Prison Safety

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Thursday 15th September 2016 Westminster Hall

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

On deliverability of the ambitious and welcome programme, does my hon. Friend agree that a healthy and safe ratio between staff and prisoners is vital and that ultimately we must grasp the nettle? There must either be more prison officers or fewer prisoners to get the ratio back into equilibrium.

[Robert Neill]

My hon. Friend is right. There is no other solution but to grasp the nettle. Some will assert that we should increase the staff, and they have to grasp the nettle that that means more public spending. I do not think most of the public are in the mood for that, but I think the public mood towards prison reform has changed markedly in the last 20 years. It has changed during my time in the House. It was apparent in debates during the last Parliament that people are, rightly in my judgment, much more open-minded now about the need for prison reform. No one is beyond rehabilitation—that is an exaggeration: precious few people are.

I spent 25 years practising at the criminal Bar. I dealt with some very nasty people indeed and some dangerous people, some of whom needed to be locked up and kept away. I also dealt with some stupid people. [Interruption.] I leave aside members of my profession or even the judiciary, but I dealt with some people who were stupid and got themselves into trouble because of that. I dealt with people who did not have an education or skills and who made certain choices. They got their lives into a mess through drugs, alcohol and disrupted families. I suspect that they make up the majority. Whenever I visit the women’s estate and talk to women prisoners, I find that the vast majority of one kind or another have certain issues in their lives—often mental health problems and related issues.

We cannot treat this matter in a simplistic fashion. Simply saying, “Keep the numbers up and just produce more staff” makes no sense to my mind as a Conservative given the need to keep public spending under control, because we would be giving a demand-led blank cheque; it also makes no sense in terms of the ambitious agenda for social reform that the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State, the Minister and I believe in.

It seems to me that the answer to the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk), based on his own considerable experience as a practising barrister and his having seen exactly the same people, is yes, we must grasp that nettle. It is pretty obvious to my mind that the answer is a greater emphasis on rehabilitation, education and reform, and that is why getting safety right is all the more critical.

I think that all or almost all of us share the same objectives, but the question now is about willing and providing the means to achieve them, and that is what our report was about. I hope that the Minister will tell me that the Government response was a measure of work in progress. I quite understand that when a new ministerial team come in, they need to reflect, take stock, review priorities and consider, in the light of the circumstances that they have inherited, the shape that they want progress to take, but if he told me that, it would be further reassurance that the progress will be genuine and speedy. The Secretary of State talked about reform proceeding “at pace”. Can we have a bit more flesh on the bones of what is there? We ask that in a spirit of complete good will towards the Government’s intentions.

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[Robert Neill]

When I was a Minister, I was sometimes portrayed unfairly in the press, so I shall adopt a practical approach: let us see what happens. But I do think it important that we do not, any of us, send any signals that reform is less pressing or less important. Were that to be the case, it would be disappointing and, I think, an error. I am conscious of the clarification that the Secretary of State issued after her appearance before the Justice Committee, and I will take her at her word on that, but we need the measures that we talked about to be brought forward swiftly. If Brexit means Brexit, to adopt a phrase, pace means pace, but pace requires detail in order for there to be credibility in how things are delivered. That is the approach that I take—we want to be constructive and assist the Government on what I think is the right path, provided that it is followed through consistently.

I shall touch on just a few more matters before I finish so that other hon. Members can speak—this is a well-attended debate. First, I have referred to the matrices showing that everything is going in the wrong direction at the moment, such as on assaults, self-harming and deaths in custody. All those figures are going the wrong way. The data are set out well in a report that is readily available in the public domain, so I shall not cite a raft of figures, because I suspect that that would not add a great deal, but the trend is clear.

Secondly, despite genuine efforts by NOMS to recruit staff, the number of new staff coming in is significantly offset by the lack of retention. The problem is that we are very often losing some of the most experienced officers—some of the coolest heads. When there are difficulties to do with safety, such as dangerous situations arising on a wing, one wants to have experienced prison officers around to deal with it.

The fewer there are, the greater the risk that things will escalate rather than being brought back under control, so there is a direct link between retention and safety, which we highlight in our report. That is one thing that the Government need to do more to address. We are not convinced that NOMS has a deep-seated understanding of what causes that lack of retention, why recruitment is increasingly difficult and what underpins both those factors, so we need more flesh on the bones of that.

Let me deal briefly with some other matters. Steps have been taken—again, let us recognise that—on the possession of knives and new psychoactive substances in prison, but I am not sure that we are fully on top of that issue, either, particularly in relation to those new substances. The issue is one of technology: the ability to fly in substances and a raft of other things with drones is enormous.

