Justice Committee
Oral evidence: Prisons: planning and policies, HC 309
Monday 10 November 2014
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 10 November 2014.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Nick Hardwick, Chief Inspector of Prisons PPP 24
– Stephen O’Connell, Prison Governors’ Association PPP 34
– Dr Julie Mills, Association of Colleges PPP 19
Members present: Sir Alan Beith (Chair); John Cryer; John Howell; Mr Elfyn Llwyd; Andy McDonald; and John McDonnell
Questions 111-165
Witnesses: Nick Hardwick, Chief Inspector of Prisons, Nigel Newcomen, Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, and Stephen O’Connell, President, Prison Governors’ Association, gave evidence.
Q111 Chair: Mr Hardwick, Mr Newcomen and Mr O’Connell, welcome. We are very glad to have your help this afternoon. I want to start by asking you a question which, although quite broad, I hope you will have some brief thoughts about. If you were given a chance to redesign the prison estate now, what would be the priorities?
Nick Hardwick: First of all, I would say that I do not think the design of the estate is the most important thing; I think it is the quality of work by governors and staff that is most important. When we go into a prison, what makes the most difference is the leadership of the governor and the quality of the staff rather than the actual design of the prison.
To come on to the design, my experience up to date is that it is not one size fits all. If you are running a training prison for category C prisoners who are going to be there for a reasonably long period of time, a larger establishment where you can offer some options to people works reasonably well. On the other hand, if you are running a very specialist function—perhaps preparing men who have done long sentences for release—you might need a smaller establishment. It is not one size fits all; it is horses for courses. There are also issues around not just the design of a prison but the location—having a reasonable geographical spread so that nobody is too far from home, because we know that families are critical. But I am not unrealistic; we are not starting from a clean sheet. We have to do the best we can with the estate we have.
My account would be not to think that one size fits all. In terms of size and location, different sizes and designs work better for different purposes. I would start with the purpose we are trying to achieve and then ask what is the best design and size for that particular purpose. That would be my view.
Nigel Newcomen: I certainly support everything Mr Hardwick has just said. I view things through my own particular prism. As the Committee may be aware, I investigate deaths. One of the features that would be singularly pleasing to me is if the estate were designed to allow not only for safer cells to minimise some of the difficulties that are posed in safety areas but also for the burgeoning elderly population, which I think the Committee has looked at relatively recently. They are singularly poorly served by the physical estate, which is still substantially designed for young, fit men. The reports I have offered the Committee clearly suggest that we have found continual examples where location is quite a serious impediment to looking after elderly prisoners properly.
Stephen O’Connell: You will know that a lot of our prisons are in rural areas because either historically that is where we have had land, or we have built there at a reasonable cost, but most of our prisoners do not come from rural areas; they come from urban areas. If I could start again, I would have more prisons in urban areas serving the communities where the courts are.
On top of the design bit, there are lots of smaller groups of prisoners who are not well served by a geographically diverse prison system—women prisoners in particular. We need smaller, more localised prisons that are suitable for the populations we are dealing with, as well as accepting the fact that there is a large male population, so we need some large urban prisons as well. Places like Haverigg are a long way from anywhere. There is not a lot of crime in that area but we have a lot of prisoners there. If I was starting again, I would want to have prisons closer to where more crime is committed and where the courts are.
Q112 Chair: What about the current level of the prison population? When you compare it with other European countries we have one of the highest levels of incarceration. Obviously in your roles, whether as inspector or the other roles that you have, it is quite difficult to challenge the policy because that is somebody else’s job, but you have seen its implications. Do you have anything to say about that?
Nick Hardwick: The latest figures I have are that on 7 November the system was running at 98% of capacity overall. That is population as against usable operational capacity. Of course, that population is not spread evenly, so in some areas it will be much more overcrowded than in others. As I have said to the Committee before, there are two aspects to overcrowding. First of all, there is physical overcrowding. In some places, two men are in what is essentially a large toilet designed for one, and often in very squalid conditions. On top of that, even if the physical conditions are not that bad, if the population is more than the prison is designed for, you will not have enough training, activity and rehabilitation programmes available for the size of your population. It is a real problem.
I have always taken the view, as my predecessors have, that it is not for the prison inspectorate to say how many people should or should not be in prison. What I would say is that we can control the population to some extent. We need to make sure that if we decide to have a large population we resource it, so that we do not have a lot of people leaving worse than when they came in.
Q113 Chair: Do we have too many people who, because they are deemed to be a security risk, are on long sentences in prisons in which security takes the main priority, and the opportunity to do rehabilitation for when they eventually come out is too limited?
Nick Hardwick: I read some of the earlier evidence you had on this matter from some of your other witnesses. First of all, security is important. You have some dangerous men who need to be kept secure, so I would not belittle that. In any establishment there is, in a sense, always a balance to be struck between the needs of security and the need to allow people to move about the place so that they can do rehabilitation programmes well.
Perhaps I could give an example of where I think it worked well. I have recently been up in Manchester prison, the old Strangeways. It has a category A function, and even within its category B population it has people who have committed very serious offences and who are a current risk. One of the reasons it works well is that they have a very effectively run security department who see their job as enabling staff to do things safely rather than stopping them doing things. Therefore, you see more happening safely in that prison despite there being some quite high-risk men, because there is a culture embedded there now—which might be a surprise to some people given its history—where they say that the purpose of security is to help people do things safely rather than a simple and often unthinking no. It is not simply a question of the perimeter, the walls and the barbed wire; it is often a question of how security is managed in the prison and whether it is done in a proportionate way.
Stephen O’Connell: To some extent, it can also be driven by a risk-averse attitude in terms of high profile incidents. That drives the idea that we need more and more security and people in higher security prisons, not necessarily because the broad population needs it but because incidents along the way have helped to drive it up. We have more people in higher security conditions because of risk aversion in terms of incidents.
Q114 Chair: In your experience, have you had to deal with a situation where the response to a high profile case led to an immediate change of policy which had not really been thought about very much?
Stephen O’Connell: I was around in ’94 and ’95 at the time of the high profile Whitemoor and Parkhurst incidents that changed the whole nature of what we do. Having been around in the late ’80s—Strangeways, the Woolf report and the changes the prison service was going through then—it almost stopped there, and a new approach emerged from 1994-95 which has had a significant effect over the last 20 years. We are still feeling the effects of what happened all that time ago.
Q115 Chair: I am not quite clear whether this was a good thing or a bad thing.
Stephen O’Connell: I would say there were good elements to it and there were some negative elements to it. There is no doubt that it was a wake-up call for a lot of things that we had allowed to slip, but it catches a lot of people in a very big net. You could argue that you end up for a period of time shifting this way and that, and it takes a long time to redress the balance and come back to a more rehabilitative approach rather than a secure and control approach.
Q116 Chair: Do you have any examples of the policy areas where this has had an impact?
Stephen O’Connell: For prisoners, it is straightforward things like the security categorisation they are actually held in. It is things like incentives and earned privileges and the property that they can keep. 1994 and 1995 was a watershed on things like volumetric control and what you could have in your possession. It affects prisoners’ everyday lives.
Nick Hardwick: I agree with what Stephen is saying about some of the smaller things. It may not be a reaction to a great incident that has happened. It might be reaction to fears of what might happen, so you see very risk-averse policies applied to the use of restraint; people have been restrained on escorted visits to hospitals, where they cannot conceivably be an escape risk, because of their health. For instance, all prisoners will routinely be strip-searched when entering a prison, even if they are being transferred from another high security prison and they were strip-searched when they left the last place. There is something around taking a proportionate and individual approach to risk. Sometimes it is necessary to apply strict security measures, but when it is done in a blanket way it can often be counter-productive.
Nigel Newcomen: There is a residual point, too, Chair. It takes a great deal of time for some of these changes to be adequately implemented—some of the concerns I have expressed, and the Committee has taken heed of, with regard to chaining the terminally ill, for example. That has not necessarily been a function of deliberate inhumanity; it has been a function of very slow change to the different populations and different risks that are being posed. That is another compounding factor for the prison system. It takes a very long time to turn it round.
Q117 Chair: Let me turn to benchmarking and its impact on staffing. Has the benchmarking system been beneficial to the efficiency with which public sector prisons are run, and/or led to unwise staffing reductions?
