Prisons: Planning and Policies

Charles Walker Excerpts

Thursday 15th October 2015 Westminster Hall

[Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

It is an immense pleasure, Mr Walker, to serve under your chairmanship once again this week, as I do every Wednesday afternoon on the Select Committee on Procedure. I do not think that I have ever taken part in a debate that you have chaired in Westminster Hall.

It is a pleasure to respond to this report by the Select Committee on Justice. The previous speakers have been incredibly kind to the Government. When I read the report, I thought what uncomfortable reading it would be for Ministers and officials, as it does not pull its punches at all. The hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) has been incredibly generous in his presentation of the report; his manners are a credit to his parents. I do not think that I will be quite as polite. I am under no illusions about the nature and scale of the task faced by the Ministry of Justice in tackling the crisis that is beginning to take hold in prisons. It is a crisis, and I do not use that word lightly. I have avoided using it for my first four years in this role, but I am beginning to think that a crisis is exactly what we are seeing.

The report explains very well the overcrowding and violence, and that there is zero improvement in reoffending figures. [Interruption.] The Minister is asking his officials. They will find a not statistically significant reduction in reoffending figures—a wasted five years in the previous Parliament. Opportunities have been missed to improve outcomes. It seems that almost every opportunity has been taken to make matters much worse.

The most urgent issue that the report, quite rightly, addresses is that of violence in prisons. The Minister and I have had debates in here on that very issue. I know that he is acutely aware of the level of the problem and he knows of my long-standing concern, which dates back to early in the previous Parliament, when I met one of his predecessors, the hon. Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt), along with prison officers from the north-east.

One of the officers, Craig Wylde, had been assaulted by an inmate with a history of violence who had barricaded himself into his cell at Frankland prison near Durham. The inmate attacked several officers with a broken bottle, causing life-changing injuries. As far as I am aware, they have not all been able to return to work. That case brought home to me that violence in prisons is not just a case of throwing punches or the inappropriate use of restraint techniques. It can be extremely serious.

For the first time that I can remember, this year we lost a serving custody officer while she was at work. That happened since the publication of the report; I am sure it would have been included. Although she was not in a prison at the time, the tragic event reveals something about the level of risk that prison staff take on a daily basis. At Prime Minister’s questions in the week following that dreadful murder, members of neither Front Bench—I do not reserve criticism just for those on the Government Front Bench—used the opportunity to pay tribute to Lorraine Barwell in the way that they, quite correctly, do when a member of the armed forces or a police officer is killed in the line of duty. It saddens me to acknowledge that this reveals something of a disparity of esteem in the eyes of the media and the public. That is not right and we must all work to put it right. Prison officers are brave public servants working to keep us safe. They deserve equal respect and acknowledgement for the job they do.

I have spoken for the Labour party on prisons since 2011. Throughout that time, the deterioration of standards in jails has been shocking, and they were not in a great state to begin with. I worked in prisons in the early ’90s; I know exactly the state that they were in then and I see the state that they are in now. I have seen nothing but decline. The situation is not, in any way, the responsibility of those working in our prisons. They are not to blame. Overcrowding, understaffing and a lack of political interest or leadership is responsible. The statistics are really quite grim. As the report states,

“since 2012 there has been a 38% rise in self-inflicted deaths, a 9% rise in self-harm, a 7% rise in assaults, and 100% rise in incidents of concerted indiscipline…There are fewer opportunities for rehabilitation, including diminished access to education,”—

we all remember the book ban—

“training, libraries, religious leaders, and offending behaviour courses.”

There have been 43 suicides and five homicides in prisons in the past six months. Serious assaults on staff are at an all-time high, with overcrowding, drugs and radicalisation getting worse or, as the chief inspector feels, becoming accepted as part of prison life. The most telling paragraph in the report is paragraph 17 on page 70. I want to read a few sentences from it. It is quite disturbing and I would like to hear the Minister’s response. It says:

“It is possible that the Ministry might be taking the matter of the sudden rise in self-inflicted deaths seriously internally, but downplaying publicly its significance, and the potential role that changes in prisons policy might be playing in it, is ill-advised as it could be construed as complacency and a lack of urgency.”

