is a good thing if the community in that part of Wales gets to know what is happening in the prison and starts to help to deal directly with what are community issues, so I would not go completely with what you are saying.
Q11 Nia Griffith: On the issue of community being incredibly important, there is also the obvious issue of helping prisoners afterwards, with probation officers needing to visit prisons. I know of situations where prisoners are miles away. Are there any guidelines for trying to keep prisoners nearer to home? Indeed, I know of one who had to move from Gloucestershire to Kent, and it makes a huge difference for the family and to the costs for the probation service. All these things mount up, and it does not seem logical. What attempt is being made to keep people, if not in their nearest prison, say Swansea, as near as possible?
Nick Hardwick: There are two things to say about that. First, you are absolutely right about the importance of family contact. We recently published a thematic report with HMI Probation, and we found that the most effective resettlement agency is the prisoner’s family. They are the people who fix them up with jobs. They are the people who fix them up with accommodation; if the wife will not have them back their mum will put them up, and that sort of thing. Those family connections are very important, and they are not given enough priority within the system.
To be fair to the Government, they are trying to establish resettlement prisons. Swansea and Cardiff will be resettlement prisons, and the idea behind that is for prisoners doing short sentences and for prisoners who are to be released shortly, who are coming to the end of a longer sentence, to be held in a prison that is local to their area, one in which the community rehabilitation companies have a connection, and where those services are more localised. That is a good thing, but there are some concerns about delivery. At the moment, we do not have prisoners in the right place to make the resettlement prison idea work. We have some way to go to make that effective, and we have a concern about that, but generally that is what should happen.
In terms of longer term prisoners, there will be some prisons with a specialist function that may not be very close to where a prisoner is located. What should happen is an effective sentence planning process, so that all of these different issues are weighed up—the importance of family connections, the training input and the rehabilitation programmes that you need. Judgments are made on a planned basis of where it is best for a prisoner to be, but, too often, prisoners are put in such-and-such a prison because that is where there is space, rather than it being where they need to be.
Q12 Geraint Davies: Finally, on women and resettlement, is there an issue because of devolution? More and more local services are being devolved, and we may have a future where services—social services, obviously, but other services as well—are devolved, so women coming out in Gloucester, Bristol or wherever, do not have the support systems that might be at hand if there was an opportunity in Swansea. The men presumably have that, but they have less need of it because they do not have children to look after.
Nick Hardwick: It is only right to say that it would help if they were held more locally. To be fair to the staff and management at Eastwood Park, they are trying to make those connections, but it is not ideal. It would obviously be better if women from Wales were held in prisons in Wales.
Q13 Geraint Davies: Is there any funding? For example, if a woman from Swansea was in prison in Gloucester, is there any funding for her family to visit?
Nick Hardwick: They might be able to apply for one of the grants that are available to help with travel costs, but often we find that families do not know about them and the prisons do not promote them very well. It is a real difficulty. It is not just funding. If you have small children and you are trying to cart them across the country to visit, it is often the practicalities rather than the money.
Q14 Mrs James: Obviously, you would expect me to be interested in this. The Howard League for Penal Reform, echoing what Baroness Corston said in her report, states clearly that what we do not need to build in Wales is a custodial facility. What we need to be looking at are different ways of supporting women who are serving non-dangerous sentences within the community. I know that there are excellent organisations, such as Gibran, that support women when they come out of prison, but is it not time that we should be looking at alternatives to custodial sentencing for women?
Nick Hardwick: I agree with Baroness Corston’s recommendations. She suggested that we should be making alternatives to custody for women, and that women should be held in smaller units with greater community links. A lot of her aspirations are widely shared.
In a sense, it is not particularly for me to say what size the population should be. I would say that, if there are women in prison, they need, as far as possible, to be held as close as they can be to home. For women, even more than for men—it is true for men as well—those family connections and responsibilities for children are likely to be greater and of more importance.
Q15 Chair: Is that entirely fair, in this day and age, when we live in an age of sexual equality? I question why we suddenly want to treat women in prison differently.
Nick Hardwick: I understand the point. What is striking if you go into women’s prisons and men’s prisons is that some of the practical needs are very different. The women are more likely to have responsibility for children. They are more likely to have mental health problems. On the whole, they are in custody for acquisitive rather than violent crimes. The security risks that they pose, on the whole, tend to be different.
It seems to me that we should be looking for equality of outcome. To achieve equality of outcome, or equitable opportunities for the same outcome, you may need to do some things differently, as you would do for somebody with a disability—you would act appropriately for their needs. Women are more likely to have responsibility for dependants, and that becomes a more important issue in a women’s prison than it does in a male prison, just at a practical level.
Q16 Geraint Davies: Given the proportion of women inmates who are single-parent mothers, the costs associated with putting their children into care, whether there have been calculations of the longer term costs for their future behaviour and all this stuff, has there been some proper number-crunching on the payback of women’s prisons? It is not an equal situation. For example, if you have a single-parent mother, the father is not normally looking after the child, and the rest of it.
Nick Hardwick: This is true for both men and women. The consequences for a child of having a parent in prison are, we know, severe, but it is often true that the women will have responsibility for dependants. What you also have, particularly with women in prison, is some extremely complex family situations. It is not simply that you have some happy family and that mum happens to be inside; you have some very complicated family situations that need some skilled and difficult interventions to try to resolve them.
