Prisons and Probation

Baroness Chapman of Darlington Excerpts

Wednesday 27th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) for his tenacity in at last securing this Opposition day debate on prisons.

In preparing this speech, I thought about the different angles from which I could come at the topic. I could have picked radicalisation, women offenders, mental health, drugs, violence, opportunities for early intervention and diversion, or young people. There are plenty of ways to approach the topic of prisons, but I will talk mostly about staff. I spent five years shadowing prisons Ministers. As one would expect, I visited prisons regularly and met hundreds of prison staff, as well as offenders and victims of crime. I cannot tell you, Mr Deputy Speaker, how poorly understood, undervalued and ignored our criminal justice workforce feel and, indeed, have become.

That was brought home to me in the starkest possible way when a custody officer, Lorraine Barwell, lost her life at the hands of a prisoner at work. When serving armed forces personnel lose their lives in the course of duty or when, occasionally, police officers sadly lose their lives in the course of duty, their names are rightly read out at the beginning of Prime Minister’s questions that week. No such honour was afforded to Lorraine. I know that no disrespect was intended, but it does illustrate the disparity in the esteem in which prison officers and other uniformed services are held.

Those of us in the House with an interest in prisons policy—it is great that there is so much interest today that there is a speaking limit—have the capability and, I would say, the duty to change that, and change it we must. There is no doubt in my mind that our prisons are in a dreadful state, but, with the right leadership from the Government, it is prison staff who hold the key to unlocking the rehabilitation revolution that we all want.

Several Government Members have said that it is all very well our presenting this motion to the House, but we could have presented it six years ago, in 2010, when things were just as bad. They should take absolutely no pride or comfort in that fact. I want to be part of a Parliament that sees improvement. The opportunity to deliver the rehabilitation revolution that the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) promised us—and that I believe he so dearly wanted and tried to deliver—has been completely wasted in the last five years. We have seen a deterioration of standards in our prisons and no improvement at all.

So how bad is it really? It is my view—and the data from the Ministry of Justice bear this out—that our jails have never been less safe. Further, the interventions put in place by Government have been ineffective in putting prisons on course for improvement. They are getting worse; they are not getting better. Last year there were 95 self-inflicted deaths in prison. That means that, once every four days, someone in prison takes their own life. There have been seven murders in our prisons. These events are devastating for the families concerned, they sometimes leave victims feeling cheated and they can be deeply traumatic for staff.

The secret to safer prisons is in staffing, and I do not mean just staffing numbers—we have spoken about that already—although that is incredibly important. What I am talking about is what our staff actually do. All staff I have spoken to can tell us of occasions when they believed they made a difference, but they can also tell us of many more occasions when they wished they could have done more. I am all for bringing experts and specialists into prisons to help to deliver education, rehabilitative courses and the like—some of them work and do some good—but what we should be doing more of is using the experienced staff resource that is present on the wing, day in, day out. When a visit is cancelled, when news of a loved one dying needs imparting or when a fight breaks out, it is the officers who are there. They are the staff who should be demonstrating, and are demonstrating on a daily basis, how to keep one’s cool, de-escalate a situation or sometimes, for example, even just how to take a joke properly. It is not psychologists, counsellors or boards of visitors who are present; it is prison officers. They are undervalued, undertrained and underutilised.

There are undeniably problems with substance misuse and mental health, particularly for women prisoners, when we look at the suicide rate.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I am interested to hear the hon. Lady refer to substance abuse. She will know that the figures indicate that there is a greater incidence of those addicted to substances in prison than there is outside. There is also the issue of how the drugs come in. How does she feel the Prison Service should stop drugs coming through the prison gates—perhaps the Minister could respond to that—and ensure that those inside who were not drug users before do not become drug users when they leave?

[Jenny Chapman]

I am extremely grateful for that intervention. The way we solve that is through staff, because they are there and it is their job to deal with it. There are not enough of them and they are not sufficiently well trained to perform that task to the standard that we want them to. I want our prisons to be safer, because if they are safer, they are doing their job of rehabilitation properly.

