Justice Committee
Oral evidence: Prison population 2022: planning for the future, HC 483
Wednesday 10 October 2018
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 10 October 2018.
Members present: Robert Neill (Chair); Ruth Cadbury; Bambos Charalambous; David Hanson; Gavin Newlands; Victoria Prentis; Ellie Reeves; Ms Marie Rimmer.
Questions 268 - 341
Witnesses
I: Professor Nick Hardwick, Royal Holloway University; Dee Anand, British Psychological Society; and Mark Day, Prison Reform Trust.
II: Sonia Crozier, Director of Probation, HM Prison and Probation Service; Martin Jones, Chief Executive, Parole Board; and Dr Jo Bailey, Head of Psychology, HM Prison and Probation Service.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– [Add names of witnesses and hyperlink to submissions]
Witnesses: Professor Hardwick, Dee Anand and Mark Day.
Q268 Chair: Welcome to our evidence session and thank you for coming to give evidence to us. The members will declare their interests to start with. I am a non-practising barrister and a consultant to a law firm.
Victoria Prentis: I am a non-practising barrister, but I used to conduct law on behalf of the Prison Service.
Bambos Charalambous: I am a non-practising solicitor.
Ellie Reeves: I am a non-practising barrister.
Chair: Perhaps the panel could introduce themselves and their organisations. We will then go straight into the questions.
Dee Anand: My name is Dee Anand. I am a forensic psychologist and vice-chair of the National Division of Forensic Psychology and a two-time past chair of that division as well.
Professor Hardwick: I am Nick Hardwick. I am now a professor of criminal justice at Royal Holloway University in London. I was chair of the Parole Board and chief inspector of prisons.
Mark Day: I am Mark Day, the head of policy and communications at the Prison Reform Trust. I am also the clerk to the all-party group on penal affairs.
Q269 Chair: Thank you very much for coming to give evidence to us. I will go straight to the Ministry’s three objectives set out in their departmental plan. We are looking at the prison population going forward, and they are saying that they should get the basics right with safe, decent, modern prisons. They talk about incentives for prisoners to reform and a sustainable population. They are looking at non-custodial sentences and, at the same time, keeping the money under control.
What are your observations? Are those the right objectives? Is there anything missing? Should they be formulated or prioritised differently?
Professor Hardwick: First of all, thank you for the invitation to talk to you.
I think they are now the right objectives. We have come a long way from the rehabilitation revolution. We are now concentrating on the basics of getting our finances right and getting a sustainable population. That is the correct thing to do. I do not have the same day-to-day knowledge about what is happening as I used to, but I have heard that there is evidence of some improvement. You can see some effect of that, but there is still a very long way to go, and I still think there are some big risks.
We should see those objectives as laying the foundations. They are not an end in themselves but they are a means to an end. It is correct to say that you need to get them in place, but we should not abandon a longer-term vision of wider reform, greater focus on rehabilitation and trying to make more decent and humane prisons. At the moment, you have to stop people beating each other up. You have to get them out of the squalor that some of them are living in.
Q270 Chair: Those long-term objectives might have been in the old Prison and Courts Bill that was lost at the previous election. That is where we should ultimately aim.
Professor Hardwick: Yes, exactly. We should concentrate on the basics now, but that is a foundation and not an end in itself.
Mark Day: I broadly agree with Nick. The short to medium-term objective has to be addressing the problems of safety and decency, which means crucially having the staffing and resources to do that. In the longer term, if the Ministry wants to keep a grip on finances and also to be able to deliver safe, decent prisons, they have to look at measures for a sustainable prison population.
What they have so far put in place in terms of the changes to HDC, while welcome, has led to a small reduction in numbers, which has taken some pressure off, but it is just not enough to achieve a sustainable reduction in the longer term. It will be difficult politically, given that the vast amount of inflation has been driven at the top end of sentencing. There are political obstacles, but in the short term there are certainly things that could be done, building on the welcome statements by the Justice Minister around reducing the use of short sentences and looking at extending the use of HDC. I see no reason why that could not be done. It is also looking at limiting recall, and the probation review at the moment provides an opportunity to look at recall for short sentence prisoners.
Q271 Chair: It seems to me that the issue is that either you spend a shedload more money on prisoners with the current levels of demand, or you do something about alternatives that the community has faith in.
Professor Hardwick: As I said in my submission to the Committee and as Mark says, the increase in the population has been driven by an increase in the length of sentences.
Chair: Which was Mr Day’s point, yes.
Professor Hardwick: At any one point, only 4% of the population do sentences of less than six months. Churn is an issue, but that does not account for it. I would be very concerned about the mistakes that were made in the early part of this decade, when the Secretary of State—Ken Clarke I think it was then—made a promise or a prediction that he would be able to bring the population down. The budgets were cut because of that promise, but the population did not drop and the crunch then happened.
I would be very cautious about the Ministry of Justice, in order to please the Treasury, promising that they can deliver savings through reductions in the population that, in the end, prove unachievable. It is not simply a question of prison space. It is not the physical space; it is about the numbers of staff, the services and so on.
Q272 Chair: That is why you say it is good as far as it goes but we should not lose the long-term objective that you talked about.
Professor Hardwick: Yes.
Dee Anand: I broadly echo the sentiments of my colleagues. What we need to bear in mind is the material objective of the strategic thinking behind the reduction in prison populations. From my perspective as a psychologist, we really need to be looking to develop a culture of safety and change for prisoners and for the staff who work within prisons. Reducing prison numbers is a part of that, but it is only a part. It is a big part, but it is only a part.
There is lots of research. Alison Liebling from the University of Oxford has published very widely on what she calls a decency agenda and changing the cultures within a prison. It is only when you change the culture that you can expect positive results from rehabilitation.
The Committee also needs to bear in mind that this is not only a prison issue. Reducing prison numbers is not about prisons; it is about what is available in the community. It is about the link between mental health services in-reach and outside in the community, and through the gate services. It is the linking between various different strands of policy that we should be concerned with.
Chair: That is a very helpful point; thank you.
Q273 David Hanson: We have looked at a number of prison issues, and the Government themselves have identified a number of seriously difficult prisons at the moment. They have instituted the urgent notification procedure, which has been issued against Birmingham and Bedford recently. There have also been challenges at Liverpool, Nottingham and other prisons. I want to get a sense of where we are now in relation to whether the panel thinks that the urgent notification procedure has value, focuses resources and leads to improvement.
Professor Hardwick: Yes, I do. I congratulate my successor. It is a very important initiative. I have spoken to people in some of the prisons concerned and they tell me that it has done precisely that. It has focused resources and attention on the prisons that are of most concern. We have looked at some of the critical things in terms of more experienced staff and reducing populations. That has had an impact. I think that is necessary.
There are a number of things to bear in mind. There are a lot of prisons just below that level, or which the prison inspectorate has not yet got to, that are very concerning. I do not think that those where the urgent notification has been issued are the only ones we should be concerned about. In the Prison Service’s own performance ratings, there are far more that they say are of concern than the inspectorate has yet identified.
My second concern is this. I think Peter Clarke has got the balance right now, but I would not go further. It would be a concern, I think, if the prison inspectorate becomes a substitute for the management of the Prison Service. One of the questions about urgent notifications is why they are necessary. Why does it take the inspectorate to go round to identify the problems? Why can the corrective measures only be put in place after the inspectorate has been there?
It seems to me that, in some cases, if the inspectorate becomes dragged too much into doing management’s job, it starts to have to defend the position it is in and it starts to have to work more in the Government’s agenda than to provide an objective overview. I think Peter has got the balance exactly right now, but it raises some other questions about why the UN process is necessary, and why management is not identifying and dealing with those problems itself.
Q274 David Hanson: I tend to agree with that. It is a badge of failure if you have an urgent notification. If you are the Department and you have one against you, it says that you are not performing to an acceptable standard. Wherever we are now, that is the procedure; they are being issued on a relatively regular basis. Is that mechanism leading to improvements?
Professor Hardwick: To give an example, I went to Liverpool. There was a pre-urgent notification, but it is a similar process. I was not inspecting it; I was just a visitor. From what staff at all levels were telling me, and from what I observed just walking round, there had been a significant difference. You could see that the place was cleaner and calmer. Governors and staff in other prisons have told me the same.
I would not want to claim too much, because I am not there on the same basis, but I think it has worked. It was necessary to do now, but it raises some bigger questions about why it was necessary.
Q275 David Hanson: Are there any dissenting observations from your colleagues?
Mark Day: I agree that it has been a welcome power that has helped to drive change. I think it is important that it is seen not as a tool of management and resource allocation, but fundamentally a power given to an independent inspectorate to highlight when a prison is in particular and exceptional crisis. That should be because it is failing to meet very basic minimum standards. When the inspectorate gets into questions of management, problems will begin for it as an independent body that is meant to be overseeing standards in prisons. I echo Nick on that.
