Prison Safety and Security

Caroline Flint Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2016 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Sam Gyimah)]

I am pleased to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall. This debate has been conducted sensibly and the former prisons Minister, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), made a powerful case.

The challenges facing our prisons are indisputable. The statistics make grim reading, as do many reports from chief inspectors of different prisons. I do not dispute much of the right hon. Gentleman’s analysis of the problem. He rightly referred to our White Paper, which responds quite well to the challenge, although he was right to challenge us on the detail, as did the Labour shadow Minister, and to ask when implementation will take place.

The White Paper commits us to introducing legislation in the next Session on a number of measures. As I said to the Select Committee, we will introduce a Bill covering some of those measures. However, some do not need legislation and we will crack on with them. Over the next few weeks and months, the Justice Department will make several announcements on many of the issues that the White Paper touched on, demonstrating how we will implement what we have discussed in it.

Our brave and valuable prison officers work hard in our prisons and do a tremendous job. Whenever I visit one of our prisons, I make sure I spend time with the staff. I spend time with members of the Prison Officers Association and other staff to hear their experience of the challenges facing them, because I firmly believe that to understand the front-line challenges there is no substitute for speaking to those who are doing the job.

That is why it gives me great pleasure to announce—the House is aware that we have been in discussion with the Prison Officers Association on health and safety, pay and pensions—that we have come to an agreement with the association’s national executive committee on a new pay and pension package for front-line staff that it will recommend to their members. We have also agreed a significant number of health and safety reforms, as well as new powers for governors to deploy their staff. That is a big step. Many questions have been asked about retention and how we value our prison officers. Hon. Members will hear the details of the deal after the debate, but it goes a long way to show how we value prison officers and should help to retain the best officers in the service.

[Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)]

I apologise for not being here at the start of the debate. I was involved in parliamentary business in another part of the estate.

The Minister’s announcement is very welcome. In my constituency, I have three prisons where the staff are represented by the POA, and there is a private prison in Doncaster where the Community union, which I am a member of, represents a number of people working in the justice sector in that establishment. Has the Minister spoken to representatives of the Community union to make sure we have consistency across the prison estate, both private and public?

[Mr Gyimah]

I am not sure what consistency the right hon. Lady is referring to.

[Caroline Flint]

I am sorry if I was not clear. Will the terms and conditions, numbers and all the other factors the Minister constructively announced a moment ago be shared by the private establishments as well as the public ones?

[Mr Gyimah]

Obviously, private prisons determine pay and conditions. The deal we have agreed is for members of the Prison Officers Association in bands 3 to 5. I will write to the right hon. Lady with more details.

I echo the concerns raised by the right hon. Member for Delyn on this important topic. I hope the new money we secured for staffing, the new money for the Ministry of Justice and now the new deal on pay, pensions and health and safety indicate that, as I said in my intervention, our interest is long not just on aspiration. We are determined to deliver. This is all happening in the four months the new team has been in post.

The right hon. Gentleman rightly challenged us on the White Paper and on providing concrete plans to tackle drugs, phones, recruitment and the old Victorian estate. We have announced a comprehensive plan to tackle these and other crucial components of the prison system. Despite the inevitable time lag—it will take time because some of the problems have been long in the making and did not arise overnight—we are working to make sure that what can be delivered today will be delivered, and we are confident that we will see lasting benefits in the coming months and years.

As we set out in the White Paper last month, we will invest £100 million to recruit an additional 2,500 staff. Reference has been made several times to the number of staff in 2010, but we have closed 18 prisons and secure detention centres since that date. More importantly, our desire to recruit 2,500 extra staff is based on evidence. We want to create a system in which every prison officer handles the cases of six prisoners. That is what we call the new offender management model, which was recommended in the Harris review, which Members have mentioned. We are implementing it via our new staffing model.

The investment will provide the capacity for prison officers to play a dedicated officer role and to build constructive relationships. As the former prisons Minister is aware, we are talking about a people business: it is about relationships and about prison officers being able to listen prisoners’ frustrations, to diffuse tensions and ultimately to reduce the level of violence. That is a vital component of our plan to stabilise and then decrease the level of violence, self-harm and suicide, as well reforming offenders more generally. With nearly half of all offenders going on to commit crime within a year of being released, we believe that giving each prisoner a dedicated officer will help prisoners to turn away from crime in the long term.

We recognise the challenge in recruiting an extra 2,500 staff. That is why, as I told the Select Committee, we will launch a number of initiatives to help us to do that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gyimah]

Of course we will keep the effectiveness under review. Drugs are such a problem in terms of prison violence, safety and the effect on our prisoners that we ought to do so because we have to deal with the problem, and we will keep it under review.

A question was asked about drones and no-fly zones. We are looking to work with drone operators to programme the co-ordinates of prisons into drones so that if someone buys a drone from the operator and tries to fly it into a prison, it just collapses before it reaches the perimeter. That is technologically possible. On the point about the physical infrastructure, we have seen improved netting and CCTV, which help in dealing with that challenge.

[Caroline Flint]

Many of these issues affect both public and private prisons. Will the Minister give me an assurance that the Government will take on board some of the issues about staff ratios just as much for contracts for private prisons as they will for public prisons? I would welcome it if he would write to me on that issue.

[Mr Gyimah]

Of course we look at the entire prison estate when we look at all those issues. Prisons are there to protect the public. All prisons, whether private or public, have the same objectives, and the measures that we are looking at apply across the prison estate.

When it comes to drugs and phones, a lot of crime underpins that activity. People make money from it, which is why we are investing in a new intelligence hub and a search capability. We will say more about that in due course.

I would like to say something about probation, which has not been touched on and is important if we are to turn around offenders. In addition to making prisons places of safety and reform, we must ensure that prisons work hand in hand with probation if we are to achieve lasting change with offenders. It is clear that performance at community rehabilitation companies, which manage low-level offenders, varies widely, and therefore we have launched a review of operations and standards. Public protection is our top priority, and we will take the necessary action to ensure that the probation system reduces reoffending. As with our plans for prisons, I want a simpler, clearer system in which probation is focused on outcomes rather than processes and with increased transparency and accountability. I want specific outcome measures that focus on getting offenders off drugs and back into work. We will look at what additional measures—

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).