That is how it is construed. I do not suggest for a second that that is how the Minister intends it to be construed or that he personally feels that way about it, but that is the perception in jails. That is why he urgently needs to set his mind about the issue.

I have spoken in similar terms on so many occasions, as have organisations representing staff and others with an interest in prisons, but the Government continue to speak in the same terms. We hear about the rehabilitation revolution, working prisons, and through-the-gate support, but it is all starting to wear very thin. The Government’s disdain—shown through their inaction, if not their words—is unforgivable. As well as a new Justice Committee Chair and, mostly, a new Committee, we have a new Secretary of State. It is great to hear him. Some of the things that he is saying are very welcome but we have to see more than just words.

However, even in the grimmest of times—and I think these are the grimmest of times in prisons—there are always shining examples of success. We have all visited prisons and seen workshops preparing offenders for employment, amazing charities working to maintain vital family links, prison officers helping inmates to read and businesses, such as Timpson, going to great lengths to provide jobs on release. I admire those working in our prisons to contribute to the gargantuan task of reducing reoffending.

The Government have made a start, and I want to encourage more of the same, but we must assess the effectiveness of such interventions and focus funding on those proven to be most effective. It is incredibly frustrating to find that the work that does happen is so patchy and is not enough to have a significant impact on reoffending figures, which is probably because the methods are very inconsistent and delivery sometimes lacks quality. Access to courses, as we know, is extremely limited, and understaffing leads to offenders spending time idle and to missed opportunities to put right bad attitudes.

I welcome the new Secretary of State’s declarations. I completely support him when he says that he wants better education in our prisons, and more of it. I support him when he says that he wants to work to create a system in which every offender gets a chance to change—absolutely. But, so far, his words are lacking in substance, and he has not yet come up with a single policy that tells us how he will achieve his aims. We look forward to hearing about those policies, but so far we have not.

The Secretary of State does not need me or anyone else to worry about him all that much, but in his rush to reform our penal system he must not forget the needs of victims or neglect the vital task of maintaining public confidence in criminal justice. I share many of the concerns that he expresses, but he must remember that, if public confidence is lost, his opportunity to reform will vanish, too. The Minister will probably ask, “What would you do?” That is a fair question. We would fundamentally change how prisons are managed. It is pleasing to hear the Secretary of State utter similar words.

The report also observes that prison governors are “effectively becoming contract managers”, which the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst articulated well. Prison governors are constrained in their operational decisions, and the Committee rightly concludes that

“relegating governors to an oversight and partnership management role with much reduced discretion undermines their control over the performance and safety of the establishment and their ability to govern their prisons using their professional judgment, as they are trained at public expense to do.”

I would like to see the creation of prisons that are not centrally run from Whitehall. Instead, we should have locally run establishments. If hospitals, colleges and fire services are best run by local stakeholders, why not our prisons? It has never made sense to me that, at a strategic level, prisons should be entirely detached from the services needed to house, heal, educate and employ their inmates on release. It is no wonder that prisons do not succeed more often and that homelessness, unemployment, mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse are all commonplace among those recently released from prison. We know that those factors all contribute to reoffending and that roughly half those released from custody reoffend within a year.

I am glad that the Secretary of State seems to be coming round to that point of view. When we hear his concrete proposals, I have no doubt that we will do our best to support him, but it is widely accepted that work to prevent prisoners from returning to crime has to begin before release. That is better achieved if agencies with expertise in preventing homelessness or combating drug addiction have a stake in devising and delivering prison regimes, not just in providing programmes within a prison or providing support after release. That would be a major reform, and it would need to be piloted. Some service providers need to confront the consequences of getting things wrong the first time by taking a lead in putting things right. High reoffending rates are not the responsibility of the Ministry of Justice alone.

Conservative estimates say that about 23% of the prison population have been through the looked-after system. If that group were better provided for and prevented from committing crimes, we would save the Treasury an absolute fortune. Even if only half that group were kept away from crime, we would prevent some 10,000 people from becoming victims, saving about £270 million each year in incarceration costs.