Of course, that brings us back to the circular issue referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham. If, as we have seen on our visits, people are locked up in their cells for 23 hours a day, and if there are illegal substances in prisons, prisoners’ ability to make use of them is all the greater given their close confinement and the growth of gang culture and peer pressure. The more that people are out of their cells and doing something purposeful, the better it is to combat the misuse of substances. That cannot be done sustainably with the current prison population, which is a very important issue.

The direction is right, but we need to be more vigorous and radical in tackling some of those important issues. That brings me back to a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell): we are disappointed about some of the detail in the Government response. We called for the Ministry and NOMS jointly to produce an action plan on prison safety, addressing the underlying factors behind violence, self-harm and suicide. We said that that plan should include preventive and punitive measures, because those two things have to be in the toolbox of any prison governor. We also wanted objectives and indices. The Secretary of State is right to commit to a prison safety and reform plan—that is good—but it is the missing detail that people need to see urgently.

We asked for quarterly reports on progress on the plan, rather than the six-monthly reports suggested in the Government response, not as a matter of caprice but because we wanted the reports to coincide with the publication of the quarterly safety in custody statistics. Otherwise, frankly, they are pretty meaningless. The whole point of transparency and scrutiny is to have the two sets of figures together so that we can compare and contrast. That is why I urge the Government to rethink their response on that matter. The information is collated, and there is no doubt that it is available—I am sure it is available to Ministers on a regular basis. There is no practical reason at all why it cannot be made available in the way we suggest in our report. It is not an expensive or a difficult ask, in other words.

We are also looking for specific information on incidents of disorder in prisons, including the deployment of the national tactical response group; a more comprehensive set of data about staffing; and performance ratings for individual prisons. We do not know yet whether the previous Secretary of State’s league table initiative will continue, but certainly we want performance ratings for prisons. I accept that it is not always easy to make complete comparisons, but on safety it is, actually. We can compare data on safety even if we cannot do so for rehabilitation in a particular prison, so there is no reason why those data cannot be available.

The same goes for data on the average number of hours each day that prisoners spend locked in their cells—I stress that in particular. I mentioned this earlier, but the amount of time that people spend locked up is entirely linked to safety levels. Boredom, the abuse of substances, the internet and a raft of other things, and the peer pressure of groups of people locked up together in a confined space for long periods all contribute directly to a deteriorating safety environment.

[Alex Chalk]

Is it not also the case that meaningful rehabilitation does not take place inside a prison cell? It is only when people are outside their cells and engaging in courses—be they on anger management, substance abuse or whatever—that they can truly come to terms with the problems that may, in some cases, be the reason why they got into prison in the first place.

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[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

It is always a great honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer, and to follow the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), for whom I have a great deal of respect. As others have done, I commend our Chair of the Justice Committee, who does a great job in martialling sometimes disparate viewpoints on the Committee.

When I say “disparate viewpoints”, what I am really referring to is me. As on many issues, I tend to have a very different view of the world—particularly the world of prison and sentencing—from that of many of my colleagues, so I might put a slightly different viewpoint from theirs. That is not to say that I do not have a great deal of respect for their views and expertise on these matters; we just happen to draw different conclusions.

One thing that never gets talked about with regard to prison safety that I want to talk about, and that I raised with the Secretary of State on her initial performance before the Justice Committee last week, is the change brought in under the last Labour Government: it has done immense harm not only to public confidence in the criminal justice system, but to safety in prisons.

That Labour Government passed a law, and this is a welcome opportunity to make a public service announcement to the many people who are not aware that it is on the statute book. The law stated that everybody who had reached halfway through their prison sentence had to be released from prison, irrespective of how disruptive they had been and whether they were still considered a danger to the public. Those prisoners have to be released halfway through their sentence.

The law had nothing to do with any great rehabilitation revolution, or with making our prisons or streets safer; it was introduced because the last Labour Government got themselves into a crisis over prison numbers and could not meet the capacity. They were desperately looking for ways to reduce the prison population. Anything would do.

One method they used was letting everybody off 14 days before the end of their prison sentence. The second method was to say that people had to be, by law, automatically released halfway through their sentences. It does not take a genius to work out that that will have—and this has proved to be the case—a negative impact on safety in prisons.

If prisoners have a six-year sentence, become eligible for release after three but could still serve the whole six years, the chances are that there will be an incentive for them to behave themselves in prison, get their heads down, work hard and do the things that are asked of them; if they do, the parole board may well let them out of prison when the three years come up. If they know they will be released from prison after three years no matter how well or badly they behave, what on earth is the incentive to behave in prison? There is none at all. It does not take a genius to work out that that is pure common sense.