On its own, it will not drive the improvements necessary. One of the pressures that arises when an urgent notification happens is that there are automatically pressures on other prisons surrounding the prison in crisis. You will get staff taken from the prisons and drafted in. Courts will be ordered not to send people to that prison but to prisons in the surrounding area. We know that when the urgent notification was issued against Birmingham, Hewell took on some of that pressure.
There is a danger that the more it is used, the more you shift pressures around the system. It cannot just be done on an establishment‑by‑establishment basis. You have to look at the overall pot of resources and money that has been given to prisons.
Q276 David Hanson: We are looking at prisons up to 2022. One of the key issues is what the staff requirements are by 2022. We have had a reduction in prison officers, yes; but we have also lost experienced officers and many inexperienced officers. We have governor autonomy, which brings a whole range of new challenges on the ground. Professor Hardwick, you have previously indicated your concern, which may be shared by Dr Anand, about the lack of psychologists in prison or the lack of training or ability to respond on those issues.
I have a question for all three of you. If you had the power, what would be the training and recruitment strategies? What are the shortages that are required to be met for a Prison Service in four years’ time?
Dee Anand: I will take the point on psychologists. Picking up a couple of the points raised by Professor Hardwick and my colleague a moment ago, the urgent notification process is fine and is working okay, and needs to happen for prisons in crisis. What we are talking about are places that have very clear central issues related to people and environments, and the interlink between the two. Psychologists are uniquely placed to really understand that process—the relation or dynamic between people and the environment.
A number of trainee psychologists are placed in prisons. The problem is that there is a lack of experienced and qualified psychologists in prisons to take on some of those roles. My view, as I said in the written submission, is that forensic psychologists should be supported through what we call stage 2 training, which is the vocational qualification part of the three-year training for forensic psychologists. A similar model to that used for clinical psychologists in the NHS should be employed, whereby there should be a very clear strategy and direction that overarches the provision of psychological services within prison.
Money is not always the problem; it is how money is used and where the strategy is coming from. We need subsidised training to ensure that people get through qualifications quickly, so that we have a larger body of psychologists reflective of the prison population. At the moment, statistically 80% or 90% of forensic psychologists are women. Those coming through the qualification process are young women, and that is not reflective of the prison population. Young, white, middle-class women can afford the training. This is a problem. It is not reflective of the change process, or the relation or dynamic we need to focus on in the prison estate.
Professor Hardwick: There are two priorities. There is a limit to the number of new staff you can recruit at any one time. There is a limit to the capacity of the system to absorb new staff. I would not relax the rate at which new staff are being recruited, but I would give much greater focus to retention.
From the last data on operational staff, in a year they have recruited about 5,000 new staff, but 1,000 staff who have done less than three years’ service have left. Staff are leaving before they become fully effective.
Q277 David Hanson: What is your assessment of why that is?
Professor Hardwick: There are a couple of reasons. One is working conditions; you get punched, so why would you turn up to work with those levels of violence? That is a big issue.
Secondly, it is about reward. You can earn more money in comparable or less stressful jobs close by. There is a real reward factor. I suspect there are also some things going on about the support that new staff get and whether the training is right. There are also issues not just about keeping new staff but making sure that experienced staff do not leave before they need to. The whole issue of retention has not been given enough attention.
I could not find any data about this, but my fairly recent experience is that the shortages were not just of operational or uniformed staff. There are shortages of teachers, of health staff and, as we have heard, of psychologists who are doing their training in the workshop. It is all of those ancillary grades that are crucial to the overall stability of the prison. It would be a mistake to focus solely on operational and uniformed staff. There are other people whose work is crucial. We need to be looking at governors as well, for instance.
Mark Day: When the cuts began to bite, the loss, particularly of mid-level uniformed managers and governing governors, had a real impact. We have seen that come through in the declining levels of safety, first of all with the cuts overall in staff, but then with large numbers of inexperienced staff coming in without the supervision and support that could have been provided by that mid-level. I think that has had a real impact on the outcomes we are seeing today.
We need to look at the two factors that Nick mentioned about retention. That may mean having to recruit over current rates to get more people, particularly on residential wings. We also need to look at the things that will keep people, such as terms and conditions and prospects for progression. Bringing out the mid-level of the service, along with the cuts overall, had a particular impact.
Q278 Ms Marie Rimmer: Professor Hardwick, I understand you believe that the staffing levels required to restore legitimate authority and to compensate for the lack of experience of staff will now be greater than if we had not lost it in the first place. The Prison Reform Trust believes that prisoners should play a much more responsible role in the life of the prison. Could you give us any examples of prisons where officers have regained legitimate authority and where prisoners play a more responsible role, where it is actually happening now?
Professor Hardwick: The issues are slightly different. For instance, in Liverpool I would say that because they reduced the numbers and because they brought in some more experienced staff, the prison was more ordered and calmer than before. That was an example.
The difficulty is this. I am quite sure that in some prisons the absence of experienced staff has left a vacuum that organised crime has filled. If you want a profitable trade in drugs, you need some rules and structures by which that trade operates. There is a lot of money at stake. People need to pay you; you cannot go to the small claims court if they do not.
What has happened in some prisons is that an alternative structure has developed, where prisoners are running too much of what is happening. Once established, it becomes very difficult to break down. That is much more difficult than to stop it arising in the first place. That has certainly happened in some places.
The second point you made was about prisoner roles. I do not think prisoners can substitute for staff. I would not say that. Indeed, I am aware of some circumstances where prisoners were doing jobs that should have been done by staff, and that was improper.
One of the last reports that I produced as chief inspector of prisons was about peer supporters in prisons. It was published in January 2016. There are lots of examples in that of really good prison peer support roles. They are things you are familiar with such as the listener scheme and extra education support. There is a very good scheme in Oakwood called BIG—Basic Intervention Group—where they had experienced and trusted prisoners intervening with prisoners who were on the basic level of the incentive scheme, to try to help them improve their behaviour.
There are lots of different roles that prisoners can play, but they need to be properly supervised and managed by staff. It is not a substitute for staff; it is an addition. It is good for the prisoner providing that service and good for the people who receive it, provided it is well managed. There were plenty of examples in that report.
Q279 Ms Marie Rimmer: Did I hear correctly that you named Liverpool as a place where there is retained authority?
Professor Hardwick: I would say that Liverpool is quite a good example. Another good example where it worked was Oakwood, a private sector prison. At one point, we had a lot of concerns about what was happening at Oakwood. I think they turned Oakwood around. I am not saying that it is impossible to do, but if you get a very entrenched, delinquent culture among prisoners, and indeed among staff, it becomes very hard to shift.
Mark Day: Those sorts of roles need proper supervision, and they are not a substitute for proper staffing. The roles prisoners take on can contribute a unique thing in terms of the trust they can engender, and can reflect the experience of the people they are working with, which can be more effective sometimes than what staff are able to do.
Particularly good examples are peer advice. There are information desks operated by prisoners in Send, Wandsworth, Hewell and Lowdham. Nick mentioned Oakwood as well. They use peer mentors on the drug recovery wing there. Service user feedback gets prisoners to comment on how a service is being delivered and run, and to drive improvements where it is lacking. Swaleside has a peer-led community hub that, for instance, gathers evidence on how the prison is meeting the inspectorate’s expectations.
If I may give a plug for my own organisation, we run active citizens’ panels in a number of prisons. That involves working with a small group of prisoners on a particular problem in the prison and getting their views on what can be done to solve it. We have taken on a number of different issues, ranging from the cleanliness of wings through to how better resettlement support could be delivered in the prison. We have had very good feedback.
Finally, we have something called the prisoner policy network, which is a growing network of prisoners across the country. We have brought them together specifically to comment on national prison policy on things such as the changes to the incentives and earned privileges scheme. The current consultation we are doing is around incentives. We have asked prisoners for their view of what a good incentive is in prison. We are getting lots of very rich and detailed feedback from prisoners on that. There are many ways in which prisons can do more to give prisoners responsible roles and positions where they can feel that they have some responsibility and autonomy over their own environment.
Q280 Ms Marie Rimmer: Dr Anand, would you like to comment?
Dee Anand: I defer to my colleagues on that point. The only comment I would make is that the psychological process underpinning this is clearly that of personal agency or autonomy. There is a clear value in the development of personal agency and autonomy when you are looking to create a culture of change and rehabilitation. If that is absent, it is a major obstacle that one needs to circumvent in order to begin the process of change.
Q281 Ms Marie Rimmer: Research released by HMPPS last month said that “highly controlling regimes” or situations in which “rules are unevenly applied” can give rise to conflict and assault. HMPPS has now consulted on changes to incentives and earned privileges, but does not appear to be consulting on reviewing the disciplinary system. What would be your advice to governors about how best to incentivise good behaviour and deal with poor behaviour?