Alongside a change in management, we need a change in inspections. Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons produces excellent, insightful reports that act as catalysts for change in the institutions concerned, and more widely—ending the handcuffing of women in labour is a good example. If, as the report suggests, Parliament is to be asked to devolve many of the decisions on running prisons to establishment level, we must have confidence that high standards of security and safety will never be compromised. I suggest that we need a new kind of inspectorate with more frequent unannounced inspections that produces reports with real clout. Too often, we see the response to a poor inspection report centre on the appointment of a new governor. I have read so many times that things have improved dramatically since an inspection took place, but inspectors need the ability to insist on meaningful and immediate change.

I encourage the Government to put more effort into preventing people from getting involved in crime in the first place. As the Committee rightly observes, prisons have no control over which, or how many, inmates they hold. As has been observed, effective policing, work with troubled families, Sure Start and good mental health services for young people are all ways in which the Government can improve outcomes in prisons. The Minister should share the love for prisons by trying to get some of his colleagues in other Departments as interested and as keen to improve things as I know he is.

The Committee rightly observes that, with the need to make financial savings in the medium term, there is no scope to spend more on prisons. I therefore encourage Ministers to look closely at the Youth Justice Board. We have committed to extending the YJB’s responsibilities to include 21-year-olds and to developing a women’s justice board because we want to reduce demand on prison places by intervening early to divert those at risk of committing crime away from harming themselves and others. We need to see the proper use of restorative techniques and beefed-up community orders, but never at the expense of public confidence. We must always be mindful of the needs of victims.

I never felt unsafe when I worked in prisons. I benefited from quality supervision and good support from all grades of staff. Uniformed officers took leading roles in preventing bullying. They demonstrated daily how to keep calm in tricky situations and how to de-escalate violent disagreements without anyone getting hurt; they knew how to listen. They were trained to support rehabilitation day in, day out without any fuss or particular expense. The report captures that very well, as did the Committee’s earlier report “Role of the Prison Officer”, which I commend to the Minister.

Twenty years on, prison officers are undervalued and underused. We need to support them so that they are not, and never will be, just turnkeys. As the Committee put it in 2009—it is just as true now as it was then—prison officers’ sense of vocation

“needs to be encouraged, nurtured and developed as far as possible rather than, at best, being taken for granted and, at worst, ignored.”

I am grateful for this debate. It is not often that we get the opportunity in this place to have a good romp around the issue of prisons, but this debate has afforded that, and I look forward to the Minister’s response. There is one more thing that I committed to ask the Minister. I now have a regular slot on BBC Radio Berkshire to talk about Reading jail. The Chairman of the Committee and the report discussed the new-for- old programme. It is a sound strategy in principle, but in some places such as Reading, there are empty, mothballed prisons at strategic sites in towns with potential global heritage value. Local people in Reading are getting frustrated at the Ministry of Justice’s lack of ability to decide what to do with the site. If the Minister or his officials can put the minds of the people of Reading at rest about the future of that site, that would be welcome, and would save me my early morning slot on Radio Berkshire.

[Mr Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

Before I call the Minister, I remind Members that we will hear from the Chair of the Committee for a few minutes after the Minister has finished his speech.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Selous]

We have promised a response in the autumn. We are actively considering that extremely important report, about which I will say a little in a moment if my hon. Friend, the Chair of the Justice Committee, will allow me.

In September, we announced a departmental review of the youth justice system, led by Charlie Taylor, the former chief executive of the National College of Teaching and Leadership. I recognise the importance of clear responsibility for the young adult offender group. We have therefore appointed a deputy director of custody for young people, within NOMS, as senior lead on operational policy on young adults. We are also working to improve the evidence base around what works best with young adult offenders. That includes developing and testing a tool to screen for emotional and social maturity, which should help us to understand need better and better tailor services and interventions for young adult offenders in prison or in the community.