Chair: I think that Siân might want to ask Mr Kennedy some questions. He has had an easy ride so far.
Q17 Mrs James: I am going to start by paying tribute to the wonderful youth justice team that we have in Swansea. The work that Eddie Isles, Jackie James and Rob Williams are doing is absolutely fabulous. I am a great visitor there and a huge supporter of their work.
I turn to the proper questions that I wish to ask. We have had a decline in the number of young people in Wales in the custodial system. How do you explain that?
Dusty Kennedy: We are in a fortunate position, almost a victim of our own success. We are taking a systems approach to reducing the numbers in custody. What we find, in the areas where we have concentrated on early intervention and prevention, is that we have reduced the flow into the youth justice system, and that has had all kinds of beneficial consequences for the cohort that is left within the justice system, because you can have more practitioner time devoted to the ones that are left in the system. At the same time, we have tried to encourage local authorities to take more responsibility for what happens inside the prison walls, as well as what happens outside. It is about introducing youth offending teams into local resettlement arrangements.
One of the areas that has been neglected in the past—almost properly neglected, because we were concentrating on prevention—is what happens after justice. After justice, at the end of a sentence, both in the community and from custody, there is almost a second chance of prevention. Too often, we have observed that while the young person is in the youth justice system they have a single point of responsibility for looking after their needs and attending to their behavioural problems. However, from the moment that the sentence is signed off and no longer exists, there is quite often a fall-off in the support that they get. They do not have the same kind of professional help to turn to.
If the family commitment is strong, the best support is from the family. Often, and particularly with the small number of young people we have left now, they have troubled backgrounds, and they have often experienced bereavement and a lack of attachment to adults. It is difficult even for their families to maintain good relationships with them, and a good contact.
What we have tried to do, after the demand management side, after the prevention side, and after the promotion of alternatives to custody, is to have a web of support among the young people when they leave custody and then when their licence period ends. Some of the best approaches have been through multi-agency panels or resettlement support panels. It is almost that the collection of agencies that should be involved gets around and develops an action plan for each individual young person. Someone, possibly from the youth offending team but preferably from a third-sector organisation, project manages that resettlement and integration plan to make sure that there is a tapering off of involvement with the young person as they reintegrate. Treating it like a circle—prevention, alternatives to custody and then after-justice—has resulted in the successes that we have had.
Q18 Mrs James: There was a recent conference hosted in Swansea called Female Justice Matters. We feel that there is a gap in provision, for 15 to 18-year-old young women in particular, and also that there is a wealth of information, knowledge and working practice out there, and we want to bring it all together. One of the things that struck me from the meetings that I attended at the conference was that there is some fabulous work that is being done. We have this gap but, suddenly, after the age of 18, they drop off. These young women may need all that extra help. They might not be ready at that time to make changes in their lives, but they come back on board, and there is nothing for them. Do you think that we could be looking at extending the age where women are considered to be in need of extra support?
Dusty Kennedy: As I was saying, the histories of boys and girls in the youth justice system, and the extent to which they are almost made vulnerable by their backgrounds, but also in a way made vulnerable by being involved in the criminal justice system, because a criminal record is a huge barrier to getting employment and so on—the thing about them is that quite often their development is paused at certain ages, so the extent to which they mature and become fully able to cope with the world varies from individual to individual. The key is to make an accurate, in-depth assessment when you start to work with young people and, in short, try to ensure that what you put in place to address the probabilities, the problems and the behavioural issues, is carried through for as long as it needs to be carried through.
A statutory system alone cannot do that, and nor should it. What we found with those resettlement support panels was that the most effective work was on the voluntary side. It was not what was contained in the licence, and it was not what was breachable; it was things that young people saw as voluntary and which they saw as being their decision to make. There is no reason why that kind of support and that kind of work cannot persist after the sentence. I absolutely advocate that.
Nick Hardwick: Perhaps I can add one thing that is worth the Committee noting. In Wales, girls under 18 are held in secure training centres, which are all a long way from Wales. If they are doing a sentence of any length, they will go from a secure training centre to an adult prison. For a small number of young Welsh girls in custody, the system is very disjointed, and they do not get as good a deal as other detainees.
Q19 Mrs James: That distance issue is a problem.
Nick Hardwick: If you were a 17-year-old girl in custody, you would be in one of the secure training centres, either in the midlands or down in London.
Dusty Kennedy: Unless you were one of a small number in a secure children’s home.
Nick Hardwick: Yes, the younger ones might be in a secure children’s home.
Q20 Mrs James: It is really important that we have these interventions. At the moment—I checked the figures this morning—we do not have any young people in custody who have come through the system in Swansea. We are doing really well, because we have things like the intensive support unit, which are intervening.
Something came through very strongly in that conference, which was the effect that legal highs are having and the difficulty in identifying the mental health issues and psychosis brought on by legal highs. Is this a growing problem?
Dusty Kennedy: This is something that youth offending teams have highlighted to us. I was in north Wales about a month ago and there was discussion about the impact of legal highs and how to deal with them, in terms of the fact that they are seen as legal and the fact that testing for them is something of an issue. We are at the stage now where we, as the YJB, will have to undertake one of our statutory functions and just find out what is working—if anything is working—and if there are areas that are getting ahead, and to collect that evidence and try to disseminate it to other practitioners.