Nick Hardwick: My experience is that the problem has not been the agreed staffing level when the benchmarking process has been complete; it has been the process of getting there. On the way you had a significant turnover of staff; a lot of staff left in the benchmarking process, more than actually needed to leave, and it has been slow or difficult to recruit their replacements. When I speak to current prison governors they say, “Look, if we could get up to our agreed staffing level under the new benchmark, that would be a big improvement on where we are now. The problem is that we are carrying so many staff vacancies.”
I think there has been a problem about the way the benchmarking process has been implemented up to now. Of course, up to now it has been applied mainly in the male estate. What is happening now is that it is starting to be applied in the high security estate, the women’s estate and YOIs—I think that is correct. It is very important that we learn the lessons around implementation from some of the problems that occurred in the first phase and make sure they do not reoccur in the second phase. The process is less severe but the risks are higher because you are talking about a more vulnerable or risky population.
Stephen O’Connell: Benchmarking is part of the wider prison unit cost programme. There is a key element for us as the Prison Governors’ Association: it is not so much the change that is the issue, but the pace and scale at which we are expected to change. Whether benchmarking in itself is the right answer or whether closing prisons and opening new ones is the right answer, it is not so much the individual parts but the fact that it all has to be done so quickly. As you know, when you push the pace of change it creates risk. Some of those risks lead to some of the things you have already been talking about today. That is a really important point for us. Over time and at a slower pace we would be able to manage that risk more effectively, but obviously it would not save money as quickly.
Q118 Chair: In your broad assessment, how far have some of the problems we have just identified, of staff reductions or prisons being below establishment, damaged the ability to maintain rehabilitative regimes and programmes?
Nick Hardwick: They have had a significant impact on rehabilitation regimes—both those things together. There are a number of different levels. If you look at specific resettlement services or programmes and offender management work, we have come across cases where, because the system is overcrowded, prisoners have been moved out in the middle of a course that they are required to do as part of their sentence plan, because room needs to be made for new arrivals—as we found at Winchester in our most recent inspection there. We found other examples, particularly around offender management units, where prison officer offender supervisors now have a split function. They have a function of both doing their offender supervisor work and a residential role on the residential wings. Because the prison is short-staffed, they are going off and doing their residential duty on the wings, so their offender management function is not getting done. You get huge backlogs in risk assessments, and prisoners are being released without that being done.
In relation to the whole process of what is happening in the prison and trying to get people into some kind of normal routine, you are not going to be able to do it, because of staff shortages and prisoners being banged up for 22 hours a day. It is not everywhere and not all the time—you can find exceptions—but certainly one of the things we have identified in our inspections is that resettlement and rehabilitation programmes have suffered, and particularly offender management processes in the context of your question.
Nigel Newcomen: I can illustrate that, Chair, with my other hat on as complaints adjudicator. We have had a 35% increase in independent complaints in the ombudsman’s office, having already gone through the internal complaints process. Among that has been a 50% increase in complaints about the regime, and the restrictions and difficulties about accessing the regime. Quite often there is not much that we can say about it if the position is one of resource change. Where, for example, statutory entitlements have been lost—access to fresh air, the library, the statutory gym—as part of a poorly implemented benchmarking process, clearly the real-life experience for prisoners on wings is suffering quite considerably, and that is percolating through to my office in terms of complaints.
Q119 Mr Llwyd: Is the rise in complaints to your office partly because of the removal of legal aid for prisoners to take matters forward?
Nigel Newcomen: It may well be. It is very hard to disentangle the reasons behind the increase. I am trying to get my researchers to see if they can work out a methodology to see whether a complaint would previously have gone via a lawyer. What we have not found yet is any definitive evidence, but the increase is such that we are wondering whether it is one of the features that have been displayed.
Stephen O’Connell: I would like to say something on behalf of prison governors in relation to restricted regimes and reduced staffing. A significant impact of that has been felt by the people I represent. Over the last six months, as staffing has reduced and regimes have had to be restricted in a number of prisons, frequently it is prison governors at every level who are stepping in to try to ensure that things happen with prison officers.
It would be easy to think that in that situation it is somehow the prison’s fault, but actually in those prisons governors, their senior management teams and their staff are working extremely long hours to keep going even restricted regimes, which often are not good enough by most of the measures we use now, but I would not like anybody to think that people have not worked really hard even just to deliver that in the face of significant staff shortages. That is not a benchmarking issue. It is simply the fact that they have not had enough people to do what they need to do.
Q120 Chair: Mr Hardwick, in your inspecting capacity, or indeed Mr O’Connell from the prison governors, do you have any usable figures that indicate how big this problem is?
Nick Hardwick: We have some figures on this. First of all, there were 22 prisons on what they call restricted regimes. Those are the figures I was given. I can give an example that illustrates that. We have not published the report yet so I will not name the prison, but it will come out shortly. It is a large training prison, where long-term prisoners are being prepared for work and return to the community. What the governor there has done—we think correctly—is to shut down the regime on Mondays. It did not operate on Friday afternoons anyhow and it started late every morning, so in effect the maximum amount of activity in a training prison—a working prison, supposedly—was 17 hours a week. They did that so they could hold prisoners back on the wings, pull the staff back to the wings and at least manage them there in a safe and predictable way. Given the resource constraints, we did not think that was a bad decision to take, but actually what they were doing was warehousing those men; they were doing very little more than that. You have 22 prisons, to a lesser or larger extent, in that position according to the information I have. They are receiving staff on detached duty.
If you look at figures on the amount of time people are spending out of their cells, it reduced significantly last year in a number of prisons. It is important to say that there are exceptions, and there are some prisons where they are managing to keep a pretty full regime and doing their work in prison in a reasonable way, but the plummet in our findings about purposeful activity that we recorded in our report is not for the most part about quality. It is about quantity. Prisoners simply are not getting into the activities.
Q121 Andy McDonald: Leading on from that, can I turn your attention specifically to working and resettlement prisons? Is the Ministry’s aspiration to create working prisons now a dead letter? Is so, why has the initiative run into the ground and can it be revived?
Stephen O’Connell: It is not. It is still a current policy. There are three prisons in the front end of it at the moment: Coldingley, Ranby and Lindholme as working prisons. In two of those prisons at the moment they are operating restricted regimes and the reason for that is staff shortage. It is not because they have not been profiled for enough staff to run what is required of a working prison; they simply do not have the staff. It is tempting to think that that is just prison officers, but it is not. It is staff like instructional officers who open workshops and make sure prisoners have activities to go to. The policy is still there and the working prisons are still there, but at the moment two of the three have insufficient staff to operate it to the level at which it is required to be operated.
Nick Hardwick: I have just checked, and at our last inspection in Ranby, which as Stephen says is supposed to be a working prison, we found almost 30% of prisoners locked up during the working day. Almost a third of prisoners were locked in their cells during the working day. Because of staff shortages, association and other activities were being severely restricted; they could not get people into the places. Ranby was also operating at almost exactly its operational capacity.
Q122 Andy McDonald: I will move on and ask you about resettlement prisons. What should the concept of a resettlement prison mean in practice? How, if at all, does that differ from the Government’s proposals for the creation of such establishments?
Nick Hardwick: Personally, I think that resettlement prisons are a simple but good idea. It is obviously a good thing for someone doing a short sentence, or prior to their release, if you hold them in a prison that is local to the area in which they are going to be released. The emphasis on “through the gate” services is a good and welcome thing. The idea about providing mentors is also welcome.
Although it sounds simple at one level, it is difficult to do, particularly if you are operating at capacity. In order to make the resettlement prison idea work, you have to be able to put prisoners into the prisons where they need to be rather than into the prisons where there is space. If your system is operating so that it is almost completely full and there is no headroom, where you are going to be put is where there happens to be a space tonight and not in the resettlement prison that can meet your needs.
Q123 Andy McDonald: When we went to Dartmoor we saw that there was some good practice. There was a resettlement wing that seemed to work very effectively. I do not know whether that fits into your thinking at all. It perhaps did not speak to people’s locality, but it seemed to be a very effective way of resettling prisoners.
