Prisons: Rehabilitation

Baroness Vere of Norbiton Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on securing this debate and I greatly appreciate all contributions made by noble Lords. My officials have been very busy in scribbling answers. I have not a hope of getting through them all but I will make sure that all questions asked today are answered in writing.

Turning first to safety across the adult estate, particularly in male prisons, our first duty is to keep our staff and the people in our custody safe. To do this, we need to provide full and supportive regimes in a calm and civil environment. I agree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester that perhaps there might even be a culture of hope. At the heart of this is the relationship between staff and prisoners. Prison officers must have the time and skills to support and incentivise the right behaviour, and to challenge and disincentivise poor behaviour. The second key factor is the availability of drugs, including new psychoactive substances, in our prisons.

On staffing, we have invested £100 million and we had hoped to recruit 2,500 new prison staff. We have not done so; we have recruited an additional 3,650 prison staff. Another 2,096 have job offers or are booked in for training. Furthermore, we are working hard on retaining and recognising our more experienced staff by making better use of financial incentives, including an above-average pay increase of 2.75%, improving opportunities for promotion and reviewing and strengthening learning and development opportunities for governors and, indeed, all officer grades. Having the right number of staff with the right skills and experience allows prisons to run full, high-quality regimes. It also means that we can more quickly roll out the offender management in custody scheme. OMiC provides each prisoner with a key worker model: a trained prison officer who meets with the prisoner one-to-one to discuss their opportunities for meaningful activity and any challenges they may be facing.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Harris, that all prisoners are somehow vulnerable. It is my belief that the OMiC system will help to identify those vulnerabilities and give those prisoners the support they need. They will have a named individual and the meetings will be regular. I would disagree with the comment made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, that prison officers do not have soft skills. They really do; furthermore, they are trained in those areas. There are 116 prisons in the country. OMiC has been fully rolled out in 10 of them and is under way at a further 50, so we are over halfway. Early and anecdotal feedback from prisons that have rolled this out completely, such as HMP Liverpool, is extremely positive, from both the staff and the prisoners.

However, safety is also impacted by the availability of drugs. We must spare no effort in rooting out this scourge because it impacts behaviour in our prisons. We have to tackle the use of drones and are investing in physical security countermeasures, such as netting, to frustrate their progress. We have to stop drugs being brought in on the bodies of visitors and are investing in high-tech body scanners. We have to find the drugs already in prisons and we have 300 specially trained sniffer dogs. We have to monitor ongoing drug use so we have introduced mandatory random drugs tests, including testing for psychoactive drugs. This is the first time that has happened in any country in the world. To smash the organised crime networks responsible for so much of the supply, as mentioned by my noble friend Lady Bottomley, we have specialised intelligence and disruption teams, which work very closely with law enforcement, and mobile phone blocking technology to prevent communications from inside the prison and those from the outside. Related to this, our corruption prevention units work very hard with local law enforcement to root out corruption among prison staff.

Over the summer our Prisons Minister, Rory Stewart, announced a number of initiatives. This was mentioned by many noble Lords. These included a flagship programme targeted at our 10 worst prisons. We are using these 10 prisons as a pilot group and investing £10 million to fight the scourge of drugs in them. They will serve as models of excellence, which we will roll out across the rest of the estate.

On rehabilitation, it is critical that we have full and supportive prison regimes in a calm and civil environment if rehabilitation is to be successful at all. We want prisoners, while in custody, to be able to learn and gain experience that will lead to them securing a job on the outside. No prisoner should be left behind. We should make sure that we do not leave behind even prisoners with learning difficulties, who perhaps cannot read, write or do basic maths when they get to prison. We must make sure that they are included in the learning and employment activities that we are now able to offer. We want them to have access to health providers, including drug rehabilitation services so that they can lead healthy, drug-free lives. We want them to maintain their relationships with their families and friends. We want them to get settled in accommodation and play a full and positive role in the community.

In the area of learning and gaining experience, in May we launched the education and employment strategy. It creates a system in which each prisoner is set on a path to employment. This is not a top-down, “every prison needs to do exactly the same thing” programme; we are empowering the governors and giving them responsibility for creating their own education and employment strategies locally. It will not work unless governors can engage with local employers and ensure that people have the skills for their local communities. So when people say, “Oh, there’s no strategy for the prisons”, in fact there are—the governors will make the strategy for their prison because that is right and they will have control of the budget.

On living a healthy and drug-free life, many noble Lords will know that the National Partnership Agreement for Prison Healthcare in England has recently been updated and is much more cohesive now. Health services in prisons and outside in the community work much more in co-operation. We recognise that suicide and self-harm remains a major challenge, as noted by the noble Lord, Lord Harris. Prison staff are receiving revised and improved suicide and self-harm prevention training. This is under way and has been completed by 17,000 staff to date. It is also important to note that we have acted on the vast majority of recommendations from the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman’s investigations of deaths in custody. Any death in custody is a tragedy, even more so if we do not learn from it.

On transitioning from prisons, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Marks, the community rehabilitation companies have had mixed results. We are taking that bull by the horns and looking at the future and the way we work with them on their contracts. I am fairly sure that there will be more on that in due course, as we finalise exactly what we will be doing in future.

I turn briefly to young offender institutions. Many noble Lords have noted that the number of children and young people in those institutions has fallen dramatically. That is commendable but improvements still need to be made. We have the youth justice reform programme, which was launched in January last year. Again, we know that since then Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons has highlighted improvements in all the under-18 sites that it has inspected. We are also recruiting 120 extra staff into these institutions, including sports instructors, as noted by the noble Baroness, Lady Healy.

I am afraid I do not have time to go into great depth on the issue of women now but I will do so in my letter. The Female Offender Strategy was published in June and I will be able to provide much more information on that.

There is much more that I should like, and indeed need, to say, so I will set it out in writing. This is my third debate on prisons. The first was probably four and a half hours long. I never tire of this debate as it is an important subject. I am proud of the work that the Government are doing, and I hope noble Lords will have heard that we have lots of plans in place. We now need time for these plans to bed in, and I am confident of improvements. Once again, my heartfelt thanks to all contributors and, most of all, to the noble Lord, Lord Bird.