Nick Hardwick: Legal highs are a really big and developing problem that we should be concerned about. Legal highs, because they are currently manufactured, are selling in prison. I am told that the prison value of a legal high is 10 times the street value, whereas for an opiate it would be three times the street value, so the profits are bigger. Often, these substances are not illegal to have in your possession. They are illegal to give to a prisoner, but they are not illegal outside, so the risks are lower. They are also difficult to test for, so it is much harder to get caught. What’s not to like?
Inside prison, first there are the effects of taking them, particularly if you mix them with other substances; they can be very dangerous at that level. Secondly, they are a cause of debt, and debt is a cause of violence. We have found that, on the whole, Welsh prisons do not yet have the problem to the same extent as English prisons—the drugs used in prison tend to reflect the drugs used in the community—but I think that they will, and therefore Welsh prisons need to be ready for this to hit them. On the whole, the system has been too slow to react.
Q21 Mrs James: There is also the cost of putting right the damage.
Nick Hardwick: Exactly. The effect is pernicious.
Q22 Jonathan Edwards: Following the decision to decommission Hindley, how do you think the youth custodial estate will be reconfigured in that part of the world? More importantly from our perspective, what will be the implications for children and youths from north Wales?
Dusty Kennedy: The immediate implication is for the four young people from north Wales currently held in Hindley. What we are doing is working with the youth offending teams that are supervising them, to develop some good transfer plans.
On the wider issue, I have no doubt that we will recreate elsewhere the specification that we developed for children from north Wales at Hindley. The two potentials that we are exploring now—we are talking to youth offending teams and the chairs of their management boards, and the Welsh Government because they were a partner when we set the specifications—is to go to the next nearest establishment, which is Werrington in the midlands, or to think about using Parc YOI. They both have their challenges.
The big challenge about Parc is the distance—not so much the distance but the time that it takes to get there, and that is not inconsiderable. However, what we do have in Parc is something in place that already has a Welsh specification. We already have the ability for Welsh language lessons, and Curriculum Cymreig is right there, along with cultural studies—the whole thing. If you walk down the corridors in Parc YOI, it is like being in a school in Wales, because everything is bilingual on the walls. People say “Bore da” to each other. There is little difference, apart from the obvious security, in the feel of the classrooms at Parc from the feel in many classrooms in schools in Wales.
We have the opposite problem in Werrington, although the distance is not so much greater than the distance to Hindley. I always do a Google search on how long it takes to get from Bangor to all of our estate, and the difference in time is about 20 minutes. It is not going to have a huge impact on what is already a long time. However, we do not have in Werrington the readily available provision that we have in Parc, so we will have to start creating that.
There are ways in which we will be able to benefit from what was in Hindley, no doubt, and we have been through it once; we have the blueprint and we can move it. We are also developing what is called a virtual campus, which is an in-establishment internet system for young people accessing terminals to do their learning, so everything will be bilingual on there, including Curriculum Cymreig and Careers Wales. We will be able to mitigate the issues, but it is a problem that we will have to address.
Q23 Jonathan Edwards: We shall discuss references to prison in more detail later. Is there not an opportunity, with this new facility still at concept stage, to put a youth wing in that prison? That would solve a lot of problems, would it not?
Dusty Kennedy: It would address some of the problems, but the main problem that we have is that the demand for places in that area of Wales and England is so low that we have had to decommission Hindley. I am not sure that the economic argument and the potential benefit argument would stack up against the cost and the time lag of creating a small unit within that prison. It would not be outweighed by what we know we can do now with the facilities that we have on tap.
Distance is a problem, but we had a resettlement consortium steering group that Parc ran, and it has been taking a lot more children from England recently, since Ashfield was re-roled. They are saying that even the English local authorities twice as far away as a local authority in Wales, that is good, that stays in touch and that does what it can for its parents is better than some that are much closer in Wales, where the local authority does not make as much of an effort. We know that it is possible to do well at a distance, and that is probably what I am going to pursue.
Q24 Chair: I have two questions, Mr Kennedy. You may not want to comment on the specifics, but I believe that one of the people mentioned in the evidence that we had from you was a young person from Monmouthshire who was being held in a secure training centre. I have heard figures being bandied around by councillors as to the cost of that being hundreds of thousands of pounds. Would that be about right? What is going on in this centre that costs so much? I hope that you do not mind my asking. I do not want you to comment about a specific individual, but in broad terms.
Dusty Kennedy: There are currently three different types of establishment—secure children’s homes, secure training centres and YOIs. YOIs are the cheapest; they are for the less troublesome young people—the older, more stable ones. Secure children’s homes are for the most vulnerable and the youngest. Secure training centres sit somewhere in the middle. The chief difference in terms of cost is the number of staff that you have attending to each young person. If you have a young person who needs a lot of attention, who needs to be watched around the clock, you need more people, and that is the main reason for the difference.
Q25 Chair: Is the figure that I have heard of between £160,000 and £250,000 a year for one individual plausible? That is what I have been told.
Dusty Kennedy: At the lower end, yes, £160,000 to £170,000 per annum.
Chair: I had another question, but I cannot see it here. I will probably have to jump out with it in a moment.