Nick Hardwick: That was one wing. I think you need to start thinking about preparing a prisoner for release the day they enter a prison. There are very significant things. They may not be getting out of somewhere like Dartmoor for a long time, but if you can do some work with them, for instance, that enables them to hang on to their accommodation or maybe keep contact with their employer, and you do that early—at the start of their sentence—you improve their resettlement prospects when they get to the end. Dartmoor was doing some good things on resettlement. I am certainly not implying that the only place resettlement activity should take place is in resettlement prisons. I do not think that at all. It needs to be taking place in every prison. The idea they have talked about of designating some prisons with a local connection and a particular focus as people prepare to leave is a sensible initiative.
Q124 John Cryer: You talked about the 22 prisons under restricted regimes. Is that entirely down to shortage of resources? Is that the majority of the problem?
Nick Hardwick: It is mainly staff vacancies. It is very rarely the agreed staffing level; it is staff vacancies. Then we find that you get into a vicious circle. You are running at a high level of vacancies so the staff who remain are under pressure and then go sick. Then because they have gone sick the staff vacancies are even greater, and so on. There are a number of solutions to that. They are sending staff down on detached duty from prisons that do not have that problem. I know there are more prison officers coming through the system, but at the moment they are covering some of these things with staff on detached duty. The problem with that, as we find when we go in, is that the staff on detached duty obviously do not know the prison and the prisoners in the way that the regular staff do. They can do the turnkey business, but it is very difficult for them to do more than that. It is important to be clear; the problem at the moment and over the last few months has been about vacancies rather than agreed staffing levels.
Q125 Andy McDonald: Are the concepts of working prisons and resettlement prisons compatible with each other?
Nick Hardwick: It is a long time since I have heard anybody talking about working prisons, which I think is a shame. Generally what will happen under the plans for the new core day in a resettlement prison is that people would go into some kind of activity for half the day and they would then either be locked in their cells or would do some kind of resettlement process for the other half of the day. That is distinct from what they would be doing in a working prison, where the intention is that they do something more like a normal working day. There are two distinct models that could not both run in the same prison; that is not the idea. As far as I am concerned, neither of those two models has really yet occurred anywhere much.
Stephen O’Connell: There are two things that concern prison governors and the Prison Governors’ Association about resettlement prisons—to some extent you could apply it to working prisons, but it is more about resettlement. Again, it is my bit about pace and scale; it is all happening very fast and expected to be done in very short order. It means that potentially risks are being taken that may not be fully understood at the moment, particularly at ground level where people are doing the work.
The second thing for me is the fragmentation of the system. When you are a prison governor you are accountable and responsible for everything that happens inside your wall. By next April you will have outsourced resettlement, health, education, facilities management and drug services. You will have regionalised health and safety. The levers and tools that a governor has to do what is necessary in order to join all of that up and make sense of it in a single system that says to a prisoner, “End to end, we’ve got what you need”, are a worry for me and the Prison Governors’ Association, in terms of a fragmented system.
Nick Hardwick: The other day we had a very senior person from NOMS arguing with us about the fact that we make our recommendations to the governor normally; if they are local recommendations we make them to the governor rather than the individual service provider. The NOMS person said to us that they saw the governor’s role now more as the conductor of an orchestra rather than, as Stephen described, somebody responsible for what happens within their walls. We said, “Look, that is not how we see it.” I think that is a mistake. We certainly see fragmentation as a real danger. Stephen also mentioned the pressure on governors. If you are doing all those things, you are not down walking the wings, checking that prisoners are out of their cells when they should be or that exact processes are being done properly and keeping people on their toes.
I would make one other point. In the focus on the benchmarking process it is important that we do not forget what came before—the fair and sustainable process—which was a change, in a sense, to the roles of front-line managers. A consequence of that, in my view, was that you had a lot of front-line supervisors either doing a job that they did not want to do or doing a job that they were very inexperienced to do. You have those critical posts that make sure that in practice stuff is happening in the way that it should. It is not working terribly well and then, way below prison governor level, they get hit by another set of changes that they have to manage: the benchmarking process, the staff vacancies, the population pressures and so on. People have to deal with all these new pressures, and the system for dealing with them was weakened before it began.
Q126 Andy McDonald: I wanted to ask about the reasons why end-to-end management failed, and I think you have given us a very detailed answer about that. What model of joint working between prisons and probation would best support the Transforming Rehabilitation programme? What would your model be if you were to look at it again?
Stephen O’Connell: From the Prison Governors’ Association—I would say this, wouldn’t I?—we felt that the probation model as was, in terms of the probation service and the responsibilities they had, worked quite well. We are concerned about how it is going to be broken up, with medium and low-risk prisoners with private companies and high-risk prisoners with probation. If I was designing the ideal system from inside the prison through to probation, for us personally in the Prison Governors’ Association we would prefer to keep a unified probation service, which would allow greater focus in terms of offender management between those two bodies. We are now introducing additional players into that.
I am sure there are places where that will work well once it actually happens, but it would not be what we would design in terms of a single end-to-end offender management system. We would want an offender manager responsible for the prisoner from start to finish and the least number of people involved, with a particular focus on their expertise. That has worked in the past. We have lots of successful examples of that in large and small prisons. Blantyre House is particularly successful at it, as are local prisons that have been doing resettlement for a very long time. It is not new to them to be doing resettlement and preparing prisoners to go back to their local communities. Governors have been doing that for a very long time. The biggest worry for us is fragmentation and things falling between gaps or cracks.
Nick Hardwick: I have one small point. The offender management model as it is currently constituted does not work very well in prisons. We have done reports with the probation inspectorate on that. One of the issues is that for some prisoners the process is too complicated for the needs it is trying to meet. The people running it—the bulk of them prison officers acting as offender supervisors—do not really understand what they are supposed to do. It is really striking that you might have a prison officer offender supervisor and a probation offender supervisor, both dealing with men who pose the same level of risk. The probation offender supervisor will have had years of professional training and will have professional supervision. The prison officer offender supervisor will have had much less training and almost no professional supervision. You can really see that in the quality of the work that emerges.
Q127 Andy McDonald: Is it partly the relationships that are formed between those who are guiding people through the offender programme and sustaining that, rather than this fragmented approach of bringing people in?
Nick Hardwick: Yes, I think that is a significant issue.
Q128 John McDonnell: This question is for you, Mr O’Connell, in your new-found role as a conductor. You mentioned the incentives and earned privileges scheme. Can you explain the impact of the recent changes in the IEP scheme—issues like the concerns of staff and prisoners and the impact upon morale and compliance with prison regimes?
Stephen O’Connell: In my new role as president of the PGA I attended conference last month for the first time. There was a specific issue discussed in relation to the incentives and earned privileges scheme where a prisoner can be on remand for a significant period of time, work their way through the scheme, get to enhanced, go out to court, be convicted and come back and have to start again. There were very strong feelings among governors that that was not just wrong, but morally wrong where a prisoner has demonstrated their behaviour.
There is no doubt that prisoners have felt strongly about the changes, not least how you get on basic, particularly if you are on adjudication. If a prison officer places a prisoner on report, for certain reports that can mean immediate basic before the actual adjudication is even heard. If a prisoner who is on standard or enhanced allegedly does something and is placed on report, in certain circumstances that means the prisoner can go immediately to basic. Again, that has been felt, and we have made representations about it in the past as well. There are examples where it is affecting prisoners and staff.
Q129 John McDonnell: What impact has the book ban had on prisons and prisoners? We are told that the new regime is allowing 12 books from the prison library.
Stephen O’Connell: There was an update last week which gave the governor discretion to allow more than 12 within the volumetric limit. I referred to the volumetric control earlier on in terms of ’95 and ’96. There is discretion now for a governor to allow more in possession.
Nick Hardwick: The whole point about this is allowing governors some discretion to do the job that they are well placed to do. I am in favour of a sensible system of incentives and earned privileges. That is not a bad thing to do. What you might need to do in a YOI for young adults—how you incentivise them and deal with poor behaviour—will be very different from what you need to do with a settled population of long-term prisoners who are more mature and doing long sentences. How it will work for those two groups in their prisons will be very different.
I think what you ought to be saying to governors is, “Look, what you need to do is have a sensible system that passes the public acceptability test and meets the needs of prisoners, but you are the professionals and we are going to let you do that in a proper way.” We will inspect it to make sure it operates, but to try and design from the centre how it should work in minute detail is a mistake.