Professor Hardwick: Consistency is the No. 1 rule. It is like parents with children. You have to be consistent. This is where some compromises have to be made. We have a very legalistic discipline process. There is a very good parenting point. Sometimes the way the discipline process works is like a parent saying to their child, “If you don’t tidy your room immediately, there is a 40% chance that in six months’ time I am going to ground you for two years.” It does not work. There need to be much quicker sanctions when prisoners have misbehaved, and much quicker rewards when they do the right thing.
There is quite an interesting example that the inspectorate found in some of the young offender institutions, where they are doing simple rewards and sanctions. It is very immediate and there are some principles that could be applied in the adult estate, not for the most serious offences, but just nipping some things in the bud and making sure there is a very instant reward if you have done the right thing.
Mark Day: It is right that the system of incentives and earned privileges is separate from the adjudication system. We should not confuse the two because they are fundamentally about different things, although related.
The Government have just conducted a consultation on review of IEP. There are some things to welcome in there that reflect the evidence. There is a lot in the evidence section around procedural justice, around ensuring consistency in how people respond, and about fairness in the processes—appeal processes and processes for review.
Positive reinforcement is the other evidence in there. It is essentially that reward is more effective than punitive responses. It is ensuring that the focus is very much on commendation for good behaviour and not sanctions for bad. Unfortunately, the inspectorate found in its recent thematic for young people that there is currently far too much focus in the scheme on punitive measures over positive reinforcement, and there is no reason to think that is not the same across the estate, certainly on the basis of our conversations with adult prisoners.
Q282 Ms Marie Rimmer: Dr Anand, you have suggested that greater integration of psychologists across health and forensic services may help to improve safety. Would you explain how this might work in practice, and whether there are existing examples of good practice? If you would like to comment on the rest, you may.
Dee Anand: I will pick up on the points raised, but that actually flows neatly into my response to the specific question too. What we need to do is view prisons as places and cultures that facilitate change, which means that rehabilitation needs to be a primary focus for our institutions. Although there is necessarily a process that exists to punish bad behaviour, as Mark quite rightly says, we know that positive reinforcement is far more effective.
In order for a prison environment to be conducive to change, we need to create an environment where prisoners feel self-worth and feel that authority is used fairly and proportionately. Where prisoners do not feel that, or have mistrust in the system, as they would view it, whether that system is just psychologists or everybody in the prison state, and they feel it is an unfair place to be, it creates a significant problem in creating a culture of safety and change.
What we could be talking about could be desistance rather than rehabilitation. We could be talking about creating an environment that stops people in the first place from transcending the boundaries they need to adhere to. Encouraging the building of a better narrative for prisoners is where psychologists can really help in developing that environment.
In response to your question about specific opportunities, I have already mentioned that the subsidising of tuition fees and placements for forensic psychologists is important. Psychologists should be brought into every stage of workforce and strategic planning within a prison, whether that prison is being newly developed or reformed as an institution that exists already. That includes the fundamental architectural design of the prison and influence on policy within prison, from the governor’s directive downwards, as well as the broader policy initiatives from the Ministry, with involvement in the support and supervision of staff at every stage of the prisoner process.
There is an example of where that happens. You may be aware of HMP Grendon. It is a fantastic example, in my view. It is a therapeutic community, where the prisoners, the inmates, are themselves invested in change. They are some of the most complex prisoners you will find. They have personality disorders—I do not like that phrase, but I use it for want of a better phrase right now. That is the label attributed to them. The prisoners themselves are, in effect, offering therapy to each other on a constant basis. They are invested in a culture of safety and change. The staff are facilitating that process and, in my view, if we could have 100 Grendons it would be wonderful.
Q283 Victoria Prentis: Moving now to the Parole Board, if that is all right, Professor Hardwick, there was a large backlog of cases. I know what you are going to say next; you have left and it is not your problem any more. If you could give us the benefit of your experience, it would be very helpful.
What I want to tease out is the effect that the backlog has on numbers in the prison population. To what extent is the slowing up of processes within the Parole Board having an effect on numbers in the prison population? Did you ever assess that?
Professor Hardwick: By the time I left the Parole Board, I think we had pretty much eliminated the backlog. We had got it down to frictional levels. I gather from Martin, who is sitting behind me, that they have been able to maintain that since. I do not think the efficiency of the process is the issue now, although as the board has been given new responsibilities, which I generally welcome, they need to be properly resourced.
The problem was that we sometimes had prisoners coming before the board with complex problems that needed to be managed and which we felt could be managed in the community, but there were not the community resources to manage them. The problem was no longer in the board itself but in what was available in the community to safely and supportively manage that man or woman if they were moved out. I cannot give you a number as to how many there were, but I do not think the answer to the problem is that the Parole Board could become more efficient. I am sure there are some efficiencies, but I do not think that is the critical issue.
We did some work, and I understand it has continued, around trying to reduce the numbers of deferrals and adjournments, and that is now bearing fruit. It goes back to a point we made earlier. The problems are now in the community and what support and management is available to people in the community, rather than what is happening within the Parole Board itself. As I say, I am slightly out of date.
Q284 Victoria Prentis: Do you feel that the Parole Board had the right level of representation before it, and the right people giving evidence to it in order to make your assessments?
Professor Hardwick: Generally. One of the really tricky issues for the Parole Board was that you could go on taking evidence forever. You never completely got to a point when every single question was settled. It seems to me that the danger, if the Parole Board were to become more risk averse, is not simply that it would make more negative decisions, but that the process would slow up because the board would be asking for more and more information. Often that additional information would simply be confirming what you already knew, but you did not know it was going to do that. So, “Perhaps we had better check this; perhaps we had better check that.” Where you strike the balance is very tricky.
As was said before, the Parole Board has had a serious failure offence rate of less than 1%. On the whole, I think the board was making accurate and pretty timely decisions by the time I left. I do not think there is some great thing you could do to it that would improve that a lot. If I was going to focus resources and effort now, I would focus it out on what is available to make it possible for the Parole Board to release people, because there is support and supervision available in the community. That is where I would put my effort now.
Q285 Victoria Prentis: Thank you. Dr Anand, is one thing we could do to speed things up to shorten the amount of time it takes to get a proper psychiatric assessment?
Dee Anand: A psychological assessment?
Q286 Victoria Prentis: Either.
Dee Anand: I can speak to the psychological assessment to a certain degree, although my colleague Jo Bailey, who is giving evidence after this, will probably be able to speak more accurately, with some data on that. Certainly there is a well-noted timeframe of around three months to get a psychological assessment.
The problem remains, as I said earlier, the lack of experienced and qualified psychologists to conduct assessments, and the value that the Parole Board then needs to give trainee psychologists, who may be very well equipped to conduct those assessments and could expedite those matters. The number of parole requests and the historical backlog that has come in means that some of the reports have had to be outsourced to private companies outside, through a framework agreement, to psychologists who are not based in the Prison Service and may not have all the information available to them at the earliest opportunity.
There needs to be a clear process of information exchange and the availability of information to psychologists at the first point of referral. The psychologist needs to conduct the assessment at a reasonable time so that other agencies are not waiting for the psychological report, which often happens and creates a backlog as well.
Q287 Victoria Prentis: One other point of delay, certainly in my experience, was the provision of courses to prisoners, and inmates having to move round the country to correct courses and waiting ages for a transfer or a place to become available. Is that still very much an issue? Possibly that is one for you, Mark.
Mark Day: Yes. We have an advice and information line for prisoners that takes 6,000 contacts a year. Progression, including lack of availability on offender behaviour programmes, is a significant concern.
Q288 Victoria Prentis: Is it getting better or worse?
Mark Day: There was some improvement in how the Parole Board was meant to take account of offender behaviour programmes as a result of the concerns about the IPP population. That led to some improvements in how the programmes were viewed, but there is still a very common view among prisoners, and staff as well, that prisoners need to take part in the programmes in order to progress. There remain significant problems of availability of courses for prisoners.
Q289 Victoria Prentis: Professor Hardwick wants to come in.
Professor Hardwick: I have two points. The point is not that the prisoner has done the course. The point is that their risk has reduced. The fact that they have done a course does not mean their risk has reduced. The fact that they have not done a course does not mean they have not had any change to their risk levels. Sometimes there might be an over-reliance on courses.
My understanding is that the provision of courses has improved, certainly over the last few years. There may be enough course places available, but that does not mean that the prisoners are in the places where the courses are. If you are running the system at maximum capacity, you have to put prisoners where there is a space, as opposed to where they need to be. That is why you need some headroom in the system so that you can actually match the courses prisoners need with where they actually are.
Q290 Victoria Prentis: That is very helpful. What is the position on deniers—people who do not admit their guilt before the Parole Board? Has anything changed?