Q26 Mr Williams: We touched earlier on education and purposeful activity. You paint a good picture. I visited Parc prison myself, admittedly a fair time ago, and, indeed, there was purposeful activity. Will you tell the Committee what you mean, by painting a slightly deeper picture of what goes on there?
Nick Hardwick: The test that we would apply to a prison is that prisoners are able, and expected, to take part in activities that are likely to benefit them. The “expected” bit is as important as the “able” bit. Generally, what you have in prison are three sorts of activity going on. You will have paid work, you will have vocational training activities and you will have educational activities. Prisoners will potentially be doing a mixture of those three. Some of it will be done on a Welsh OLASS contract, which is responsible for the commissioning of some of that activity, and some of it will be commissioned by the prison itself directly.
In Wales, Estyn looks at this. We go into prison with Estyn, which looks at it in detail. What we would be looking for, with Estyn, is a strategy that assesses the needs of the prisoners that are held there, and relates that to the needs of the economies into which they will be returning, and then arranges provision to put those two together. You would expect Parc to do this, as it is a training facility and it should do what it says on the tin. For instance, it was doing very good horticultural activity that I saw there. As I mentioned before, it was doing really good work for people with special educational needs: it had a team providing high levels of support; and it was doing good work around Welsh language skills, perhaps a bit more than they needed to do for the higher level people. Because of the scale of it, that enabled it to provide training that was tailored to prisoners with a range of different needs, from those at graduate level to those who are having trouble reading and writing. They can provide that range.
If you look at Cardiff and Swansea, which are at the other end of the scale and which are both local prisons, in neither of those prisons was there enough activity. We did not think that it was terribly well organised. Swansea was not making best use of the space that it had. I thought that expectations in Swansea were too low; they were not pushing people enough to take advantage of the opportunities that were there. It was a bit too familiar—“Pleased to see you. We’ll see you back again in a few weeks”—and the expectations were too low. Cardiff, for a local prison, was not doing too badly. Since we were there, it has opened its Clink restaurant. It is doing more, but again there are not enough places and it is not using the places that it has as efficiently as possible. Usk is a small training prison, which is doing well; and Prescoed’s training was done mainly by getting people out on temporary licence.
Q27 Mr Williams: You have pre-empted my next question. I was going to tempt you to make a comparison of the two. There is good work in all those establishments.
Nick Hardwick: They are not doing badly, compared with lots of other places.
Q28 Mr Williams: Focusing particularly on the educational side of it, I remember going to Swansea prison and going into one of the classrooms there, in 2007 I think it was, and seeing educational resources that I had used to teach seven to nine-year-olds in primary schools in Powys being used to teach adults basic literacy skills. How big a challenge is teaching those core literacy and numeracy skills? How do Parc, Cardiff and Swansea compare in that respect?
Nick Hardwick: We have only recently inspected Swansea, and I have not seen the full Estyn report yet, so I slightly caveat what I say. Basically, when I was there, I was being told that, in Swansea, you have a lot of people doing qualifications that, as you say, are essentially what you would expect of an 11-year-old in primary school. Even some of that, frankly, was not as good as it should have been. For the relatively small part of the population who were at a more advanced level, there was too little provision. We felt that that was a drop back since we were last there, since our last report. The most recent findings are that it had dropped back.
Q29 Mr Williams: Every individual case of special educational needs is obviously unique. You spoke about the tailored approach in the juvenile section. I hesitate to say this, as a former teacher, because there is no average, but how intensively would you anticipate Swansea and Cardiff are working to develop numeracy and literacy skills at the lower end? On a weekly basis, how much time do they have? How does the overcrowding that you talked about—you put a caveat on what it means—impede the delivery of those core skills to that target group?
Chair: Is that a question for Mr Kennedy?
Mr Williams: The question is for them both.
Nick Hardwick: I do not have exact figures for the amount of activity available at Swansea with me, although they are available. I can give you that information if you would like to see it.
The basic conclusion about Swansea is that men were spending too long locked in their cells during the working day, watching daytime TV, with not enough to do. That is poor preparation for them going back out into the community, able and wanting to get and hold down a job. There certainly was not enough activity. Some of that, I think, was down to poor organisation, but some of it was down to the fact that there were more people than they had places.
Q30 Mr Williams: The problem is the characterisation that it is a young prisoners’ issue, but sadly it is not.
Nick Hardwick: We have a lot of young men, but, no, it is not simply a children’s issue.
Q31 Mr Williams: I ask Mr Kennedy my next question. The Government have acknowledged that education for young people in secure estates varies in quality, and they have announced their intention to open a pathfinder secure college in 2017. What benefits will that have, specifically for young people in Wales?
Dusty Kennedy: I hope that there will be few benefits from that particular establishment, because by then I hope to have reduced the number progressively further; and, also, it is going to be a long way away. We are fortunate in that most of what has been designed for education in both the secure college and in looking at what is delivered in the public-sector YOI is striving to meet the standards that we already have in Parc.
Increasing the time in education is one of the key drivers for transforming youth custody. We already have a contract that insists on 30 hours’ education in Parc, with the provider. We have children and young people out of their cells for the longest periods of time of any of our YOIs, in Parc, undertaking education and purposeful activity. We are very fortunate in that the majority of the boys are already getting that attention.