What is happening now is that it is gradually unwinding. Governors are getting discretion around the books thing, I think. One of the big problems before was that the policy was interpreted such that you could only be enhanced if you were taking part in some sort of formal additional volunteering or activity. We were then told that that was a mistake and that was not what was meant at all; actually good behaviour for a long-term prisoner would be enough and it had been interpreted in an overly harsh way. To be frank, what is happening is that governors are either taking or being given the discretion that they should have on this matter. Undoubtedly in the early period—it was introduced last November—it did cause problems.
Nigel Newcomen: Could I add a footnote about the safer custody aspects? One of the interesting and worrying issues that concerned me at the outset of the changes was that clearly when you put somebody on basic you are potentially reducing protective factors against suicide, if you have somebody who is suicidal. For example, you are spending longer behind your door and having less activity, and you may not have a television. The Minister asked me to look at the data over a period of years. Indeed, we found there are more suicides among those on basic, particularly if you are 18 to 24; something like 16% of the suicides in the last five or six years have been prisoners on basic. There is a particular need to ensure that this is managed in a sensible way. It has always been policy for the Prison Service governor to balance the issue of challenging behaviour against vulnerability, but the more people you have on basic the more cases where you have to manage that balance and put it properly in place. I hasten to add that it is not something where I have yet been able to demonstrate a link between the recent increase in suicide and the IEP changes, but it is an area of concern which needs to be managed, and which adds a burden on governors who need to ensure that somebody who is being challenging or not behaving as they should is also having their vulnerabilities managed adequately.
Stephen O’Connell: From a professional governors’ perspective you absolutely accept that there is a requirement for a centralised IEP system, but you also accept that within it as professional governors you would be given sufficient discretion to be able to manage it locally, because you know your prisoners. You know their behaviour and what they respond to. It is trying to find the balance between central prescription and sufficient delegation for a governor to use their discretion sensibly.
Q130 John McDonnell: Mr Newcomen has just led us on to the issue of suicide. We have had the report. There is a 69% increase in self-inflicted deaths. There is also a 38% increase in serious assaults. You have all expressed concerns about the implementation of the efficiency savings and how it has impacted upon safety and security in prisons. What would all of you do now to reduce the levels of violence and self-harm?
Nick Hardwick: You will have seen what we say about this in my annual report. I tried to address it in my annual report because I have been challenged about it. On one of the previous occasions when there was a significant increase in the number of suicides Ministers asked my predecessor, now Lord Ramsbotham, to do an investigation and report on what was causing it and what needed to be done to address it. His conclusion, which I am absolutely sure was the right one, was that it was the total experience of imprisonment that affects suicidal behaviour. There was not one thing. There is no simple answer to this; it is the combination of things that come together to create the conditions under which suicide happens. What he came up with, which is the principle we have followed since, was the idea of a healthy prison, and the tests that make up a healthy prison.
My experience is that prison governors and prison staff agree with this. To reduce the number of suicides you need to make sure that people have a predictable regime and get out to activities. Having something to do is a big step in preventing suicidal behaviour. You need to make sure that they have decent relationships with staff because having somebody to talk to is an important factor in reducing suicidal behaviour. You need to do something about the bullying because we know that is a factor in causing suicide. You need to do something about resettlement so that people have some sense of light at the end of the tunnel. All of those things come together.
What may tip one individual who is in despair over the edge will be different in every circumstance. There is not some neat formula you can apply and say, “Oh yes, it was that that caused it.” I am absolutely clear that if you look at the timing of the pressures, where they were applied and what happened, the analysis about the total experience of prison and imprisonment affecting suicidal behaviour is right, and therefore you need a holistic approach. I think the tests that we apply have stood the test of time. Certainly the feedback we get from people who are operational in the field is that that is the right thing to do. That is my answer; it is in our expectations.
Q131 John McDonnell: Can I take you to your report? You said in one of your conclusions that the problems in prisons come from the conjunction of resource, population and policy pressures. We then asked the Minister responsible, Mr Selous, whether he agreed with your conclusion. He responded that he was not sure what you meant in terms of policy. What did you mean?
Nick Hardwick: I tried to spell that out in the report. It was the things that we have been talking about today. The IEP example that we have talked about is a good one. Another example that I mention in the report is ROTL. In my view the ROTL processes needed to be more rigorous. I do not have a problem with the direction of travel on that, but what it meant, if you did not staff it properly, was that you had lots of prisoners who were expecting ROTL suddenly banked up and not getting it as they waited to go through those more restrictive processes.
What I also meant is what Stephen described about the pace of change that is being applied to prison managers. He expressed it very eloquently. These things are an extra demand on prison managers’ time, particularly the ones I listed. If they are doing that and managing the staffing vacancies they have, and managing juggling the population because they do not have anywhere to put them, what they are not doing is getting away from their computer screens, walking the landings on the wings and saying, “Come on, it is time to get these guys out now. Why isn’t so-and-so at work? What’s happening about that review? You haven’t done that sentence plan properly,” and so on. That is what you need to do and that is not what is happening.
I go personally to probably as many prisons as most people in the country. I spend longer there and I have a team of people. I am 100% sure about what I am saying. If you put those pressures together—the way they affected the adult male estate from last autumn onwards—it cannot be a coincidence that the time these things kicked in was when all the data in our findings went down. Now, as remedial measures start to be taken, you see an improvement. I do not believe that is coincidence. I don’t believe it.
Q132 John McDonnell: Are those remedial measures sustainable?
Nick Hardwick: The words I would use are that there are some tentative signs of improvement. There are clearly some staff coming through. In terms of safety, putting some prisoners on restricted regimes was the right thing to do, although getting prisoners off restricted regimes will be more difficult than putting them on. They have done some work around safer custody, strengthening it from the centre. That has been good. There is some new accommodation coming on-stream. As that starts to come through we have started to see, in the reports I have in the pipeline, some improvement in the number of self-inflicted deaths. It is only a few months so it is too difficult to draw many conclusions. The number of self-inflicted deaths is down a bit on the whole, but there are some exceptions.
We are now starting to go back to the prisons we inspected that were particularly poor at the start of this process and they have improved a bit. People have slogged their hearts out to make those improvements, and I appreciate that. You are starting to see some improvement, but it is tentative. It would be very dangerous if people thought, “Oh well, that’s job done then; we’re all right.” It is absolutely not. Within that general flow of improvement there are still exceptions that are very worrying. I have been in prisons recently where you think, “They are worrying.”
Stephen O’Connell: There is a population dimension as well. The prison population is changing. It is younger. Substance abuse is presenting a different sort of challenge to us in terms of violence management, particularly the so-called legal highs. There are different challenges for us in terms of the prisoner population as well as the issue of staffing and just generally a higher number of prisoners. They are more prone to violence and it is our members who are managing manage that on a day-to-day basis, as well as all the other things just described.
Q133 John McDonnell: Your predecessor raised as a very specific problem the ability of staff and prisoners to form relationships, which was being undermined as a result of some of the savings and cuts that have been made. Do you share that concern?
Stephen O’Connell: In the circumstances we have just described, where regimes are restricted and staff are coming on detached duty, it will always be difficult in those situations for staff and prisoners to form those sorts of relationships. We need to distinguish between staff shortages and what a prison should actually have. If prisons had the staffing levels they should have, and their own staff were working there regularly, we would be having a different discussion.
Nigel Newcomen: Could I add a few comments on the suicide issue? It is something that I obviously spend a good portion of my waking life looking at. Whereas I have expressed considerable concern about the appalling increase that has been taking place over the last 12 months in the prison system, as far as I can see it is not straightforward to me that there is a direct correlation between cutbacks and austerity measures and suicides. We need to be a little bit cautious. I am still only reaching the end point of the investigations. Many of the inquests have not yet been held. My researchers have not been able to map things that are new as opposed to the frailties that existed previously, before the huge surge.
All I would say is that it is perhaps even more troubling if we are not able to readily explain why there has been such a surge. Clearly, I understand and accept that it is an entirely reasonable hypothesis that, if there are cutbacks that affect protective factors like time out of cell and so on, that is likely to raise the risk. We are also finding that suicides went up in areas, for example, in the high security estate, before they had the cutbacks. In the private sector there was a significant increase in suicides, where they have not had any changes to their contract. There are some things going on which are complex and we need to get behind the detail. I am afraid simple answers probably won’t be good answers in what is a very difficult and traumatic arena. We need to ensure that we have all the sorts of resource and thinking that can be applied to get a proper answer to what is a very serious problem.