Professor Hardwick: I think there have been changes in the understanding of what denial means. Denial covers a range of things from outright denial to minimisation, to partial acceptance of the impact. My understanding is that there is a greater sense that, even if somebody is not fully admitting the seriousness of what they have done, a partial admission gives you something to work on that may lead to more effective results in the long run. My understanding is that the approach to denial has got more sophisticated over time.
Q291 Victoria Prentis: Can I throw in personality disorders? Has the approach got more sophisticated there too?
Dee Anand: I will pick up on a couple of those points. Professor Hardwick makes an extremely valid point about the nature of risk and the availability of programmes. It is somewhat of a repeated fallacy that, if you have not completed an offender behaviour programme, you cannot demonstrably show that your risk has reduced. That is not the case. That is not the psychological perspective. Nor is denial as a risk factor a psychological imperative.
What forensic psychologists are trying to do when they conduct risk assessments for the Parole Board is to communicate an individualised formulation to the Parole Board: “Who is this guy and what is motivating this person to do this thing?” That individualised formulation is as much about social and mental wellbeing as it is about risk.
When you adopt that formula for those who have a label of personality disorder, certainly from a professional perspective the thinking around the label of personality disorder has changed. Earlier this year, I contributed to a paper on the label of personality disorder that was brought to Parliament before Norman Lamb. From a professional perspective, the thinking around that has changed. I cannot speak beyond our profession as to whether the impression of personality disorder as fundamentally untreatable has changed.
Q292 Victoria Prentis: That is very helpful in itself. Finally, I want to ask about SOTPs, which were always presented, through most of my time working with the Prison Service, as the gold standard. We now know that they have been discredited and we have new systems—two new courses—that have not yet been evaluated. Do any of you want to comment on how you think things are going with the new courses? This is a really important area because we have more sex offenders in prison than ever before, and they are a very fast-growing proportion of the prison population.
Dee Anand: There was a fairly damning report on sex offender treatment programmes that the Ministry of Justice eventually released, although it is a paper that was released far too late in my view. It should have been released much earlier. As scientists, we certainly advocate transparency and openness, empirical review and an evidence-based approach. The reasons for the delay of that paper are something that most of us in the profession are very uncomfortable about.
That said, there is some controversy about the findings in that paper. The headline findings are that there was a 25% increase in the likelihood of recidivism for those who had taken part in that course. That is not strictly true. That is not quite what the paper said. A more recent meta-analysis of sex offender treatment programmes and research into sex offender treatment programmes by a colleague of mine, Theresa Gannon, at the University of Kent—as yet unpublished but due to be published soon—has challenged some of those findings.
Q293 Victoria Prentis: Does that include an assessment of the new systems or just the SOTPs?
Dee Anand: No. She has not reviewed Horizon and Kaizen specifically, but she has looked at the meta-analysis of research relating to sex offender treatment programmes as they have been delivered, not just in the UK but in other countries too.
Q294 Victoria Prentis: One thing has always interested me. Does it make a difference who delivers the course?
Dee Anand: These are the crucial points from Theresa Gannon’s findings. Psychologists must be the individuals who deliver those programmes. Although an individualised approach is valuable, group work can be effective, which is contrary to some of the findings in the previous SOTP paper. There needs to be a clear focus on deviant sexual interest and sexual deviancy, and looking at the arousal mechanisms for those participating in the programme. That was rather absent and lacking in the delivery of sex offender treatment programmes before. There needs to be very clear and effective supervision both of those who are delivering the programme and of those who are participating in the programme.
In fact, when the meta-analysis was conducted, programmes that adhered to those broad principles actually showed a 33% treatment effect. A very clear treatment efficacy was demonstrated by those who had adhered to the principles.
The problems of the previous programme are clear. They are unarguable, and I am not here to defend the previous sex offender treatment programme. There were problems in it, but those problems were partly theoretical in terms of the theory underpinning the delivery of the programme. They were certainly mechanical in operation as to who was delivering them, the method of referral and the intake of people who had been brought on to the programme. They were environmental as well. We were returning those individuals to an environment that felt unsafe and was not conducive to change. There were a number of problems with the delivery of SOTPs before.
Q295 Victoria Prentis: That was really helpful. Do either of you have anything to add about the new programmes in place?
Professor Hardwick: No.
Mark Day: No.
Victoria Prentis: We wait with bated breath.
Q296 Gavin Newlands: Over the last few months we have heard about the barriers facing rehabilitation in prison. We have touched on some of them today. Could you crystallise for us what the key barriers are and what advice you would give to make prisons genuinely rehabilitative by 2022?
Professor Hardwick: There are two things. First, the critical driver of rehabilitation, safety and lots of the other things we have talked about is relationships between staff of all types and the prisoners they are responsible for. There is no shortcut to that. You need enough experienced staff working consistently to create the relationships on which those other things depend. There are many other things you can do; the environment is important and how the processes work is important, but it is relationships that are key.
The second thing is that the people who are managing those services need stability. If you talk to prison governors about the demands of coping, you do not have to go very far back. We had working prisons; then we had a rehabilitation revolution; then transforming rehabilitation and a shake-up of the system, et cetera, et cetera. All of that left governors in their offices looking at spreadsheets, and not down on the wings managing what was happening.
There are two things. You need consistency at an individual relationship level, where this member of staff works regularly on this wing. He or she knows the prisoners they are responsible for. They know him or her, and that happens over a period of time. Secondly, you need consistency or much more stability around policy, so that people can plan on a basis where they are clear about what the strategy is and what the objectives are. They can get on and deliver that, and it does not change every six months. I would say those are the two key things for the moment.
Mark Day: I echo that. One of the positive commitments the Government have made is one member of staff to six prisoners: the OMiC. Hopefully, we will see that drive some improvements in those relationships in the longer term.
The barriers to rehabilitation in prison are multiple. We could talk for a long time about them.
Q297 Gavin Newlands: But if you could fix two of them?
Mark Day: I would certainly mention lack of availability of ROTL—release on temporary licence. There was a very welcome commitment from the Justice Secretary to review that policy. We are still waiting for the outcome of that consultation. Information and communication technology could be employed a lot more in prisons, both in cell technology to improve family contact and in its potential for use in education and sorting out resettlement, such as housing, banking and that sort of thing.
Earlier, we mentioned problems of progression. In our advice service, we frequently hear about lack of availability of courses and waiting lists for courses, as well as continuity of staff. Then there are the through the gate services. The inspectorate’s last set of reports on through the gate services, delivered under TR, were pretty damning about the lack of engagement and the lack of provision tailored to need. As part of that, you need to look at the availability of housing and better links to health, social care and substance misuse on release.
Dee Anand: I certainly agree with the points that have already been made by the panel. The strategic involvement of psychologists in creating an environment that is suitable for change would be the headline for me. There are examples of that with psychologically informed planned environments—PIPEs, as we call them. There are therapeutic communities such as Grendon, which I talked about before.
Those environments ensure that the prisoners themselves become actively involved—an active agent in the change process. That is an evidence-based, environmental change that can happen and has a record of being successful where it has happened. I would look to changing the culture in that way and, as I say, involving psychologists at every stage of strategic and workforce planning.
I also echo Mark’s point just now about community services. As I said at the outset—and both my colleagues here have echoed this point—this is not about prisons; it is about the community services that are available to manage prisoners or to stop people offending in the first place. There is a problem with the availability of community resources. The number of offenders who are released from prison and are unable to register with a GP, for example, and who return to substance misuse or experience mental health problems is significant. I know there are working groups in pockets around the country who are looking to address that, but the through the gate services and community services are a major issue for rehabilitation.
Q298 Gavin Newlands: You touched on the environment and the community. Would you accept that in many cases prison, regardless of whether any improvements or any suggestions that you have made were implemented, would remain an unconducive environment for rehabilitation? These things, for most people, are best done in the community. Looking at the evidence in Scotland, where we have a presumption against short sentences, the recidivism rate has plummeted. Would you give a very quick comment on that?
Mark Day: I agree. One of the major problems with TR is that it focused on prison, and prison as a gateway through to rehabilitation in terms of mandatory supervision on release. I do not think there is any evidence that very lengthy periods of supervision for people who have spent days in custody have had an impact on reoffending. What it has had an impact on are the rates of recall to prison. It simply put an extra spin on the revolving door and put people in and out of prison.
The original Peterborough pilot, which the reforms were meant to be based on, was a voluntary programme of supervision for people on release. As the Government are looking at TR and at the proportionality of licence periods, they should look again at whether there really should be mandatory year-long periods of supervision for very short sentence prisoners.
Professor Hardwick: There is a lot that the prison system of England and Wales can learn from what has been happening in Scotland. The approach to women in Scotland has been much better than it has been in England and Wales. It is very striking that prisons in Scotland have not had the same problems with spice as they have in prisons just a few miles south of the border. That is to do with more effective staffing levels and the relationships that happen in Scotland. You do not hear people in Scotland talking about the same levels of violence as they do in England. The system in England and Wales should look at some of the successes in Scotland and see what can be learned and applied here.