Q32 Mr Williams: You paint a positive picture about displays, about Curriculum Cymreig, and people from primary backgrounds can relate to that. That is good to hear. This is a techie question about records and the achievement of those young people in institutions as they leave. As part of their rehabilitation, are records seamlessly moved into their future, so that when people leave institutions they can build on what they have already achieved?
Dusty Kennedy: There are seams. I cannot deny it. One of the factors is the walls and the difference in the two sectors.
I refer back to what I said about distance versus engagement. Where local authority youth offender teams are well engaged with what is happening in the establishments, there is a very good transfer of information. The majority of the young people in secure accommodation are 16 and 17. They are moving into a phase of their education where careers advice and training for employment is a most important factor. In Parc, we have Careers Wales in there to help with that transfer.
Things are getting better and better. I would say that, I suppose, but we really are seeing it in terms of the results. There are areas where the transfer of information is not good enough. For example, until recently, the local education authority case management information system was not available within the secure children’s home. That has now changed, and it is available. That has turned on a whole new vein of information. We are incrementally working to try to smooth out those things.
Q33 Mrs James: Earlier, you talked about paid work, vocation and training, and you talked about education. I know from working in Parc that an important element is the training centre, and the work that it undertakes for external bodies. How difficult has it been for prisons, in the current financial situation, to find paid work and jobs for prisoners to do that are linked to the outside world when they leave?
Nick Hardwick: It is difficult for them, for obvious reasons. Sometimes, prisons do not make it easy for themselves. Sometimes, the people running prisons have a limited understanding of what their customers want, in terms of the people who are providing the work. I talk to a lot of employers, people such as Timpson, which does fantastic work within prisons and which employs people afterwards. I know some of its frustrations around whether prisons actually understand its needs as a potential employer, or as a potential provider of work in prison. Generally, in this economic climate, it is obviously difficult to find work, and there are obviously issues about work going to prisoners rather than to local communities and so on. It is not an easy thing for them, and sometimes, frankly, you find a lot of wing cleaners who are often not terribly busy, even in Parc.
On the juvenile unit in Parc, we thought when we did the recent inspection that one of the weaker elements was the link into employment and the training opportunities after the boys had left. That was one of our few criticisms of Parc.
I have just checked my notes on Swansea. We found that the amount of activity was not too bad. We found 13% of the men unoccupied during the working day, but it was not well organised. People did not have to turn up, punctuality was poor and people would skip work. There was not a good working ethos in terms of preparing people for a job outside. They were not doing as well as we thought.
Q34 Jonathan Edwards: You have been very positive this morning, Mr Kennedy, about the position of the Welsh language in Parc for young offenders. I ask Mr Hardwick about the adult facilities in Wales. In your evidence, you note that there are some inadequacies. Would you expand on that? Is there anything positive?
Nick Hardwick: It was not a bad picture overall. All the prisons that we inspected were doing something. This is something that Estyn looks at in particular. I shall give you some examples. In Cardiff, for instance, while there was reasonable teaching of Welsh, not enough was being done to encourage prisoners to learn and think about it in terms of its value to their future employment prospects and what it might open up. There was not enough encouragement of prisoners to take advantage of it. Parc was doing a decent job of teaching Welsh, but it was too limited for the people who already had a basic level, as it was not stretching them enough. Again, Swansea had slightly declined in what it was doing, as in the general decline in purposeful activity. It was not as good as it had been, which reflected some weakening in education activity overall.
Q35 Jonathan Edwards: What about prisoners from north Wales? Obviously, that is one of the bastions of the language but they may find themselves in English facilities. Is there provision for them?
Nick Hardwick: Not nearly enough, but it depends on which prison they are in. Some work was being done in Eastwood Park, but not nearly enough.
Q36 Nia Griffith: You have covered a lot of issues about rehabilitation. As a general question, is there anything that you feel they could be doing much better on resettlement for many of the prisoners that you have seen in Wales? Obviously, we have talked about what is happening inside the prison population.
Nick Hardwick: There are two things to say. One is that, generally, the key to a lot of it is family work. Prisons on the whole have a limited view of the work with families, and it tends to be seen simply as a privilege for the prisoners rather than as an important resource. They could all do more. Again, Parc is doing well on that.
There is an issue. One of the real strengths up to now of the Welsh system was that, if former prisoners had not made themselves intentionally homeless, they were seen as a priority for social housing. I understand that some consideration is being given at the moment to changing that system. It is important, and I understood that there are sensitivities around that, but there is a risk of it having unintended adverse consequences. The consequence may be that it becomes harder for prisoners to get accommodation, and without accommodation it is hard to get a job, and if you do not have something useful to do during the day then you are likely to turn your hand to things that you should not be doing. The housing issue is an important thing for the responsible Welsh bodies to look at very carefully, along with the consequences.
Q37 Nia Griffith: I just pick up on the issue that you raised earlier about where in the UK prisoners are sent. Is there a case for having a more concerted effort to enable prisoners to be closer to home for the very reasons that you have outlined—that the family should not be a once-every-three-month visit that is seen as a great privilege but an integral part of the work?