Q134 John McDonnell: No one is suggesting it is simple. Mr Hardwick in his report, as I said, said it was a conjunction of resource, population and policy pressures all coming together.
Nick Hardwick: There are two things, just to be clear about this. What we are trying to explain is the increase. There will be a level that was happening anyhow before any of these things. It is the increase we are trying to explain. The second thing is that some of this is not about less staff on the wings or more population. It is about what Stephen described very well. It is the pressures on the prison and on the managers, who are, in a sense, distracted by the other stuff they have to manage and therefore don’t necessarily have the capacity.
I would say that I have certainly seen, when going back to some prisons, that governors and staff have dragged them back from a very poor position, where you think that these people are practically at the end or beyond the end of their tethers—really stretched. It is important to pay tribute to the work that some people are doing, but tentative and fragile is certainly the correct way to describe it.
Q135 John McDonnell: This summer you reported on progress in the implementation of the recommendations of the Mubarek inquiry. How can we best ensure that momentum is maintained in their implementation?
Nick Hardwick: One of the reasons we did it in the way we did is that some of the actual recommendations do not have the certainty that they did because systems have changed. There has been some improvement in the fact that there are now records kept on the P-NOMIS computerised system and people have access to that. Generally people will have a cell-sharing risk assessment, not always brilliant but generally it will get done.
Some of the problems that still remain reflect the general problems that we have. Certainly we have slipped back on some diversity and equality issues. Some of those structures have been dismantled when they were still necessary. I think that Lord Harris’s inquiry looking at self-inflicted deaths among young adults is really important. There is a lot of overlap, but in a sense we almost wrote our report in a way that could feed into his work and he could use it, and pick it up and run with it. There has been some progress but there is a danger, along with everything else, of sliding back. We also worked very closely with the Zahid Mubarek Trust and members of his family in drawing up that report, and I pay tribute to them for their very sustained and determined battle to keep this on the agenda.
Q136 Mr Llwyd: Mr Hardwick, your five-year appointment is due to be completed in June of next year.
Nick Hardwick: July.
Mr Llwyd: That was a good start.
John McDonnell: He just gained an extra month’s salary.
Q137 Mr Llwyd: Are you able to say whether discussions are ongoing regarding reappointment or a new recruitment exercise?
Nick Hardwick: I understand that the job will be readvertised.
Q138 Mr Llwyd: What observations would you make, given your experience in the work that you do, about the degree of independence of your office from political interference, ministerial interference and so on?
Nick Hardwick: Well, you need a thick skin, I suppose. My view now, having done it for some time, is that personally I do not think it is appropriate for the post to be sponsored by the Ministry of Justice, because some critical things, like the appointment of my successor, the setting of our budget and some other matters, are done by the body that has operational responsibility for the services that we inspect. Where there are conflicts and independence things, it is often about perception as much as about reality. Even if everybody behaves with complete propriety, which generally they do, it is certainly not seen as independent. We have a lot of visitors coming to see us from overseas. They are very interested in what we do and in our independent model. Then they ask where we get the money from and who appoints me, and they raise their eyebrows and say, “Oh, that sort of independence.”
There are practical problems for a relatively small organisation with people who work from home being part of a very large office-based bureaucracy. That does not work very well at a practical level. The other problem is that sometimes we get the worst of both worlds. There might be a temptation sometimes for people to interfere in things that they should not. Also, the normal governance processes that you would expect to apply to a body like mine, around accountability, having a board and those sorts of functions, do not exist. That is a potential weakness.
I do not know whether the Committee is aware that the National Audit Office is doing a comparative study of inspectorates. They are looking at those sorts of issues. Personally I welcome that; it is a good thing to happen. I do not think the structures are quite right. This is not a personal reflection on anyone I deal with at the Ministry of Justice or NOMS. As time goes on it feels anomalous and uncomfortable for me.
Q139 Mr Llwyd: There is one obvious point to which you have alluded. If the MOJ decide on budget allocation, they could limit your work quite severely if they wanted to.
Nick Hardwick: Perhaps you could have a word with them.
Q140 Mr Llwyd: We frequently have words with them.
Nick Hardwick: Of course that is a risk. I certainly have no sense that they are going to pick on us for that reason, but the problem is that, even if they are behaving with complete propriety, there is still a risk of the perception of what you say happening. It is a concern.
Q141 Mr Llwyd: This question is to all three of you. What positive changes can be attributed to the work of the various inspectorates and scrutiny mechanisms? In particular, to what extent are the recommendations of the independent monitoring boards, the prisons inspectorate and the ombudsmen heeded and acted upon by prison governors and NOMS?
Nigel Newcomen: It is a good question, given the 64% increase in suicides that I have had to investigate. You question the effectiveness of your own office when you get that lack of purchase in the organisations that you are investigating. That said, I think there are good reasons to believe that we are taken very seriously, and that the recommendations made in individual inspection reports are acted upon. They are virtually always accepted. There is always an action plan. Indeed, I work closely with the chief inspector, whose teams go to see subsequently whether there has been progress on the recommendations I have made into deaths in custody. I have also started on a programme of thematic reports, so I am not simply doing reactive investigations in response to a tragedy. I am trying to join up the dots to try to see how we can prevent tragedies in the future, but those sorts of thematic analyses are very slow in getting purchase in big organisations, particularly big organisations under pressure.
I was deputy chief inspector of prisons for eight and a half years. My experience is that you can do a certain amount to try to ensure that your methodology is such that you have follow-up and capacity to at least demand that there is action and change, but ultimately you are there as an investigator or an inspector and you have to expect that the services in remit are taken up, and are realistic and appropriate in response to your recommendations.
My sense is that they are taken seriously but that they come up against all the inhibitions that this Committee has been discussing for the last hour and all the difficulties and countervailing priorities that are there. There is a fundamentally important role for the independent scrutineers in a pressurised, hidden, secretive and very challenged world of custody at the moment. I could give the Committee a list of individual items where I think, “Yes, we’ve got change in that instance.” As a generality we are taken seriously but there is so much more to do.
Stephen O’Connell: I can speak on two levels. One is my own experience as a governor. You always took inspection reports and action plans seriously. When I was governor of Maidstone the action plan that arose from the inspection there in 2007 was the launch pad for the change programme. I know that governors up and down the country take inspection reports, ombudsmen’s reports and IMB reports seriously.
In the context we have been talking about today, where we are describing massive system change, sometimes very difficult staff shortages and a rising prison population, it puts additional pressures on people. There can be a feeling at times that you are swamped with action plans, but it is about understanding where your priorities are. At the Prison Governors’ conference last month we specifically discussed the inspection around the healthy prisons test. We were absolutely adamant about the independence of that and that we did not want to see the bar it was set at touched at all. Despite the fact that we are going through the difficulties we are going through and that our members are working so hard, we do not want to see any of it change because we believe it is fundamental to healthy prisons.
Nick Hardwick: We have monitored it pretty consistently over a number of years. We know that about 97% of our recommendations are accepted or partially accepted, but then we check when we go back next time, and we find pretty consistently that about 66% are achieved or partially achieved. Over the last few months that achievement rate has dropped slightly—not a vast amount, but it has dropped, as perhaps you would expect given the circumstances that we have been talking about.
I agree with Stephen. I have had this discussion with prison governors to see what they think: “Are our standards too high now? Is it becoming too much of a gap?” They say, “No, we want you to keep them high. We don’t want you to lower your standards.” It is not merely about recommendations and whether they follow them. Success is not finding things wrong and then telling them they have to put it right. Success is when they know what we are looking for and have done it before we arrive. Increasingly over the last year—sometimes it is quite moving—we have seen people at all grades whose work is not appreciated because it is hidden from public view. They are putting themselves on the line to try to maintain standards. There isn’t a surprising lack of difference sometimes between what we want to see and what they want to do. Nobody jumps for joy when the inspectorate turns up. It is a bit of a nightmare, I am sure, when you are on the receiving end of us saying, “This is not good enough.” But when they think about it, they don’t on the whole say, “Look, you need to change.”