Dee Anand: My only point on that would be that the issue of sentencing is key. I know that community sentence and mental health treatment requirements have been proposed. Where they have been piloted and services have been developed to meet the requirements, they have been successful. However, I wear another hat as director of criminal justice for a national mental health charity. In London, there are real problems in implementing mental health treatment requirements because community mental health teams are not equipped enough to deal with those who might present with a degree of forensic risk. They do not want to take them.
There is a continual battle between statutory services as to who should take responsibility for those who have a complex presentation and a forensic history. There certainly needs to be some thinking around the development of services to meet the need of community sentence treatment requirements.
Q299 Gavin Newlands: What do you think the priorities for the Ministry should be in building a proper evidence base for effective management and treatment of prisoners, and for the Department itself to become much more data driven?
Professor Hardwick: It is around the transparency of the data that is available. I am suspicious of the idea that you can drive all the changes you want to see in prisons from the centre; the idea that, if only you had the data, if only you had smarter targets, or if only you could measure things better, it would lead to improvement. I am not saying that none of that is not necessary, but I think a very top-down, centralised approach has not worked in the way we expected.
We ought to look more at shifting the balance so that it is a more bottom-up process and people are encouraged to try things. Maybe you involve experiments from the third sector and that kind of thing. I would be cautious about the idea that if only the centre knew more, it would sort out all the problems at local level. I do not really believe that.
Q300 Chair: Why is London a particular problem, Dr Anand?
Dee Anand: I do not know why London is a particular problem. My experience in London, however, shows that it is. I wonder sometimes whether it is because the complexity of those individuals includes a dual diagnosis presentation—substance misuse allied with a mental health difficulty and a forensic history; there is also a lack of availability of safe places and poor availability of forensic beds in low-secure units. There are multifactorial reasons. I guess the availability of some of those risk factors for people in London makes them more difficult to manage.
Q301 Ellie Reeves: HMPPS models for operational delivery include identification of “specialist” cohorts and how best to meet their needs and manage them effectively. Professor Hardwick, I know that you have been critical in the past of Government’s decision not to implement this Committee’s recommendations on the older population in prison, for example. What is your assessment of HMPPS support for prisoners who fall into a particular cohort, such as those with mental health problems, learning disabilities or health and social care needs?
Professor Hardwick: I will not repeat it, but I think there is an issue with older prisoners. I do not think that older prisoners are in the right place and getting the right level of supervision and support. At the other end of the spectrum, there are some big issues to resolve around young adults. They have been moved out of specialist accommodation into mainstream prisons, and that has caused difficulties, and not just for the young adults themselves. That ought to be looked at again.
We do not know enough about prisoners from minority ethnic groups. Within that category, there is a whole range of different experiences that may need different sorts of intervention.
There is a big question about whether people with mental health problems and learning difficulties should be in prison in the first place, but, if they are, they take time to supervise and organise, which may not be the case for other prisoners. Again, it goes back to whether the support is there.
There is a risk. It seems to me that with all prisons you have to balance three things: the function of the prison, the security classification and the location. At the moment, there is a big drive around function. We are going to have reception prisons, training prisons and resettlement prisons. I am not clear how that is balanced with the security needs, or indeed how it is balanced with the need to meet the requirements of particular groups such as those you mention. I have seen some quite critical comments from people who are closer to me than the Minister.
Mark Day: On the MODs I have seen there has been some good reference to the evidence and how different groups can be managed effectively in custody, but there is a question about their status. This goes back to Nick’s point about what is prioritised by governors. On the whole, they do not contain mandatory action. They are things that are good practice around certain groups, but inevitably other things will supersede those documents because they are not mandatory.
For example, with the IEP policy that has just been consulted on there is no cross-reference to the good practice contained in the MODs. There is a bit of a silo mentality, and it is not connected up.
Chair: We need to get to our next panel fairly soon.
Q302 Bambos Charalambous: I have some questions about the reconfiguration and modernisation of the prison estate. HMPPS is reconfiguring the estate into three types of prison. What should be the characteristics of each of these types of prison? Are there examples of good practice that you are aware of?
Professor Hardwick: To some extent, I can see the logic behind what they are doing, but, as I say, I have some questions about whether the overlay on the security requirements against the three functions that you described works effectively. We know that a great proportion of prisoners are in prison for violent and sexual offences, and there seems to be evidence that some are coming in with a greater range of challenging behaviour than in the past. Do we have the security? Is the categorisation process that overlays the functions correct? I am not sure about that.
Secondly, we need to give more attention to the question of location. There are some tricky issues if you are moving people away from home. On the one hand, we know that family links are important to rehabilitation. On the other hand, I have certainly had it said to me that there is a real problem with the idea of resettlement prisons. For instance, people who are part of a gang culture get sentenced and spread all over the country, and before they are released they all get brought back to a similar prison where they can reunite and make old contacts before being released back into the community. Is that a sensible thing to do?
I remember, when I was down at Guys Marsh prison some years ago, they said that bringing people back to Guys Marsh prior to them being released was a cause of real problems because essentially the gangs were reforming. I do not have the up-to-date knowledge to be quite clear about what is happening now, but I have some big questions about how those three factors are overlaid—the function, the security classification or categorisation, and the location—and whether we have the mix right.
Mark Day: I will briefly comment on the lack of transparency around the estate reconfiguration. The Government are progressing, for instance, with reception prisons, but there has been very little, if any, consultation about their location and function. Given the history of remand prisons particularly, there should have been more questions raised.
Q303 Bambos Charalambous: Is there anywhere you would look for good practice internationally?
Mark Day: Estate planning is crucially hobbled by pressures on the system and overcrowding. Any discrete function of a prison is always going to succumb to the pressures placed on it from outside. Unless we get to grips with the levels of overcrowding and the rates of transfer around the system, which are always going to limit a strategic approach to how we use the estate, it is going to be a problem that comes up again.
Q304 Ruth Cadbury: Is there anything else you want to say about prison design as opposed to the overall reconfiguration of the estate? PRT said there is a need for greater transparency on principles for future design. Are there any good examples internationally?
Professor Hardwick: It is about size. If you are going to redesign, the evidence is pretty persuasive that it is much harder to run a big prison than a smaller one. It is not an absolute position, but I would look at that. You have to be quite careful about saying you can take designs from one estate and one culture and simply plonk them somewhere else. I am not completely convinced of that. You need a model that works for this estate. It goes back to Mike’s point about the lack of transparency around some of these things. It is quite difficult to comment because we are not quite clear what the plans are.
Q305 Bambos Charalambous: This inquiry is focusing on planning up to 2022, but the Ministry of Justice has established a Justice 2030 project, which is looking at the risks and opportunities further ahead. Is there anything we have not yet discussed that you would like to see reflected in prison policy or operations by 2022 and by 2030?
Professor Hardwick: I am now increasingly persuaded by the Prison Governors Association’s call for some kind of public examination of these things, with an inquiry focus. It seems to me that the system has been bedevilled by changes in policy. Because you are talking about estate change and people doing long sentences, you need a long-term perspective that people potentially of different political persuasions can sign up to. We do not have that at the moment. You could set out a 30-year plan. Because it is a disciplined service people will look towards that and they will beaver away and try to do it. Then a couple of years later there will be a new 30-year plan or a new 10-year plan, whatever it might be, and everyone will say, “Right, as you were,” and shift and zoom off in the other direction. All of that takes resources that could be better spent elsewhere.
If you are going to reconfigure the estate, for instance, you need some reasonable degree of confidence that you can stick with that for decades. If it is going to be changed in a couple of years’ time, why would you do it? Sometimes, when you went to a prison where there was some bright-eyed, bushy-tailed new governor and you spoke to the experienced staff on the ground, they just said, “We will just sit it out because he will be gone in 18 months and then we can go back to doing things as they were.” That is a danger for the system as a whole. We need consensus around that long-term plan, whatever it is.
Mark Day: The 2030 project has to be an opportunity to look at sentencing and our sentencing framework. In the short term to 2022, it would perhaps be reckless for the Government to be planning to cut the prison population and allocate resources on that level, but looking ahead to the next decade there should be an opportunity to look at sentence length. We did modelling with colleagues at Justice Episteme looking at the impact of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The combined measures of that Act increased our prison population by 16,000 people. There has to be better planning around the impacts of sentencing choices made on the prison system as a whole. The 2030 project would be an ideal opportunity to do that.
Dee Anand: I agree entirely. There is something to be said for looking to change the conversation around this. Let’s face it: it is an area and a topic of great political sensitivity and not a lot of public buy-in. We need to change the conversation and move it away from prisons being places that are full of terrible people who have done terrible things. Of course, they have committed crimes, but prisons are in fact full of very vulnerable people who need support to help them change.