Nick Hardwick: There is a case for doing that. To be fair, the Government are trying to do that, but it is hard to do. That is where the population becomes important. If the system is operating at 99% full, then you put people where there is a space. If you have a little headroom, then you can put people where it is best for them to be. If you do have the headroom then you have costs, so you have to balance those things up. If you look at the cost of reoffending, families can play a role in that, and keeping people as close as you can to their families is an important thing to do.
Q38 Chair: Mr Kennedy, you said that the number of young people going into institutions is falling at the moment. Is that because sentences are more lenient, or because fewer young people are committing crimes?
Dusty Kennedy: It is not because sentences are more lenient, absolutely not.
Q39 Chair: So fewer people are committing crimes.
Dusty Kennedy: There are fewer young people—perhaps not fewer young people committing crimes or displaying offending behaviour. What is happening is that when that offending behaviour is displayed, before it is an arrest situation, when it is troublesome behaviour at school or in the community, or antisocial behaviour, agencies are getting together to address that behaviour, so you have fewer young people in the youth justice system. All the research suggests that the earlier you get into the formal criminal justice system, the more you are stigmatised and the more you will progress through it.
Nick Hardwick: A consequence of that—it would be a consequence for Parc—is that the boys who remain in the system, and it is mainly boys, will be much more troubled and troublesome. The boys that you will have in Parc will be boys that could not be handled in other parts of the system, so you now have some boys with very challenging behaviour, but the same boys are also very at risk from harming themselves. The staff who work in Parc and other places do not get sufficient recognition for the often exceptional work that they do with these very troubled boys.
Q40 Chair: Mr Hardwick, could you tell me the rough percentage of Welsh speakers who make up the Welsh prison population? How big a problem is it that the Welsh language facilities in some prisons may not be quite up to the standards that we would all like?
Nick Hardwick: I do have that figure, and I am not sure whether it is known. In a sense, it is something for the Welsh authorities. It is not a problem that prisoners or staff raise directly with us on inspection. It is part of a wider set of issues for institutions in Wales, and it is a matter for the Welsh Government.
Q41 Chair: What is the percentage of Welsh prisoners who take up the opportunity to learn Welsh?
Nick Hardwick: I do not have that figure, I’m afraid.
Q42 Chair: I am being a bit naughty here, and I shall probably upset two of my colleagues, but some might argue that there is a bit of political correctness going on here—“Let’s spend a lot of money on Welsh language facilities and Welsh language courses”—when in actual fact, very few prisoners are going to want it because the expansion of their cultural horizons will not necessarily be one of their top priorities. I am sure that Siân will rubbish this in a moment.
Nick Hardwick: These are probably arguments above my pay grade, but, regardless of the wrongs or rights of it, if you take the Cardiff issue, it is certainly the case, as I understand it, that if somebody leaving prison can speak Welsh it will improve their employment prospects. From our point of view, that alone is sufficient justification for making sure that they can do it. There are certainly some prisoners for whom Welsh is their first language, and it is important to be able to communicate with them in that language. We also inspect police custody, and that has been an acute issue in north Wales. If you are unable to communicate with some individuals in the language of their choice, you will not have the quality of communication that you need to deal with some sensitive things.
Dusty Kennedy: In terms of numbers, in the juvenile population it is very hard to put a figure on it. There is a strange phenomenon that, when you get a group of young people from north Wales, they all claim that they cannot speak Welsh and are not interested it. When you do one-to-one work with them, as Welsh speakers they all flourish. There is something about the machismo of being a teenage boy.
Q43 Chair: I am tempted to argue that it is quite the opposite in Llandaff and Cardiff.
Dusty Kennedy: It could be, but what you find is that the proportion of young people with special educational needs is very large. If you have lived and grown and learned in Welsh in the community, and you are put in an environment where you cannot do that, it really does act as a barrier.
Q44 Mrs James: It is their right to have that education. If they are Welsh prisoners within the prison estate, they have the right to access that. We may find it challenging, and we may find it difficult, but they have come through a whole education system where that has always been an option for them. I certainly applaud it, and I am really pleased to hear about the unit in Parc. I know the people who run that unit, and the Welsh language is very important to them. I applaud your support of it.
Nick Hardwick: In a sense, if it is the law, we will insist it’s done.
Q45 Jonathan Edwards: I want to go off the point here. We have had very good evidence about what is going on at Parc, and the youth offending wing there, but you are talking about a secure college. Would you explain a bit more about that, as I have no idea what it means? Is it moving youth offenders away from Parc to a different facility?
Dusty Kennedy: The concept of a secure college is best envisaged like this: rather than having prison with some education in it, it is having a school that is in a secure setting. Conceptually, that is the best way to think of it. In terms of whether it is going to move children and young people away from Parc, it certainly will not in the short to medium term, because the secure college is a pathway that has been developed outside our catchment area. In the longer term, the potential for secure college to replace Parc is there. As YJB for Wales, we would be advocating having a secure college that Welsh boys could access, and get the quality of service that they do now.
Q46 Jonathan Edwards: There is a facility in Parc, which the report says is doing really well and which ticks all the boxes as far as we are concerned, that potentially could be decommissioned.
Dusty Kennedy: In the longer term, that is a potential. I am not going to sit here and say that I am happy with Parc, job done. There are areas of Parc that we want to improve. Whether the quality of service that we get in Parc now happens in Parc or happens in something else, a good, if not better, secure college, for me it is the outcomes for the young people that matter rather than which particular building it is in.