Q142 Mr Llwyd: Mr O’Connell, what consultation, if any, takes place with prison governors in relation to changes of operational policy affecting your regimes? In particular, if I may ask, how are governors typically consulted about the specifications of contracts for areas of prison provision that have been outsourced, or is this the responsibility of other Government Departments—for example, health or offender learning and skills provision?
Stephen O’Connell: There are several ways that you can potentially consult governors. I cannot speak for every contract in recent years, but governors will meet by region with their regional manager and then their regional managers will meet the directorate senior team. Information and exchanges of views will flow up and down that particular system, particularly when policies are going through development. I am not sure how exactly that works for contracts because a lot of contracts will be protected as they develop, so the commercial interests of those contracts may not be exposed to governors. Things like pricing mechanisms and the more detailed commercial aspects of contracts will not be; the broader aims and objectives and what the contract is trying to achieve will be.
It goes back to my earlier point about fragmentation. If you are a governor at the moment and you know there is a resettlement service coming, you will welcome that because you want your offenders to go through the gate and have that service. You won’t be fully sighted on all the contracts and you won’t understand some of the details. People will have different views on whether you should or you shouldn’t, but governors are unsighted on large elements of contracts.
Q143 Mr Llwyd: I have one final short question to Mr Newcomen. We have covered the possibility that the cuts to legal aid are partly responsible for the increase in references to your office. How effectively is your system currently operating?
Nigel Newcomen: My system or the complaints system in prison?
Q144 Mr Llwyd: The complaints system that you oversee, as it were.
Nigel Newcomen: There are two aspects. There is the internal complaints process within prisons themselves. I get a lot of complaints about the complaints system. I know that the inspectorate, when it surveys prisoners, finds that there is lack of confidence in the complaints system. I do not think it has got any better since it was streamlined from a three-level to a two-level approach, which means that things are being decided at a lower level in terms of seniority. Governors have less knowledge of the complaints being raised by prisoners and are less involved in some of the processes, which means that more are being escalated to my office outside the Prison Service. It also has to be said that I am upholding more complaints than a few years ago. Last year I upheld 3% more. I think I uphold something like 9% or 10% more than when I first arrived in 2011. That is not radicalism on my part or my staff’s part; it is simply a reflection of failures in the system and a weakness in the complaints process.
Complaints in prison have a fundamentally important role in easing tensions and allowing people to feel that they are being treated justly. The independent element externally does that as well, and the IMB provide another level, but it is fair to say that it is not a subject of great confidence among prisoners. If it lacks confidence it will add to frustrations, and if it adds to frustrations that adds to problems for the prison itself. It is one of the reasons why the chief inspector and I have committed to undertake a review of the complaints process, and also of my component part of that, because there are strengths and weaknesses in the independent scrutiny of complaints. I have been fortunate to be able to transform the timeliness of fatal incident investigations, but I am still working on trying to reduce the backlogs of complaints I receive. We have now conquered most of the backlogs.
When you look at the whole complaints process, both internally and externally, there are definitely frailties. It definitely needs to improve but they are fundamentally important parts of a decent prison system.
Chair: Thank you very much indeed. We are very grateful to the three of you for your help today.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Rod Clark, Chief Executive, Prisoners’ Education Trust, Dr Julie Mills, Association of Colleges, and Keith Smith, Interim Chief Executive, Skills Funding Agency, gave evidence.
Chair: Mr Clark, Mr Smith and Dr Mills, we are very glad to have your help this afternoon. There is a strong possibility that we could be interrupted by a Division, so we will get cracking. I invite Mr McDonnell to begin.
Q145 John McDonnell: The Ofsted report in December on further education and skills was pretty damning about the standard of provision of education and training in prisons. As the providers working with NOMS, what are you doing to turn this around?
Dr Mills: My role here is to represent the Association of Colleges, but I am the principal of one of the three colleges who provide education and skills training in custody. The short answer is that we are all working very hard to improve it. There is some evidence that shows improvement happening in terms of both the quality of provision within the custodial environment and certainly the nature of provision that students now experience. The curriculum now focuses very strongly on employability, and the range and quality of qualifications that students are able to engage with and pass has improved. Qualification success rate, which is quite a blunt measure but an important one, is increasing rapidly.
The Ofsted inspections and judgments, certainly during the last academic cycle, were also significantly improved from the previous year, both in terms of leadership and management—which is a prison and a provider issue—and the quality of teaching, learning and assessment as well as those outcomes for learners. There is lots of activity around that and lots of focus on bringing employers closer to the curriculum, developing programmes and activities that mean students are better prepared for employment when they are released.
Q146 John McDonnell: Does anybody else want to pitch in?
Rod Clark: In a sense I am in the privileged position of not being a contracting party to the mainline delivery of education in prisons. We are a charity and the main thing we do is to support the delivery of distance learning. We also bring together a number of organisations from across the sector in the Prisoner Learning Alliance. The thing that we are doing is to work with them to come up with prescriptions, blueprints and ideas for how education can be improved. We produced a report last year which looked at a number of those areas—about the way the prison education system needs to focus more on the outcomes that it is looking to deliver; about how it needs to join up more effectively; and about how it really needs to build the values of education into the way the entire prison operates as an institution. Those things can be done without huge additional resource. It is about making the system more effective.
Keith Smith: I am not a training provider. I represent the Skills Funding Agency. We are the body responsible for the funding of aspects of the OLASS provision in prisons.
Q147 John McDonnell: On a point of detail, do you know what progress has been made on finding an alternative provider for OLASS in London?
Keith Smith: We had a provider who, on their own commercial decisions, decided to withdraw. That was a decision that they made a couple of months back. Since then we have instigated an open tendering process. We are in the process of that, and we are very close to making a set of decisions and recommendations for an alternative supplier.
Q148 John McDonnell: What is the time scale?
Keith Smith: The priority is to make sure that we keep continuity of service, but we would hope that a new provider is in place, if not at the end of this calendar year, very early in the next calendar year.
Q149 John McDonnell: What have the implications been with regard to A4e’s withdrawal?
Keith Smith: Implications in regard to what?
Q150 John McDonnell: In terms of funding arrangements.
Keith Smith: The first point I should make is that there are no implications for the continuity of service. The delivery of the OLASS offer continues to be made and we have agreed arrangements with A4e for them to keep delivering that until a new provider is put in place. The operational aspect of the programme is still very much happening day to day.
Q151 John McDonnell: Would there be any additional costs as a result of continuing the existing provision and looking for a new provider?
Keith Smith: We have agreed with A4e that clearly there are some costs for them in relation to the extension and continuation of that agreement. We are agreeing those with A4e on very much a cost-by-cost basis. I should stress that the underpinning structure for them receiving funding is exactly the same as for all the other providers. It is funding on a per course or per learner basis, and that is very much the methodology that is used to fund the whole of the OLASS programme.
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
On resuming—
In the absence of the Chairman, Mr Llwyd was called to the Chair
Mr Llwyd: I have been asked to take the Chair. We will now continue with the sitting. When we were rudely interrupted, Mr McDonnell was showing his skills at questioning people.
Q152 John McDonnell: We were talking about improving the service itself. Can you explain what have been the main direct and indirect effects of cost savings on education provision within prisons?
Rod Clark: We have seen evidence of the sort of things that you were hearing about in the session with your earlier set of witnesses. Where there are restricted regimes, it means that prisoners are locked up for much more of the time, up to 22 hours a day. That means they cannot get out to education. We have had prisons where they have effectively closed education for the summer. They have made it much more difficult to get to workshops. Even when you are not running a restricted regime, if you are short on staff, it puts more pressure on the people who have to support the system in other ways to ensure that the right people get to the right classes. You really don’t want to be running a class in which it is a random pick and mix as to who is going to turn up from one day to the next or one week to the next. All those sorts of problems have been very real. It has been tremendous the way that education providers and prison staff have been working their socks off in order to overcome those problems.
Dr Mills: I agree. In terms of the impact on quality there are two really critical things for us. One is making sure students get on to the right course at the right level. That is about information, advice and guidance and, in prisons, allocation—the role of allocating prisoners to education. Then, when that has been done effectively, it is about getting students into the classroom or getting the workshop to take place. As we have heard, staff shortages can impact on both those aspects. We have been working in prisons to try to address some of those issues by looking at what work the education team can take on to resolve some of the blockages. For example, in partnership we might take on the role of allocation—a member of the education team does it—which frees up the prison staff to address something else. It is about partnership working, and both sides understanding the importance, prioritising and then trying to find some creative solutions to the problems.