We need to change the conversation in strategic and political circles. We need to change the public mindset that comes down from top-level strategic thinking. We need to engage the public a bit more. I would like to see that as part of the policy, and part of the function of this Committee too. The focus can then be made much easier on turning prisons into places of rehabilitation, safety and change rather than purely punitive organisations and institutions that the public can forget about.
Q306 Chair: And which other countries and societies have managed to achieve more effectively than us.
Dee Anand: Indeed, yes.
Chair: Thank you very much for your evidence, gentlemen. It is very much appreciated. Thank you for your time.
Witnesses: Sonia Crozier, Martin Jones and Dr Jo Bailey.
Q307 Chair: Welcome. Could you quickly introduce yourselves and then we will get straight on to the questions?
Martin Jones: I am Martin Jones, chief executive to the Parole Board.
Sonia Crozier: I am Sonia Crozier, executive director of probation and women in HMPPS.
Dr Bailey: I am Jo Bailey, head of psychology for HMPPS.
Q308 Ruth Cadbury: What is the impact on parole, probation and forensic psychology services of having a more complex and challenging prison population, in terms of resources, the nature of the work and the knowledge and skills required to deliver it? How is it planned for?
Dr Bailey: I will start with psychology. We see a significantly more complex presentation in the prisoners we are asked to report on for the Parole Board. We also see increasing demand from the Parole Board across the board in psychological results. We have both volume and complexity there, and that obviously has a significant impact on resourcing.
In terms of the practical things we do, we monitor the workforce very closely. We have a skills audit of the training and development our staff need. We look at what the specificity of the work needed for the Parole Board is, and then train and develop staff to meet that. There is a range of asks that are sometimes outside our service, for neuropsychological reports, autism and specialisms like that. Again, we identify them, and then we try to work with offender managers and governors to contract those services when they are needed.
Sonia Crozier: From a probation perspective, it has already been referenced: the offender management in custody model and the increased numbers of prison officers to act as key workers to develop the engagement with prisoners and enhance their engagement with the regime, and so on. As part of the offender management in custody model, additional probation staff are being put into prisons, particularly the long‑term prisons where there are pre-tariff people—the training cat Bs and Cs, for example.
Within the male estate, there are currently about 449 probation officers in prisons. That is going to increase to 622, and there will also be an increase in senior probation officers across the country. The rationale for that is to have more probation officers on the landings who can actually engage with long-term prisoners in a meaningful way, so that they are being assessed routinely, and we are getting them better parole-ready and are able to make more detailed observations around behaviour change. OMiC is a significant change programme in meeting the needs that you have described.
Q309 Ruth Cadbury: Are you going to have the people to fill those positions?
Sonia Crozier: Our recruitment pipeline has been informed by the need to put more probation officers in prisons, so, yes. The goal by the end of 2019 or early 2020 is to be able to put those additional probation officers into, particularly, the long-term prisons.
Martin Jones: From a Parole Board perspective, I have a few things to say. The changing nature of the prison population, in relation to the number serving very long sentences and indeterminate sentences, means that a significant proportion of those cases are coming to the Parole Board for us to assess. Given the fact that 19% of the prison population are now serving sentences for sex offences, we certainly find that it adds to the complexity. There are pressures on psychology resources in relation to the assessments that need to be done. The figures suggest that a large proportion of the prison population have some kind of personality disorder. That leads to increasingly lengthy parole hearings. Obviously, we are holding more hearings than we ever have before. Just getting through that work is an enormous challenge for us all.
The final thing is the ageing prison population. Quite often the Parole Board is getting involved in how to release an 80-year-old man into a care home—how to get social services to pick up the pass, essentially. It makes it very difficult for us. The lesson for us would be to ensure that we get the resources we need to deal with those cases, and the research and the evidence to make sure that we make the right decisions.
Q310 Ruth Cadbury: Dr Bailey, Dr Anand said at the earlier session that there is a shortage of correctly qualified people in psychology coming up through the system. He also said that there should be greater integration between health professionals, particularly psychologists and forensic psychologists. Would you like to comment?
Dr Bailey: The availability of forensic psychologists is a national problem. Without wanting to go back into history too much, forensic psychology was a relatively niche area in the Prison Service. As time has gone by, other forensic and clinical settings have started to recruit forensic psychologists. It is a very different market from what it used to be.
On vacancies, I will have to look at my notes because I can never remember the numbers. Our net vacancies are just over 100, but with that underspend we commission people to do pieces of work such as risk assessments for the Parole Board. That can either be because we do not have sufficient supply or because there is a particular skills gap and we are able to commission it in that way.
We use that funding wisely. It does not just sit there. The issue for us has been quite a historical one, where the enormous growth in funding behaviour programmes some time ago occurred at the same time as the division of forensic psychology changed its training criteria. It was a bit of a perfect storm, and we have spent the last few years pulling psychology together into a single professional function, which has enabled us to improve the training experience and the pace. Our retention is much better. We are attracting people back who have left us. We have quite a positive story around some of that at the moment, but obviously things do not happen quickly.
We have a gap in our qualified psychologists. We are home growing, and we are recruiting in. That is improving. I have a note that since January we have interviewed 164 people for qualified posts. We have not appointed them all. It is improving, but there is more we could do.
Integration is an interesting one. In some places, we are very closely integrated; it works really effectively in some of the youth custody service work that we are doing, and in the women’s and long-term high security estates. There is something about our functional estates where we are both able to have the same aim in sight despite slightly different outcomes. We can work together. It is much more complex over the mixed adult male estate. It is certainly something we aspire to.
Q311 Victoria Prentis: To what extent do regime restrictions get in the way of providing both courses and availability of inmates to be assessed? Is it possible for inmates to get down to the room they are meant to be in to receive the treatment they need?
Dr Bailey: It will very much depend on the level of the restriction. In my experience, prisons work really hard to not block those sorts of activities. Having said that, it always clearly has to be risk assessed in the scheme of the day in the restricted regime. From a programme delivery perspective, staff and prisons work very hard to catch up; if we have not been able to run something on Tuesday, we will fit it in later that week. Clearly there is an impact, but people work very hard to try to reduce the impact.
Q312 Victoria Prentis: Picking up on something from the earlier session, what are the implications of Professor Gannon’s research? Have you seen that?
Dr Bailey: No, sorry, I have not. It is unpublished, I believe.
Q313 Victoria Prentis: Then this is probably unfair: what are the implications for the delivery of sex offender programmes in the future? You have not seen the research, so you cannot say, but perhaps you could tell us what steps are going to be taken to react to it.
Dr Bailey: The new offers in programmes for men convicted of sexual offences are Horizon and Kaizen. They are developed on a much more forward-looking, healthy good lives model, which I think is in line with what Theresa Gannon will be saying. All the theory and evidence that has gone into the new programme development is based on the same work.
There is a little bit of professional debate at the moment about the balance between group work and individual work. The new programmes that we have implemented have both of those things. I think there was a push in the SOTP research paper to say we should do more individualised. I think Theresa Gannon will be saying that the group work can be effective, and I hope that the current offer is able to offer both of those in a more bespoke way.
Q314 Ellie Reeves: Ms Crozier, the rapid evidence assessment found that effective supervision requires particular personal characteristics—for example, warmth, empathy and likeability. What is your existing strategy for recruiting the right people to work in the NPS, as well as the right number of people?
Sonia Crozier: We have a very comprehensive assessment centre to test those kinds of characteristics in our new recruits. The assessment centres are very much designed to attract people with those kinds of qualities. We are also working very hard to attract more second career people into the probation service. We have recently changed our entry requirements and have had some success on that front. People who come with greater life experience often have other things to offer when working with the very difficult people we work with.
Q315 Ellie Reeves: What is the change?
Sonia Crozier: The change has been the degree requirement. We had a very narrow set of recognised degrees, which tended to attract younger women into the organisation. We have unblocked that completely, so you can have any degree now, but we have made the training slightly longer to accommodate it. As I say, we have seen some shift in both second career and increasing the proportion of job offers we have made to BAME candidates, which I am really pleased about.
Q316 Ellie Reeves: Do you have any statistics on that?
Sonia Crozier: Yes. The number of BAME recruits before we changed the entry requirements was 11%. We increased that to 20% in the last recruitment round. I am sorry I do not have to hand the age profile, but that has also gone up, which is another good thing for bringing in people with life experience.
Q317 Ellie Reeves: How do you respond to concerns about the appropriate balance between risk, public protection and rehabilitation in approaches to managing offenders?
Sonia Crozier: That is the work of the probation service. The competing demands placed on us all the time are that we give equal weight to reform and change as opposed to public protection and our duty to ensure that, for example, if people are in the community and we are sufficiently concerned that they pose a risk, we will take recall or breach action. That is the inherent work of the probation service. I can talk a lot more about it, but that is absolutely central. That is why the training is so important. It is to give people knowledge and understanding of how they appropriately apply their professional judgment.