I want to raise one thing with the Minister. The Harris report on deaths in custody recommended that the Minister should phone the family of anybody who dies in prison by taking their own life. He has rejected that recommendation, but I would ask him to adopt it today—to phone the family of anyone who takes their own life and any member of staff who finds somebody who has taken their own life. That would focus his attention, but just as importantly it would focus the attention of his officials and senior staff in NOMS. Facing that reality is something that no official wants to do. They certainly do not want to have to prepare their Minister to do it. There is one self-inflicted death every four days. That is not good enough. He needs to take personal responsibility for that. It would be a welcome move on his part if he could commit that small amount of time to contact the family of someone who dies in our prisons, in our care, each time it occurs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

The prison system is a source of much frustration for many people involved in justice in Wales, and I welcome this opportunity to raise a number of specific issues. Despite recommendations from the police, unions and independent commissions, as well as from a cross-section of politicians, this remains a reserved matter for the UK Government, and the consequences for Wales are clear. In spite of the excellent work done by many justice officers, our prisons are neither located nor designed with the needs of Welsh citizens in mind. We still do not have a women’s prison in Wales—

[Jenny Chapman]

We don’t want one.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

I will return to that.

There is nowhere in Wales for women prisoners to go. Young offenders from the north must also be housed in England, as there is no facility in the north of Wales. What we do have is a plan from the UK Government to build a so-called super-prison in the north, but it is not being built to serve the needs of Wales. It is a priority for an England-centred justice system—a monolithic pack-them-in-and-pile-them-high type of prison to house offenders from all over the north-west of England. There will be around 700 prisoners from Wales, but double that number will be transported in. Its raison d’être is to meet the needs of north-west England, not those of north Wales. This is about overcrowding in English prisons. The prison happens to be in Wales as a matter of convenience, rather than being for Wales as a matter of strategic design.

This is not just nation-building from Plaid Cymru. This is about ensuring that young people can be housed in their own country, and that women do not have to cross the border into England, far away from the stability of their families and loved ones, as they will surely have to do if we do not have a women’s prison in our own country. Has there been a cold evaluation of the wider cost to Wales, especially to the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, which will carry the cost of providing healthcare to 2,100 prisoners? If healthcare at HMP Cardiff costs £2.24 million, has any estimate been made of the Wrexham care costs, as that prison is set to house two and a half times more prisoners? How much additional money will be made available to the health board by the UK Government via the Welsh Government? What are the wider costs of housing released prisoners, especially those deemed vulnerable and thus with priority housing status, and what indeed of the additional policing costs?

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Andrew Selous)]

We have had an excellent debate, with 22 Members taking part. I want to start, as others have, by putting on record my thanks to the men and women of our probation and prison services. They are outstanding public servants. They are often not in the public eye and do not get the thanks and appreciation they deserve. Probation officers make difficult professional judgments every day, often to tight timescales for the courts and the parole service. Prison officers face unacceptable violence, which we do not tolerate and are determined to reduce.

The Government are not in denial about the problems we face. We are not rehabilitating or reducing reoffending enough in order to keep the public safe. That is why our reforms are so vital, to protect the public by better rehabilitating offenders. That is why I am delighted that we have more support for prison reform from the top of Government than we have had for very many years. Reoffending has been too high for too long. That is why we have brought together the best of the voluntary, charitable and private sectors to join our excellent public service probation workers in bringing in our probation reforms. That has meant that we have extended probation supervision to some 40,000 short-sentence offenders who did not get it before. We have also introduced a through-the-gate service, joining up probation from prison into the community.

We have created the National Probation Service, and I should tell Members that 19 of the 22 CRCs are being run with a staff mutual or a voluntary, charitable or social enterprise sector body alongside their owners. We monitor their performance very carefully indeed, and the October 2015 performance figures showed that we are advancing in performance in almost all areas. South Yorkshire CRC has developed an action plan to deal with the issues it faces, but I can tell the House that no CRC is in a formal remedial plan. I can also tell the House that there are 560 more probation officers than there were 12 months ago. That is the largest intake of newly qualified probation officers for some considerable period.[Official Report, 23 February 2016, Vol. 606, c. 4MC.]