Q153 John McDonnell: Since the changes to the system of funding prisoners taking courses at level 3, has there been any noticeable drop-off or reduction?
Dr Mills: Yes. We do not have a large level 3 provision now, because of the requirements for that to be funded by a loan. It is much more difficult to predict and we need to work together to improve the process for applying for loans because it is very bureaucratic and does not encourage people to take it forward. I think Rod will probably have experienced that more directly than we have.
Rod Clark: Yes. I am in the fortunate position of sitting outside the contract but observing what has gone on. The introduction of advanced learning loans for anyone over 24 to do an FE level 3-type course has certainly had an impact, and has made it more difficult for education providers in prison. There is also the issue, which is one of the unintended consequences of the structure of the OLASS 4 contract itself, that, because it rewards people who complete courses and then achieve qualifications at the end of the day, it is simply easier to make that work in a prison if you focus on areas where it is going to be relatively easy to get high volumes and put people through relatively quickly, so that you can get them through a course before they are shipped out to another prison or something like that. All of that tends to move you towards levels 1 and 2. We find that very often the only provision that really is available for level 3, for seriously doing something like an AS-level, is through distance learning that we fund. That is something that we are very keen to work on.
This is something we have also heard from prisoners directly. In the autumn of last year we ran a survey through the Inside Time prison newspaper and got 340-plus responses from prisoners about the issues that they saw to do with education. Almost half of them were saying that there was just not enough learning of a sufficiently advanced level available within their prison as they would like to see. There is an appetite there; it is an appetite that between us we have to find a way of meeting.
Dr Mills: I visited HMP Gartree recently, which is a life establishment. It is a very live issue in there. It is a different type of community with a different type of student needs and ambitions. It was interesting; I felt that in the end I had almost turned into a bit of a salesperson in terms of having quite a detailed conversation about a loan, about what that means and when you would pay it back. For that community, many of whom have not been out for some time, as a society we were having to change how we viewed the funding of education. This was an issue for everyone. Definitely, the culture was not to take a loan, for that student group.
Q154 John McDonnell: How do you feel that the drop-off has impacted upon rehabilitation?
Rod Clark: The first thing is that we know that education works to help people rebuild their lives in a way that takes them away from crime. We have been fortunate to be able to do research looking at the recipients of our grants, working with the Ministry of Justice statisticians to see what happens to their reoffending rate, and look at the comparison between those people and a matched group of prisoners with the same characteristics—age, nature of offence and all those sorts of things. That research is published by the Ministry of Justice. It showed that, compared with the reoffending rate of the control sample, the rate of reoffending of recipients of our grants to do distance learning is over a quarter lower. We know it helps people through a whole host of mechanisms, some of which will be towards getting better employment or giving them chances of employment, and some of which will be to do with building a new and more positive identity rather than just a criminal identity.
The first thing is that, yes, education really does work and it does help. Therefore, if it is not available, that becomes a problem. Certainly when it comes to employment, there is a great deal to be said for not only being able to address the remedial needs that lots of prisoners present with around basic literacy and numeracy; we also know that in the labour market once you begin to get level 3-type qualifications it begins to give you something you can really do something with in the labour market. That is especially important for prisoners given the disclosure requirements that rest on them. It is very tough out there. We know that prison destroys employment, and we need to do everything we possibly can to redress that.
Q155 Chair: Does the creation of resettlement prisons present a good opportunity for the prison system to provide integrated end-to-end educational provision across the estate? How would that best be achieved, in your view?
Dr Mills: That question has one easy answer and one more difficult answer. It does provide an opportunity, absolutely. It is about how we work together to tie up a range of interventions in a way that is joined up and not siloed. The risk is around silos from the CRCs and from the NOMS ESF funding. There is the OLASS 4 funding and other pockets of activity that go on. Having a very clear set of responsibilities for each of those providers, which dovetail but don’t overlap, and having a very clear and simple focus for who has oversight of the offender journey through the gate and into an appropriate activity on the outside, is the bit that we all need to work together to deliver, because it has great possibilities.
Rod Clark: I very much agree with that. There is clearly potential in having a system in which there is a player on the block who is interested in the overall outcome of somebody desisting from crime at the end, and looking to manage the interventions that then support them in custody in order to achieve that. Once you have people closer to the community into which they are going to be released, there is more potential for making constructive use of release on temporary licence so that people can get into an educational course whilst still in custody that they can then continue in their local community, and bridge that gap, particularly in the very difficult period through the gate.
There is clearly potential. My concerns are the inevitable ones that you get when you have another major disruption to the system and a whole new set of players. As Julie said, joining up across the system is incredibly important to get that to work, and we are now introducing another player, as well as the importance of the work programme provider, the NCS provider, the education provider and the offender management systems within the prison itself. Getting that to work is going to be a major challenge.
Q156 Chair: Can I press you on that? In your view, is the Transforming Rehabilitation agenda going to improve education and training for prisoners? How should the “through the gate” educational provision be co-ordinated between the CRCs and prisons, especially for the short-term sentenced?
Rod Clark: My worry about the Transforming Rehabilitation changes is that you are introducing a whole lot of new licence requirements for a new batch of prisoners that did not have licence requirements in the past. You are asking your CRC provider to supervise those requirements as a core part of the contract they deliver. We know that there isn’t any more money around, so they have to find a way of financing that activity within the overall contract price. Whatever the allure of the theory of the CRC provider being able to do all these constructive things—spending hours talking to OLASS and NCS providers about what is happening around individual prisoners, how they move through the system to different prisons and how they arrive with the right skills to then get them connected to employment; all of that is wonderful in theory—my real worry is that the resource pressures on them are going to be such that they will really be just focusing on delivering the contractual minimums around the licence requirements. The worry with those, of course, is that, as soon as you start breaching people through those licence requirements, you increase the prison population and you make the situation worse. Yes, there is potential but I see very large risks as well.
Q157 Chair: Surely there is going to be a problem with the short-term sentenced prisoners.
Rod Clark: Exactly. They are the group where you are introducing these new requirements. We will have to see whether there is really scope for a CRC provider to play a very constructive role in working with education providers on that in a very short time. It is the job about joining it all up that is going to be the challenge.
Q158 Chair: Should the CRCs be involved in the provision of education in non-resettlement prisons?
Rod Clark: One of the things that has to be got right is what happens to prisoners while they are in a non-resettlement prison. If that time is simply wasted educationally, you have missed out on a massive opportunity. It is easy to see that the right theoretical answer is that you have a plan for that prisoner from day one, and they go to a resettlement prison which is perhaps selected because it offers the things that prisoner needs—the right educational opportunities or the right work opportunities, whatever they are—in order to use their time constructively while in custody. They then get received into a resettlement prison in a constructive way. It would be a lovely model if the CRC provider were the person that is concerned about that.
Quite a lot of long-term sentence prisoners are not going to come back to the CRC provider until after their contract period has expired, so it is going to ask quite a lot of them to show a great deal of interest in long-term prisoners. It would be wonderful if they did it but it is rather altruistic. As I say, I am concerned about whether they really will have the resources to do all the good things that we might like to see, looking at it as a system as a whole. If it is not the CRC holding the ring, it really does demand that the governor takes some real responsibility for managing that linking up across the system.
Keith Smith: Obviously, from the OLASS point of view, we already require providers to look at provision whilst they are in prison as well as on release. One of the big changes to the current regime from the old regime was that the strategy for that localisation was much more important. That is why, when we commission, and currently still deliver, the OLASS provisions in prisons, it is the governor who acts as the commissioner. We have set up structures where the governor is basically holding the training providers to account, in terms of saying what they need and when they need it, so that we then have confidence that the pattern of provision put on locally is what that governor is determining. If the governor is not happy, that is when we look to take action.
Whatever happens on the short-term side of things, there is still going to be the provision of the OLASS work, which is still focused not just on the identification of long-term needs such as English and maths—the literacy and numeracy type of area—but a really strong assessment of the vocational requirements and how that is going to link to the local labour market and the local jobs market. All the incentives that we are putting into training providers are to continue to encourage that to happen.