Q318 Ellie Reeves: Dr Bailey, do you have anything to add on that point?
Dr Bailey: I echo what Sonia said. It is a core dynamic that both probation staff and forensic psychologists are constantly trying to manage. In reporting to the Parole Board, the balance between talking about risk assessment and risk management, and what is manageable within the community, is a tricky balance for all of us to try to work with.
Q319 Chair: We heard some earlier evidence about the 2030 project. What is your sense as to that? How do you see those things evolving?
Sonia Crozier: There are some really interesting conversations in the 2030 project about the use of technology in the future, particularly how it can be deployed to enhance community orders. At the moment, we are on the edge of starting to implement location tagging—GPS tagging—which will inform the supervising officer where an individual is at any given time and strengthen arrangements around curfews and restrictions on location.
Looking to the future, technology combined with the relationship with the responsible officer—the individual who is supervising an offender in the community—starts to give us new opportunities in the way we think about sentencing and resetting community orders. It could potentially unlock some of the issues we have had to date with public confidence in community penalties.
Q320 Chair: Mr Jones, do you have any observations on that?
Martin Jones: There is something in the complexion in relation to people serving long sentences. Nobody would argue with the point that if you commit a serious offence you need to go to prison, but how do you manage those people over the course of a very lengthy sentence?
I was recently looking at some of the people on the Parole Board caseload who have been in the system for 40 or 50 years. If you are thinking about transitioning those people back into the community, it presents real challenges for people who are completely institutionalised. How do you manage those people back into their communities and the challenges they face? Looking ahead, with lots of people now serving sentences of more than four years and indeterminate sentences, how do you use technology more intelligently in the future? I would absolutely support changes to release on temporary licence to ensure that people are better prepared for that transition in the future.
Q321 Chair: I will come back to Dr Bailey in a moment, but you have a particular issue there, don’t you, Mr Jones? You referred to the high percentage of prisoners who come before the Parole Board now. There are more serving longer sentences, including extended determinate sentences as well as IPPs. You talked about how you might manage those with new technology.
One of the issues that we seem to have at the moment is that in some cases you cannot test the risk factor in an open setting. You have an either/or choice of whether you keep them in a closed prison or let them out on parole. That has caused quite a bit of controversy. Can you explain to us what gives rise to what may seem anomalous to a lot of people?
Martin Jones: It is very odd, isn’t it? We currently calculate that about 5% of the people on the parole caseload are restricted from being sent to open conditions. Generally speaking, that is because they have a history of having difficulties and absconding from open conditions. I would suggest that means that you need to test them even more carefully before being faced with the very stark choice of releasing them back into the community with no testing or alternatively keeping them in custody, which perhaps seems too far. We need a much more nuanced risk assessment based on their characteristics. You sometimes find people whose history was that they absconded 20 years ago and now you cannot test them in open conditions. It has to be about looking at the person as they are today when the risk they may present as a 60-year-old man will be very different from when they were 35 or 40.
If you are looking for the safest possible release decisions, and also keeping people in custody, a full evidence base is necessary. If you look at the number of people being managed in open conditions, the failure rate is tiny; I think there are 0.01% of failings from open conditions. All the evidence published by the Ministry earlier this year demonstrates that good ROTL is really essential for reducing reoffending in the long term. It seems to me that some greater relaxation of the policy to give us—
Q322 Chair: Is it a policy?
Martin Jones: It is a policy that was implemented following concerns about people released on temporary licence committing serious offences. Of course, that is of concern to everybody, but it is extremely rare that it happens.
Q323 Chair: How often? What percentage is it?
Martin Jones: When I last looked at the figures, there were about 400,000 releases on temporary licence a year, and maybe about five to 10 cases in which it goes horribly wrong.
Q324 Chair: A tiny fraction.
Martin Jones: A tiny number.
Q325 Chair: It seems to be a sledgehammer to crack a nut. You cannot comment, but that is what it might seem to us. A change to that would enable you to test them in open conditions, and link that with ROTL.
Martin Jones: That is absolutely right, and it would help us to ensure that we get every decision well judged, to ensure that we do not place the public at unnecessary risk with uncertainty or, alternatively, keep people in custody for much longer than they need to be.
Q326 Chair: I do not know whether you wish to comment on the merits or otherwise but, factually, does that accord with your experience, Ms Crozier?
Sonia Crozier: Absolutely. ROTL is a really good mechanism by which to test someone’s risk and response to supervision before they are finally released. I absolutely support the proposed changes to ROTL, so that larger numbers can experience it before being released on licence.
Q327 Chair: There is an issue about the length of time in getting parole hearings. There are frequent deferments and other excuses. What is the current position on trying to move along and reduce deferred parole hearings?
Martin Jones: It is very frustrating. I think the first time I came to the Committee we were worried about the backlog. That is now sorted, so we are getting to hearings in a relatively timely fashion, but there is a concern about the cases that come to a hearing. Last year, about 25% of the cases that went to a parole hearing were deferred on the day, so we then had to start again. That clearly makes no sense.
We have been implementing a project over the last year to encourage greater case ownership to try to take a case to conclusion, so that when a panel gets a case they hang on to it to conclude it. That has seen a reduction from 25% of our cases being deferred on the day to less than 2.5% of cases deferred on the day. When the case cannot be concluded they keep the case to themselves, and 95% of those cases conclude within a few months of the hearing. Sometimes it is on the papers because actually what you need is an additional assessment—perhaps a psychology assessment—and to ensure you get that in a timely fashion, but most of those cases then conclude relatively quickly.
If you look back, you find that, if you just repeatedly defer a case, sometimes there are one, two, three, four or five deferrals because nobody gets hold of a case and brings it to a conclusion. We are looking to implement the project; 50% of our panel chairs are now following that model, and in the new year we expect it to be implemented across all Parole Board members. I am sure that will lead to greater conclusions and a better grip on the case.
Q328 Chair: That is helpful. There has been an issue, Dr Bailey, as you probably picked up from the earlier panel about the three months to get a psychological report. Why is that? What is the position now? Is that changing?
Dr Bailey: It is really a planning assumption. Some reports will be done significantly quicker than that, but of course the success of the Parole Board in reducing its backlog creates pressure further down the system. What we ask for is three months’ notice in order to do it. As Martin just mentioned, we are working with the Parole Board at the moment on a project to try to improve psychology listing processes so that we can be really clear, “Mr X is going to have his hearing on this date,” with a date by which a report needs to be done.
As long as we have time to plan, I am confident that we can deliver. What we sometimes get for a variety of reasons are either very specific directions that we need to outsource, or directions that hit us quite late because they were not made early, or maybe they went to the wrong functional mailbox or there were some system issues. Three months is what we ask for from a planning perspective.
Q329 Chair: Is it satisfactory? Is it desirable?
Dr Bailey: I do not think it necessarily slows down the hearings if we are notified in time. Everybody needs to be able to produce the reports. The interesting bit is that sometimes the choice to wait for the psychologist’s report before some of the other people make their assessments. I can understand why that happens.
Q330 Chair: But you do not think it is always necessary.
Dr Bailey: Not always, no. Sorry, I will soapbox: I think the volume of directions for psychology reports is unnecessarily high. Sometimes that is because the Parole Board just wants more information. It was mentioned before that they can keep hearing evidence forever. I feel that sometimes the request for a psychology report is unnecessary.
Q331 Chair: Is it a bit of risk averseness—or back covering, almost? “Oh, I will get a psychology report as well, just in case anything ever got criticised.”
Dr Bailey: I would not want to label it as risk averse or back covering. I guess I would want to label it as wanting to ensure that a full picture is always available.
Q332 Chair: Mr Jones, what do you make of that?
Martin Jones: The point about timing is really important. I was talking to Jo about the fact that if you start the process much earlier and you think, “We have more than enough information in the dossier to make a decision without a psychological risk assessment,” let’s do that.
Generally speaking, the process of somebody going up for a parole hearing on a life sentence case is well known in advance. You know exactly when the date is. Why don’t you do the planning to ensure that most of the assessments that are needed are done on day one, so that the Parole Board simply needs to consider the evidence and whether it needs to go to an oral hearing and can get on with the process? I certainly think we can smarten up in relation to late requests, which are incredibly disruptive to the prisoner and the system generally, and frustrating.
Dr Bailey: To build on that, OMiC is key to that case management. I am very hopeful that with the introduction of the case management aspect of OMiC, we will have a much more integrated sentence planning case management approach that will exactly lead to that.