Q47 Jonathan Edwards: Is there a site for the secure college?
Dusty Kennedy: For the pathfinder, yes, there is. It is in the midlands
Nick Hardwick: In Leicestershire.
Q48 Chair: We are coming to the end. I ask both of you separately what you feel about the Silk II recommendations for devolving youth justice. This may be a question more for Mr Kennedy. Perhaps I can then tempt Mr Hardwick into commenting on whether the rest of the prison service should be devolved to the Welsh Assembly.
Dusty Kennedy: As the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales, you will not be surprised to hear that our mission is to make the youth justice system effective for England and Wales. I have always felt that what I do in Wales, if you look at the devolution question, is either the best preparation for devolution of responsibilities or the best reason why it is not necessary. We try as far as possible to ensure that the youth justice system operates in a devolved context. Our position is that those kinds of decisions are matters for you, for politicians, and we will do the best that we can to prepare for that, should it come to pass, and do the best that we can do.
One thing that we would say, however, is that we believe that an important factor needs to be maintained. There is a strong argument, in whichever jurisdiction youth justice is situated, for it having a strong leadership function that can look at it in a systems way. We would be saying, “Okay, you want to devolve youth justice. We can see the arguments for that, and we can see some of the issues and complexities, but we will transfer it in a way that maintains the successes that we are having now.”
Q49 Chair: You feel that you are having successes now; there are fewer people going in. Are you confident that you do not need to devolve to the Welsh Assembly in order to maintain that success? You feel that you are not missing out a trick by not devolving to the Welsh Assembly but that things are going well at the moment and that they will continue to go well if things are not devolved.
Dusty Kennedy: Things are going well at the moment. I hope that they will continue to go well. There are aspects that would go better with devolution, there are aspects of administrative efficiency in terms of planning and involving Welsh Ministers in the planning, and there are things that are going to be more of a problem and more of a challenge. You have inverse economies of scale when you deal with a smaller population. That is doubtless.
Q50 Chair: One might argue that things are going quite well at the moment, so why change.
Dusty Kennedy: You might argue that, but we couldn’t possibly argue one way or the other. I am saying that we have every confidence that we can make it work in both contexts.
Q51 Chair: Mr Hardwick, there is a recommendation for looking into the possibility of devolving the Prison Service, justice and probation to the Welsh Assembly. I ask you the same kind of question.
Nick Hardwick: What the Silk Commission said made some sense to me. On the one hand, you can certainly see the advantages of devolving probation and prisons. You can see in principle why there might be advantage to devolving them to a more local level, to a national level, because you would have the benefits of community control and sensitivity that we have talked about. The Commission also said that the practical difficulties of doing so are very large. The question would be about how you would resolve some of those practical difficulties. It is a national system, an English and Welsh system, at the moment. Although it is true that the needs of some prisoners in large prisons could better be met in prisons closer to their homes, for others the sorts of specialist interventions or programmes that they need certainly are not going to be available at an economic level within Wales.
You also certainly need to have the ability to move people about. Interestingly, there was a boy in Parc recently who came from another YOI in England, who had exhausted that place and was getting into trouble with the other boys and needed to be moved out. The practical difficulties of running a much smaller system—which it would be if it were devolved—would be significant, although I can also see some advantages.
Q52 Chair: I think I will not be shot down if I said that there had been challenges in the health service in moving people around into services across borders. It is fair to say that it has been challenging and that there has been a temptation not to do it. If you have the same situation going on with prisons or youth justice, that would present problems, would it not? Is that what you are both saying—that you need to have the ability to move people around across borders between England and Wales?
Nick Hardwick: You would certainly have to have arrangements. If you did devolve the Prison Service, you would still have to have pretty close arrangements with English prisons simply to move people between the two. For instance, at the moment, when there are staff shortages, when there are a significant number of vacancies across the system, they have been sending people from one prison to another on detached duty to cover some of those gaps. That would be hard to do in a small place. If you had a disturbance, you would have to send in a team to deal with that. It is not an easy thing. However, as we have said about places like Swansea and Cardiff, the links with the local community and the connections with local agencies are also important. Perhaps there are things you could do to strengthen those links without losing some of the benefits of being part of a larger system.
Dusty Kennedy: The fact that there are so few young people, and the fact that they are now a small unit in a large prison, reduces some of those risks. One of the strengths of Parc is that there is a large work force in place, and you can almost cherry-pick the best people from the work force to work in the juvenile unit.
In terms of the movement of young people, the other consideration is custody, because young people when they offend do not really respect borders. They will be from England and offending in Wales, or from Wales and offending in England. Similarly, with the care system, young people placed in care homes move across borders. They all present issues. Sometimes the issues are greater between two Welsh local authorities or two English ones than they are between an English and a Welsh authority. What we are confident of is that we have a system in place now where we are not starting from the bottom of the slope and trying to push the boulder uphill. We are pretty much up the slope now; the boulder is not going to roll back down again, we hope, but we can make the adjustments that we need to make to take account of whichever way the decision goes.
Q53 Jonathan Edwards: Before we start discussing Wrexham, obviously in Scotland and Northern Ireland these issues are devolved, and what we’ve got for Wales is an England and Wales system. Are there any interrelations between the Scottish and Northern Irish systems and the England and Wales system?