Q159 Chair: The rather strange policy of what has become known as the book ban was, mostly, lifted last week on 7 November. Did it have an appreciable detrimental effect upon education during its period of action?
Dr Mills: We did not see that in terms of the programmes that we are delivering and the students that were working with us. There was nothing that was specifically related to their education provision.
Q160 Chair: Would I be right in thinking that much of the work you do with prisoners is on electronic media anyway?
Dr Mills: Some is, but certainly it is resourced within the department through—
Chair: You provide that.
Dr Mills: Yes.
Rod Clark: We certainly had prisoners writing to us saying that they had not been able to access books. This particularly comes in when you are talking about people who want to study at higher education levels and want to do background reading. We have been arguing all along that the governor really ought to be given more discretion to take a sensible decision about people in that sort of position, and enable them to get the books. There is still an issue about the route for getting books. You can buy lads magazines through approved suppliers in prison, but getting a book delivered from Amazon still appears to be a part of the issue that has not been resolved. I personally cannot see the security risk involved in that.
Chair: When I was a lawyer—I still am a lawyer for that matter—years ago I remember defending a fellow who had a book taken off him because it was too political. It was Plato’s “Republic”, so things have been a bit dicey for some time.
Q161 John Howell: Overall, how can educational opportunities best be provided to prisoners alongside opportunities for work?
Dr Mills: It is about partnership and integration, and really understanding what the shared objectives are of any purposeful activity. Where we are seeing it work best is when there is a senior leadership team in the prison, and indeed, in the region, through the local governance structure that Keith described, where they absolutely understand what we are trying to get from it. In those places it would not be an issue that a student spent part of their workshop time developing skills or working towards an accreditation, because the overall ambitions are understood and shared. For example, in one prison we worked from, when a member of my team delivered to the senior leadership of the prison what OLASS 4 is, how it worked, what the objectives are, what the targets are and what makes a difference, we saw our delivery increase by over 10 percentage points because everybody got it and was working together. We are able to work more creatively as a cohesive team within the prison to look for better opportunities. It is like any change programme; it is about taking the time to explain the vision as to where we are going and get people onside.
Q162 John Howell: Does education have a lesser status in working prisons?
Dr Mills: Not exclusively. As I said, it is about the understanding of the wider staff team as well. On the ground, in prisons, it possibly is not understood by all prison staff how much the education and training provision has changed; they will see the same people, probably in the same locations, but what they won’t know is that they are doing very different things to very different standards. There is a bit of an education role across the whole establishment.
Rod Clark: There certainly are some fantastic examples of work coupled with education, such as the Railtrack courses where people are given qualifications which almost take them straight into a job on release. Those are wonderful examples, and there are some great examples, in any workshop, of being able to embed things like literacy and numeracy education as part of that.
There is also some work that goes on in prison that is low skill, repetitive work and it is very difficult to see how it is really giving you many skills, or much that could possibly be of use to you when you get released. The real challenge is to combine work and education in a really constructive way.
One thing I would mention is distance learning-type courses or correspondence-type courses, which of course can be done in cell to a large extent, alongside work. The issue about parity of pay is important. I mentioned the survey that we did of prisoners through Inside Time. Around half of them said that one of the barriers to learning was that there was less prison pay offered for being in education than there was in work. Some of that low-skill work is doing little to help that individual prepare for release. Rewarding them in a way that gives them parity of reward in terms of prison pay would be a way of helping them to do more constructive things that are going to help them become more effective in future life.
Q163 John Howell: Mr Clark, would you like to expand on the proposals for learning prisons to exist alongside working prisons?
Rod Clark: It really is a simple message: why should there be a distinction between a place where people can do work and a place where they can learn? The best examples of educational achievement in prison establishments are where there is a real commitment from the leadership team, picking up on Julie’s points, and where there is a belief in educational values running right the way through the prison and where every opportunity is taken, whether it is use of the gym or use of the workshops, contact from individual prison officers supporting education as a goal, or the establishment of ways for prisoners themselves to engage in talking through prison councils or learner voice bodies to take some control of their own learning. There is potentially a hugely precious model within our grasp if we can get those different factors and that leadership working together.
Dr Mills: And if you can get key local employers to support you and be part of that journey. We are developing academies sponsored by employers. Greggs is a good example working with us at HMP Drake Hall, which is part of the female estate. We run a Greggs academy and they actually come in and do some of the training. It is an absolute partnership. The prison has had to be flexible to allow us to do that. The exiting students are guaranteed an interview for a job; in fact, we have had our first two to secure employment as a consequence of that. That adds yet another layer of value to the work-education-employer link.
Q164 John Howell: Presumably you would like to see greater flexibility in the system so that people worked during working hours and then had access to education after that. Have any of you done cost implications on what would be involved in that?
Keith Smith: Could I make one point in terms of the question? Perhaps one of the things we are trying to achieve is not to separate education from work quite as much as you are suggesting. One of the key strategic goals we are trying to achieve is, as I said before, how we can understand the labour market requirements and skills requirements that employers say are needed and how we can best deliver those to people in prison.
When you look at the best apprenticeship models, they are about enabling people through their work to gain underpinning skills and knowledge, but also having a way of recognising and validating that through a formal qualification or a formal programme. What we are looking for are increasingly more opportunities where you can bridge the work that people are doing, or the practice of work, with how you actually do skills acquisition and skills learning alongside that. Rather than seeing it as what education programmes we put people on and then what jobs you can get them to do, you want to try to bridge those things to make them more meaningful and complementary.
That is where we are doing more and more work to understand how the delivery of services in prison can immediately lead to somebody on release moving into an apprenticeship or a traineeship, which is again an extension of the model within prisons, and is as much about work experience as the continuation of skills training. That is where I think the OLASS providers do a really important job. What they are doing is interfacing with the services or the skills requirements that are happening within the prison itself and then trying to engage with those prisoners on release to see them through the continuation of those skills programmes.
Q165 John Howell: What are the cost implications?
Keith Smith: It is very much about how you set it up. As a model, it is potentially cost-neutral. Government is already investing in skills. It puts a skills budget there. It is investing in services in prisons. The efficiency issue is how that structure is set up. You will see, as Julie said, that there are already models that are very effective and efficient with resources.
Dr Mills: Our learning, in terms of cost-effectiveness, has been about the types of roles we need to have, both in individual prisons and then regionally as an organisation. We started off with a particular model of employer interface and an organisational structure that we thought could deliver it, and we have changed it. We are investing much more in front-line staff, who are engaging outwith the prison, talking to employers and trying to broker those relationships. We have to do that within our funding envelope. That is what I mean about partnership being the key thing. We have to work effectively with the prison and its leadership team to make sure that that is done in a joined-up way.
Rod Clark: There are a number of things we could do that really do not involve additional cost. One is to make use of the sorts of opportunities that the community and voluntary sector are making available to support education—for example, the use of distance learning in particular, which is an opportunity to have greater flexibility to study in cell and outside the normal working week. One is to make more use of prisoners themselves, who provide a real potential resource for supporting education and supporting colleagues doing it. Another is to make use of the ICT infrastructure that has already been put into prisons at considerable expense, and making available the content so that it can be used to support a broader range of learning, and ideally to do some thinking around the contract so that Julie’s colleagues in the OLASS providers can run courses that use that ICT potential within the same cost envelope for the overall OLASS 4 contract.
Dr Mills: That is very helpful. My caveats would be twofold around that. Historically, evening classes have struggled to be attractive to students, so in terms of a straight staff to numbers of people engaging, there is not a track record that demonstrates that is an effective use of time getting people off the wing and into education. The use of technology is a really important thing and we could be doing much more with it. That stores up a cost for the future though, whereby the IT estate needs refreshing, and that needs to figure in terms of the cost implications to take it forward.
Chair: That completes our session. On behalf of the Committee, I thank you very much for your time and the very helpful evidence you have given. Dr Mills, Mr Smith and Mr Clark, in light of the fact that this session was rather truncated because of House business, if you feel you wish to make further points, please write to us; they will be appreciated. We have had very good evidence, but if you need to add anything, please do so and feel free to write. Thank you very much.
Oral evidence: Prisons: planning and policies, HC 309 19