Q333 Chair: The final thing I am going to ask is about IPP prisoners. Two issues arise. I think the board has said that unless we get some sort of legal change we are going to be stuck with the legacy of a sentence, which we now recognise was a failure and was abolished, hanging around for years to come. How long do you think it is likely to be before we work it out of the system, if we just sit here in Parliament and do nothing about it?
Martin Jones: The latest published numbers for the IPP prison population are down 55% from its peak; there are now around 2,700 people serving an IPP sentence who have never been released back into the community. The Parole Board thinks we can probably get that number down to about 1,500 over the next couple of years, but increasingly the numbers released will reduce.
It is undoubtedly true to say, given the fact that our task is to assess risk to the public, that we are not going to release people we consider to be too dangerous. There probably are some people serving an IPP sentence who might have got a life sentence were it not for the availability of that sentence. It is certainly true to say that there will be people still serving the IPP sentence through to 2030 in the absence of legislative change. We have talked about the 2030 strategy.
There is also a real question in relation to IPP recalls, where the lifelong nature of the recall means that potentially some people will be affected. I know that area has been looked at before in relation to limiting the licence period in some way that might provide some respite. Yesterday, I visited Hull to see some really excellent work with IPPs in the community, psychologically informed to understand how to manage young men with quite complex needs.
It was a really impressive project, but one of the things that they very clearly said was that some of these people are men who were swept up by a sentence that did not work out as intended. They were young men living chaotic lives, and having spent 10 years in prison has not improved the chaotic nature of their lives. They are now releasing young men in their thirties who emotionally are probably still young men. They struggle in the community and it gives rise to behaviour that causes concern. I think that is very difficult, but of course our job is risk assessment and we cannot release people who continue to be a danger to the public.
Q334 Chair: We have had some evidence from families of prisoners in this position that, for example, there is a bit of a disconnect, in that to meet your risk assessments you want evidence that they have been on a particular type of rehabilitation—joined a therapeutic community, for example—but they are in a prison where they cannot get that, and nothing seems to be done to move them to a prison where they can. The ball is knocked back and forth between the two courts and they are stuck in the middle. What is being done to address that, because it is scandalous, isn’t it?
Dr Bailey: We have quite a significant IPP project, which is a joint action plan between HMPPS and the Parole Board, where we are specifically identifying the reasons why IPPs are not progressing. Some of those are quite practical reasons; they need a transfer or they need an assessment. We are making sure that those are driven through and actioned.
Some other cases are very complex and perhaps need a mental health setting. Again, we are enabling some actions to be taken there. In terms of what you are saying, there is a significant amount of work to do. We have made quite a lot of progress. We started off looking at IPPs remaining in custody after two oral hearings in closed conditions because that seemed to be a trigger point; if they had not progressed to release or open after their second hearing, they lost a level of hope.
Building on what Dr Anand was saying about the rehabilitative approach, agency and hope—all the important things that he has already talked about—we are trying to make sure, where we can, that they are embedded in the system around the IPPs. Some of the IPPs do not know what is available to them. It is just having a relationship with someone where we can sit down and say, “This is your sentence pathway.” Some are still a little bit lost. We are seeing good progress, but we will always have a group of people whose risk to the public is unnecessarily high.
Q335 Chair: Maybe the honest thing might be, as Lord Thomas, the former Lord Chief Justice, said, to change the law, and resentence on the basis of a modern type of determinate sentence, so that people know where they stand.
Martin Jones: Increasingly, by the time we get to 2030, there will be an odd group of people serving a sentence that was only available for a period of six and a half to seven years. Particularly for those receiving a tariff of less than two years, it will look like an anachronism.
Q336 Bambos Charalambous: What is your assessment of the management by the probation service and other statutory partners of serious and violent offenders in the community in terms of their resources, expertise and research evidence on effective practice?
Sonia Crozier: They are a group where we assign the highest level of resource in both time and qualified probation officers. We increasingly know what works around access to psychological services in the community. The personality disorder pathways, which are subject to evaluation, show that when probation officers work with an individual in a psychologically informed way we get better outcomes. We enable the offender to manage their risky behaviour better.
That is combined with having access to supported accommodation. Often, the Parole Board releases individuals into the community when it is given assurance that that individual will spend a period of time in one of our approved premises. We have about 2,000 beds nationally for APs, but in future projections we need more of that accommodation. It is absolutely key to getting people settled and having a higher level of observation around them after the Parole Board has decided to release.
As we look at the forecasts for the prison population, we must look through the lens of community as well; that point was made very well by the previous panel. If we are going to move long-term prisoners safely out into the community, we need to match that with resource. Our AP population—our bed availability—has been fairly static and it is in really high demand. With some of the more complex individuals, there is not a hard and fast rule, but we work primarily on the basis that people will be there for about three months. Actually, some of those individuals need longer than three months to get settled before we can confidently put them into move-on accommodation.
We have a lot of evidence of what works with that group; it is having properly trained professionals and multiagency arrangements around them, so we can draw on the skills of police and other individuals, and having a higher level of both monitoring and surveillance when they come out. As I say, we need to ensure that we keep up with demand, particularly for our approved premises.
Martin Jones: For the Parole Board, knowing where somebody will be released to is absolutely essential for our decision making. There is some really good practice out there in relation to managing people’s complex needs. After all, it is the job of the Parole Board, given that almost everybody we consider has committed a very serious offence, with the majority serving indeterminate sentences, to have confidence that they are going to be well managed in the community. Lots of my panel members say to me, “The critical thing in my decision was the fact that we had a really good offender manager who had a real grip on the offender and knew what his risk factors were and how to identify and manage those in the community.” If we have that sort of plan in place, I am certain that we can have more confident decision making. If you are not convinced that you have that in place, it makes it much more difficult for us.
Q337 Bambos Charalambous: My next question is to Ms Crozier, and it is about the recall action plan. What progress has been made on implementing the recall action plan? What impact, if any, is it having on recalls? What more can be done?
Sonia Crozier: We have seen the recall population marginally drop from 2016 to 2017. It is not huge numbers, but that is in an environment where the number of people subject to licences increased. That tells you that some of the actions that we put in place are working in giving senior managers in probation appropriately more decision making when considering alternatives or warnings.
We can only push that so far though, because, going back to an earlier question, we always have to be mindful of balancing rehabilitation against public protection. Her Majesty’s inspectorate, when they did the recall inspection in 2017, said that we were good, and assessed our judgments very positively in terms of how we manage that. Yes, we have implemented the action plan by giving probation senior leaders more autonomy to make other decisions. As I say, the figures speak for themselves in that we have held the pitch.
Q338 Bambos Charalambous: The recall rate for women has gone up by 20%.
Sonia Crozier: That is related to the fact that the introduction of statutory supervision for less than 12 months disproportionately hits women. Women typically get prison sentences of less than 12 months, so it is very disappointing to see that the number of women being recalled to prison has increased in the way you described. That is because they are now subject to statutory supervision, whereas in the past, potentially, they would not have been. The MOJ strategy is absolutely about keeping women out of short-term custodial sentences. It is quite astonishing that 36% of women who receive prison sentences of less than 12 months do so for shoplifting, compared with 12% of men. There is much more we need to be doing, and will be doing, around women.
Q339 Bambos Charalambous: In relation to the ones in the system now, who are subject to statutory supervision, what steps are you taking to try to stop them being recalled?
Sonia Crozier: We know that there are key issues around them having accommodation. We are working with women’s centres and other providers to ensure that they have suitable places to live. The Homelessness Act may assist with that as well. We must make sure that we have engagement around the Homelessness Act.
We are considering alternatives and making sure that recall—taking action to send someone back to prison—is the position of last resort. We are preparing women better for when they are released. I am pleased that we are now seeing a number of pilots around the country where prisoners can start their application for universal credit before they leave prison. If you are coming out on licence and then waiting weeks and weeks before you can access benefits, that in no way is going to play well with rehabilitation. There are a number of component parts that should assist us in driving down recall for women. Ultimately, we want women to be sent appropriately to women’s centres and not to receive short-term custodial sentences.
Q340 Bambos Charalambous: How does the probation service determine when to suspend supervision of those on life licences for good behaviour and cancel the licence upon application? Are any statistics available?
Sonia Crozier: Those decisions are made by the heads of service in the probation service. They carefully consider progress over time. If they feel that supervision should be suspended, we will do that. There are well‑rehearsed processes for that.
Q341 Bambos Charalambous: Can we make better use of those mechanisms?
Sonia Crozier: I think we could make better use. It is interesting. We did some evaluation recently, and Wales has set up a more formalised system of panels to review lifer progression, rather than individuals making those decisions. They seem to have proportionally higher numbers of requests for lifers having their supervision suspended. Having conducted that review, we want to export what we think is good practice in Wales across to England.
Chair: Thank you very much, ladies and gentleman, for your time and your evidence. Thank you for your patience in waiting to give evidence to us. It has been very helpful indeed. We are very grateful to all of you.