If the Government want to get to grips with safety in prisons—and, as a by-product, instil a bit more public confidence in the criminal justice system—they must deal with that issue. They must repeal that terrible law and say to prisoners once again, “You become eligible for release halfway through your sentence, but only if you are considered to be safe to release to the public and if you have been behaving yourself in prison.”

I remember when the last Labour Government introduced this law—the Conservative party was apoplectic. What have we done in our six years in government? Absolutely nothing. That is a disgrace—certainly for the millions of people who have gone down to the polling station to vote Conservative at a general election. Those people would expect a Conservative Government to deal with this, and I hope the Minister will not only address the issue in his remarks but will act on the situation in his time as prisons Minister.

[Alex Chalk]

My hon. Friend is setting out his characteristically robust and principled position, with which I do not disagree. But even if that welcome repeal were to happen, is not the difficulty that it would lead to such additional pressures on the prison system that, frankly, we would not be in a position to absorb the extra numbers at this juncture?

[Philip Davies]

I understand my hon. Friend’s point, but he is looking at it from a perspective different from mine. My view is that we should not manage the prison population to fit an arbitrary figure that we have decided is the limit that we will allow in prison; we should imprison the people who should be in prison, and it is the Government’s job to build the capacity in the prison system to cope with those people. That is the bit on which the Government need to get a grip.

I was going to come to this later but, as we are on the subject, I will deal with it now. One area on which I happen to disagree with the Chairman of the Select Committee, although it pains me to do so, is the size of the prison population. We have to address the myth that has been perpetuated that the UK has a very high prison population. The fact of the matter is that we do not, and I will explain why. Yes, the absolute number of more than 80,000 represents a high prison population, but the UK is a very highly populated country so of course we have a high prison population. That is a meaningless measure.

If we look at the number of people in our prisons as a proportion of the population as a whole, we are not at the top of the table by any means, but I concede that we are above average. We are in the highest quartile but, again, it is a meaningless measure. The only meaningful measure of prison population is the proportion of criminals that we send to prison. In other words, for every 1,000 offences committed in the UK how many people go to prison? That is the most meaningful measure of whether we send a lot of people, or not many people, to prison. Comparing those figures with the figures for other countries across the world shows that we have a very low prison population. For every 1,000 crimes committed in the UK, we send some 18 people to prison. I challenge anyone to name four or five countries that send fewer people to prison, because they will be hard pressed to do so.

Our prison population is very low, so we have to end the myth that has been built up by these prison reform groups, which frankly just do not like anybody being sent to prison. We have to address the myth that has built up over the years that we have a high prison population. We send very few people to prison. Everyone knows that it is difficult to be sent to prison in the UK. People get community sentence after community sentence—the only people sent to prison are either very persistent offenders or very serious offenders. Courts bend over backwards not to send people to prison. We have to nail that myth.

Contrary to what my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) said in his opening remarks, I do not think that public opinion is that we should have fewer people in prison. I do not think public opinion has moved an awfully long way. Clearly, my hon. Friend is much more expert than I about public opinion in Bromley and Chislehurst, and I bow to his superior knowledge, but I invite him to come up to Shipley. He can knock on the door of any 100 houses he wants to ask people, “Do you want to see more criminals or fewer criminals in prison?” I suspect that a number in the high 90s would say that they would like to see more criminals in prison, not fewer. I accept that Bromley and Chislehurst may differ, but I am here to represent Shipley.

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[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

I apologise that—with your permission, Mr Stringer—I have to leave before the end of the debate so I will not be here to hear the closing speeches. Members of the Justice Committee, and indeed anybody who has met me for longer than 10 minutes, will know that very few things could drag me away from a debate on prison safety, but I am afraid a meeting about the Boundary Commission and boundaries is one of them. I thank hon. Members for their indulgence on that score.

Serving on the Justice Committee is an enormous privilege and most of the time it is a pleasure. However, as is clear from the passion of Members’ contributions today, it is not always a pleasure, because we have heard some very disturbing facts and figures about safety in our prisons. I am not a stranger to the Prison Service, having conducted litigation on its behalf for many years—it is nice to see some former clients in the Box today. I know that the Prison Service is staffed by many dedicated individuals, who work hard to ensure that people in their custody are safe, and to rehabilitate them. I also know that the spotlight has never shone so brightly on what is happening inside our prisons.

Although our predecessor Committee felt that the Government and the National Offender Management Service had underplayed the seriousness of the situation, our Committee does not now feel that is the case. This year, the former Prime Minister and former Member of Parliament for Witney gave strong leadership in his speech on prisons. Both the former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), and the former prisons Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), were aware of and open about the appalling state of prison safety.