Dusty Kennedy: There are, and they are similar to the ones that I have just mentioned in terms of young people and their families moving. In terms of our communication with devolved Administrations, every two years we get together to discuss these issues in open forum. I will be visiting a youth offending institution in Scotland next week to try to learn lessons.
Q54 Jonathan Edwards: There will not be any transfers of prisoners.
Dusty Kennedy: There are transfers of responsibility if people move house, if they offend in one area and serve their sentence in another, but there are very few between the actual Administrations. When I was working in the Swansea youth offending team, we would occasionally have young people from Ireland coming over, where the terms of their licence in Ireland did not prevent them from travelling. You would then care-take the case there. It is not very common.
Q55 Jonathan Edwards: Would you say that those systems cope with being autonomous, or do they benefit from being part of a UK-wide system?
Dusty Kennedy: I could not comment on the efficiency of their systems. I monitor the English and Welsh system.
Q56 Jonathan Edwards: Wrexham has been described by some as a titan prison, not just a super-prison but bigger—the largest in England and Wales and perhaps the largest in Europe. How many of the 2,100 prisoners will be Welsh? Will all eligible north Welsh prisoners be transferred from institutions to Wrexham if they are category B or below?
Nick Hardwick: I do not run the system, so I am not responsible for that. I do not think that those issues have yet been determined, but it is quite clear to me that a significant proportion of the prisoners in Wrexham will be English and, similarly, that there will be prisoners from north Wales who will not be suitable to go to Wrexham, for various reasons. It is not going to be complex; there will be a mixed population in Wrexham.
Q57 Jonathan Edwards: In terms of the consequences for the Welsh budget, specifically on health, has there been any assessment of how much it will cost the Welsh health budget to accommodate the super-prison in Wrexham? I have seen figures of £3 million a year.
Nick Hardwick: I am not sure that those issues have been finalised. That seems to be a big question that needs to be answered. The big questions are not just about health, but about social care costs, and what would be the impact of that on local services.
Some of these things are not simply a question of money. It is about whether there are beds and resources in place to meet that need. That will be the big issue; it certainly will be the case that prisoners in Wrexham will be typical of the prison population, so their health needs will be greater than the equivalent population, as prisoners have a set of health needs that are different.
It is worth saying that one of the complications that needs to be worked out, which I am not sure has been given enough attention, is the fact that drug treatment systems in English prisons are different from drug treatment systems in Welsh prisons. I am not yet clear about what will happen if prisoners with opiate dependencies come from, for instance, the north-west to Wrexham when on a different treatment regime and are then returned back into the community in the north-west and have to change again. How that will work, I do not know.
Q58 Jonathan Edwards: It is fair for me to make the point that the Welsh budget is going to be under a bit of strain to service a prison that is largely hosting English prisoners.
Nick Hardwick: I do not know what arrangement has been made for the transfer of funds. Obviously, local budgets will need to be compensated if you have a significant number of English prisoners there. I should have thought that that is something the Committee will want to make sure is done properly.
Q59 Jonathan Edwards: I am not an expert in these affairs, but my understanding is that in the United States, where there has been a move towards super-prisons—Texas, for instance—they are now moving away from super-prisons.
Nick Hardwick: My view is this. It is more difficult to run a big prison than a small prison. There is no doubt about that at all. However, the scale does enable you to provide a range of services that would not be possible in a smaller establishment. One of the better prisons in England and Wales is Parc, which is one of the bigger ones. You cannot get away from that. However, we also know—I hope that the Government learn from this—that setting up any new prison is very difficult, and setting up a big new prison is even more difficult.
If you look at what the Justice Secretary had to say, correctly I think, in response to some of the criticisms that we made of Thamesmead and Oakwood prisons, it was not the fact that they were big or the fact that they were run by G4S or Serco, it was the fact that they were new that was causing problems. Getting these places up and running smoothly takes much longer, I think, than is allowed for. It is noteworthy that Parc has grown to its current size over many years.
So I would have questions about health. The other question that I would have about Wrexham is the plan for recruiting. How are you going to get the staff from the local area? Inevitably, you might be able to get some from other prisons that are close, but a lot of them are going to be new, and you are going to need a lot of them—not just officers, but workshop supervisors and so on. The problem that you had at Oakwood is that we had overwhelmingly new staff who were simply inexperienced. They did not have the authority when dealing with the men on the wings to run it properly and safely, to sort things out, and knowing how things worked.
The bigger the prison, the more difficult that challenge becomes. You could get to a point down the line where you are running a large prison with a good range of facilities, a training prison with a relatively stable population, where the services were well geared to meet the needs of its population. The challenge is going to be getting there, and it is very important that that is not underestimated, and that the lessons about the difficulties of setting up Oakwood, Thamesmead and Isis, and Doncaster in the past, are learned. Indeed, if you go back, if you look at some of our previous inspections at Parc, we were not nearly as positive about it as we are now. I would say to them, “Do not underestimate the difficulties, and do not try to do it too quickly.” That is what I would hope for.
Chair: That is a good note on which to end, Mr Hardwick. May I thank both you and Mr Kennedy very much indeed for coming along, and giving us a lot to think about as we start this inquiry? Thank you.
Prisons in Wales and treatment of Welsh offenders, HC 113 3