In the Prison Service, we saw a net increase of 540 prison officers in the year to 30 September last year. We have appointed some 2,340 extra prison officers. As of last week, we have increased prison officer training to 10 weeks, to make sure they are able to deal with many of the serious issues that colleagues from around the House have mentioned. We are going to carry on recruiting at that rate to make sure that we run safe prisons.

Many Members raised the very serious issue of self-inflicted deaths. I want to reassure the House that the Justice Secretary and I continue to take it very seriously indeed. We have acted on the vast majority of the recommendations of the prisons and probation ombudsman and will continue to do so. We have put more money into providing safer custody in prisons and at a regional level. We have also revised and improved our case management system for at-risk prisoners, which is being implemented.

We are reviewing early days care—sadly, prisoners often take their life in the first few days of their sentence. I draw the House’s attention to our extensive use of the Samaritans-trained prisoner volunteer listener scheme. That is extremely worth while and very much appreciated by prison officers.

I attend every single inter-ministerial group on deaths in custody and will continue to do so. We will carry on learning lessons around the system.

[Jenny Chapman]

rose—

[Andrew Selous]

I will mention the hon. Lady’s points. I regularly meet victims and commit to keep on doing so, but she raises a good point. I will increase the amount of victims that I meet, specifically and particularly the families of those who have lost their life in prison. However, as the prisons and probation ombudsman has said, there is no simple, well-evidenced answer as to why self-inflicted deaths have increased so sharply.

Many Members mentioned violence within our prisons. We are taking a lot of measures to equip prison officers better. We are trialling body-worn cameras in 23 prisons. That evaluation is progressing well, and both staff and prisoners see the benefits of it. We are ensuring that every conversation a prison officer has with prisoners is productive and supportive.

We have better multidisciplinary case management involving psychologists and mental health workers to get on top of violence in prisons. For the first time, we have introduced a national protocol to ensure that the police and the Crown Prosecution Service work as closely as they should with the National Offender Management Service to ensure that cases are dealt with seriously. I will take up the specific case that the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) mentioned, when a victim impact assessment appears not to have been addressed in time. We have given clearer guidance to staff on defending themselves and will do everything to get on top of this issue, which is not acceptable. A positive, rehabilitative culture, with rigorous education, purposeful work and strengthened family links, is absolutely central to dealing with it.

Part of the reason why violence and assaults have gone up is that we have too many drugs within our prisons, specifically the new psychoactive substances. The good news is that this month, at last, we start to test for those new types of drugs, which we have not had the ability to do in the past. We will extend that testing to all prisons by 1 April this year. We are currently evaluating a full-body scanner in one of our prisons, which will give us the technology to help us to get on top of that problem. We have trained drug dogs and made it illegal to throw anything over the wall—it was not illegal in the past—and we are communicating in every possible way with prisoners about the dangers of those substances.

As many Members have said, there are too many mobile phones within prisons. We are acutely aware of that and are investing in new technology such as metal-detecting wands, body orifice scanning chairs, signal detectors and blockers, and dogs that can specifically find phones. However, we recognise that more needs to be done. We will carry on until we are on top of that issue.

Many colleagues who have spoken today mentioned the prison estate. It is excellent news that the Chancellor committed to invest £1.3 billion to build nine new prisons in addition to the new prison that we are building in north Wales, which has not had a prison for well over 100 years. We will design out the features of the new prisons that facilitate bullying, drug taking and violence, so that we get on top of those problems.

Many Members rightly said that it is not acceptable that people go into prison with educational qualifications and leave with none. We are determined to do better in this area. We want prisoners to have the literacy, numeracy and information communications technology skills they need to get on, get a job and sustain that job. It is excellent that the Secretary of State has got Dame Sally Coates—