The reform programme is bold and motivated by all the right reasons. In our report we praise the considerable efforts made by the Ministry of Justice and NOMS to alleviate the situation, but political will is very far from being enough. The previous Secretary of State’s response to our review was characteristically robust; he acknowledged the extent of the problem and found an extra £10 million to deal with aspects of it.

It has to be said that, in its short time in post, the new prisons team has made it clear that it is fully live to the issues. In its response to our report, it says that prison safety is the Department’s top priority. The new Secretary of State told us last week that the position was unacceptable, and the Department has confirmed that legislation will be put in place to continue the reforms set out by her predecessor.

So with all this light, why is the situation getting worse? In my view, my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) was right: the ratio of staff to prisoners is critical. I also agree with the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter)—despite the boundary changes, I will not call him the hon. Member for Wormwood Scrubs.

This is not a time for a debate with my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) about whether the size of the custodial population matters, but it is clear that unless we are going to pour new resources into our Prison Service, we have to reduce numbers if rehabilitation is to be effective. I do not say that through a wish to be soft on criminals; rather the opposite. It is in all our interests for those in prison to be changed to stop them offending again. If the upshot of that is that tough diversionary sentences have to be used as an alternative to prison, effort should be put into piloting them. Restorative justice, as the Committee said in a previous report, may well have an important part to play.

[Alex Chalk]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of our problems as a society is that we have not quite solved the problem of how to generate a community penalty that is sufficiently robust that gives members of the public genuine confidence that it is a proper punishment? As soon as they feel that community penalties are a proper punishment, there will not be such an imperative to send so many people to prison.

[Victoria Prentis]

My hon. Friend is right. He will remember that, on our excellent Justice Committee trip to some restorative justice schemes in the United States, we saw some really good new alternatives to prison that we are extremely keen to see taken up and piloted here. They may well be part of the solution, but public opinion will have to be brought along with us. If results can be shown to be good, I am confident that public opinion will come along too—even in Shipley.

I do not see how it is possible to run safe prisons, let alone rehabilitative prisons, with insufficient staff. Prison officers have only limited time to give to supervision and to building up the relationships that we know help people to change. It is often difficult to find sufficient staff to move prisoners to the classrooms for desperately needed education. We have heard examples of wings where only one officer is now on duty when there were previously two. A body-worn camera, while welcome, is not the same as two sets of eyes. There is concern that lack of patrolling perimeter fencing is making it too easy to smuggle contraband.

We applaud the Department’s efforts to recruit more staff, but experienced officers take years of training and greater efforts must be made to retain them. The former prisons Minister, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), has covered that issue fully; I emphasise his point that it is the net gain in numbers that should always be considered when looking at staffing levels.

The second reason, in my view, for the continued decline in safety is the exponential increase in the use of new psychoactive substances. The prisons and probation ombudsman says that 61% of prisoners use them regularly and that they have overtaken tobacco as the currency of choice inside.

During an excellent session at Reform earlier this summer, a prison officer told us about an inmate who had been found unconscious in his cell. Four officers went inside to assist him and all four of them needed hospital treatment for secondary inhalation. These drugs are not cannabis as some Members of the House may have known it; they are cannabinoids and they are very dangerous mind-altering substances, which are doing extraordinary damage to our prisoners.

The Government have criminalised possession of these substances, but a great deal of resource needs to be put into testing these drugs and searching for them if we are ever to hold back the tide of them. Blocking mobile phone signals, which we now have the ability and the powers to do, is surely a good step to consider, while we fight the organised providers of these drugs. I hope that the body scanner being trialled in Wandsworth works and that this device can be rolled out very speedily to other establishments. The Committee looks forward to hearing further details about it.

As others have already said, it is now for the new team of Ministers to put the flesh on the bones of the reform programme. I am grateful for the taster that we have had of that programme in the Government’s response to our report. In my view, prison reform is not a place for dogma, and there is considerable consensus across the House and on our Committee about what needs to be done. Forgive me for saying so, but we have a captive audience and it should be possible to pilot the best schemes, and to assess quickly the extent to which new ideas work. Historically, a shameful lack of data have been produced by the Ministry of Justice, but slowly that issue is being addressed. Nevertheless, the new ministerial team needs to be very vigilant about it.

To add to the list of those reforms currently under way, which are set out in the Government’s response, I would also suggest focusing on improvements to assessment on entry to prison, and asking new prisoners about previous head injuries and traumatic experiences surrounding bereavement, all of which are proven, as we know, to indicate a greater propensity to self-harm. Those prisoners who are recalled should be properly assessed, however many times they have been inside prison before, as we know that they are particularly vulnerable.

Busy prisoners are safer prisoners, and real resource must go into both education and employment. Almost half of prisoners lose touch with their families, yet it has been shown that those prisoners who maintain family relationships through visits demonstrate a 39% reduction in reoffending. Better visits, Skype and in-cell telephones should be seen not as “nice to have” luxuries for lily-livered liberals or prisoners but as a useful tool in the fight against future crime.

Of course, all these ideas need testing and evaluation, and the Daily Mail and Shipley will not like them all. I accept that it is difficult to push through major reforms at the same time as managing a dangerous and—quite frankly—unstable situation, but unfortunately the Department does not have time on its side.

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[Mr Gyimah]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his question but he will be disappointed with my answer: I will not make a firm commitment on staffing numbers in this debate.

I will also make a general point: no one factor is driving the changes in our prisons. Staffing is one aspect of that, yes, but there are a number of safety issues across the estate, and we are still seeing the violence in prisons, with different cohorts, regimes and staffing, levels so we should be cautious not to suggest that somehow staffing is the problem. For example, dealing with the scourge of mobile phones in our prisons has a technological answer; it is not a staffing issue. To deal with the problem of violence comprehensively, we need to look at all the different issues driving it.

Even in the debate today, a number of reasons for the rise in violence have been posited. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley talked about the tariff structure and fixed-term recalls, and some people have mentioned staffing or mental health. What that highlights is that if we are to solve the problem, we need to look fundamentally at what is going on in our prisons. We cannot underestimate the scale of the challenge, and I cannot overstate the Government’s absolute commitment to deal with it.

[Alex Chalk]

What does the Minister say in response to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies): that incentives for good behaviour among the prisoner population are insufficient? Does the Minister think that that is part of the issue?

[Mr Gyimah]

I will come on to the incentive structure in a moment, but I will deal first with the point about staffing.

Any discussion of staffing should acknowledge the brave and invaluable work that prison officers, staff, volunteers and governors do every day. I am determined to see that they, just as much as those in their care, are safe and properly supported. The recruitment and retention of staff in prisons is a high priority and, as I have said, part of the necessary response to the problems. For example, at prisons in the south-east that have presented persistent challenges, we have launched targeted recruitment campaigns to attract and retain the right people. We are ensuring that prison officers have the skills necessary to deal with such issues, which is why training for our prison officers has been increased from six to 10 weeks. We are also examining additional ways to retain high-quality and experienced staff.

My hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire made an important point about the task required of prison officers today—it is about not just numbers or training but what the job is. That is an important point, because we do not want prison officers simply to be turnkeys, locking people up and letting them out. We want them to have a key worker role, building closer and more professional relationships with prisoners. As my hon. Friend knows, that is very much part of the offender management model that we are looking to roll out across the prison estate.

I turn to some of the key threats that have been highlighted in the debate. The House is aware that the dynamic within prisons has changed, contributing to the rises we have seen in levels of violence, self-harm and self-inflicted deaths. In fact, what we see in prisons is a magnification of what we see in society more broadly—in particular, the proliferation of psychoactive substances, and the evolution of technology such as metal-free phones and drones, which enables drugs to be brought within our prison walls.

The Chairman of the Justice Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, mentioned the £10 million investment to deal with prison safety issues secured under the previous Secretary of State. That has been distributed to the prisons that are experiencing the worst levels of violence. Over the coming weeks and months, we will provide more information on how that is working for our prison system.

My hon. Friend the Member for Banbury put very well the point that psychoactive substances are having a serious and significant impact on the safe running of our prisons. That view is commonly held, and many in the Chamber are aware of it, as is the chief inspector, Peter Clarke. For the communities inside prisons, however, such substances have dramatically changed the dynamic. There is the impact on an individual’s behaviour as a result of taking the drugs, and the impact on driving an illicit prison economy. The power of drugs such as spice and mamba cannot be overestimated. They are dangerous, mind-altering drugs that fuel unpredictable and violent behaviour.

What have we done? The varying ways in which substances can be smuggled into prisons—as tobacco, or even sprayed in liquid form on to paper—contribute to the challenge our professional staff face in keeping such harmful and damaging drugs out. We are, however, taking decisive action to tackle that ever growing threat, and we have introduced new legislation to combat the use of drugs and psychoactive substances in prisons.

The Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 has made these drugs illegal, and we have introduced new criminal offences for the supply and possession of psychoactive substances. In addition, the Serious Crime Act 2015 introduced a new offence of throwing anything into a prison. As a result, those who smuggle packages over prison walls, including of psychoactive substances, can face sentences of up to two years.