The shadow Minister quite properly raised prison safety. The safety of our staff as they deliver a secure prison regime is an absolute priority. We are tackling dangerous new psychoactive substances, to help drive down the number of assaults and violent incidents. Measures have been taken to help deter prisoners from violence. For example, we brought in, for the first time ever, a joint national protocol between NOMS, the Crown Prosecution Service and the police, to ensure that there is a nationally consistent approach to referral and prosecution of crimes in prison. That is a really important mechanism. It is a significant change and will play its part in reducing violence in prisons.

The Serious Crime Act 2015 has brought in two new offences. Unbelievably, it was not an offence to possess a knife in a prison—if you can believe that—without authorisation. That has now changed. We are bringing in a new offence of throwing or projecting any item over a prison wall. The link to violence is very clear; it is mainly drugs that are thrown over the walls, and we know that new psychoactive substances are involved in provoking many violent incidents. That is why such measures are important.

We are bringing in other measures to record and understand the incidents of violence in prisons and the response to those incidents. We are developing a violence diagnostic tool, to enable better analysis at national, regional and local levels, and operational guidance for governors, to advise staff in prison on how they might better manage both potential and actual violent incidents. We are also piloting body-worn cameras in 22 public sector and two private sector prisons. I visited Glen Parva recently and was impressed by what I saw. The staff told me that they felt a lot safer; the prisoners also told me that they felt a lot safer, which is important. We will evaluate that early next year. We do not underestimate the hard work and challenges faced by our prison staff in dealing with serious violent incidents. We will continue to support our staff and help them to maintain safe and secure prisons.

The issue of self-inflicted deaths was rightly raised earlier. Whenever a prisoner takes their own life, it is a shocking and tragic event that is felt round the whole prison. We take our duty to keep prisoners safe extremely seriously. On any given day, prison staff provide crucial care to more than 2,000 prisoners at risk of self-harming. At times, that means someone literally sitting 24/7 outside a cell door, if necessary. We continue to make every effort to improve the care that we provide to vulnerable prisoners and learn from every individual incident.

It is too simplistic to attribute self-inflicted death or self-harm to staffing reductions or benchmarking. Deaths have occurred in contractor prisons, which have not been subject to reductions, as well as public sector prisons. All prisons are required to have procedures in place to identify, manage and support people who are at risk of harm to themselves. NOMS has put in place additional resources to undertake this safer custody work. NOMS is also reviewing the operation of the case management process for prisoners assessed as being at risk—procedures for assessment, care in custody and teamwork, known as ACCT. It is considering the recommendations of the Harris review into deaths of young adults in custody, about which the Chair of the Justice Committee rightly asked.

The Committee expressed concerns about staffing. The prison system has been under some pressure as a result of a rise in the prison population, combined with staffing shortages. That is most notable in London and the south-east, where the economic recovery may have contributed to a higher than anticipated staff turnover. Immediate action was taken early in 2014 to manage those recruitment shortages, including an accelerated recruitment campaign, the introduction of the Her Majesty’s Prison Service reserves, and staff sent on detached duty to the prisons with the greatest shortages. In the 12 months to June 2015, 2,230 new prison officers began training. Of those, 1,820 were new recruits and 410 were existing NOMS staff who have regraded to become prison officers. In the past 12 months to June 2015, there has been a net increase of 420 prison officers. Those officers will go at least some of the way to dealing with the issues of violence and safety that have been raised throughout the debate. We are also looking to recruit a similar number this year with our ongoing recruitment campaign.

There are, however, establishments where it remains hard to recruit. To address that issue, NOMS has looked at a number of options based on evidence, such as turnover, volume of vacancies and reward in other industries. A decision has been made against organisational objectives, Government policy on public sector pay and financial affordability, to improve our reward offer for prison officers at those sites. NOMS has worked, and will continue to work, to support its staff and provide them with the skills and development opportunities that they need to perform their duties with confidence and the necessary skills.

I shall quickly touch on the role of the external monitoring bodies. I wrote to the Chair of the Justice Committee in July, clarifying that the reference in the NOMS original response to the Justice Committee to a review of the independence of all criminal justice inspectorates was made in error, for which I apologise. A corrected version of the NOMS response has now been relayed in Parliament. I assure the House that in the absence of such a review, both the Secretary of State and I remain absolutely committed to safeguarding the imperative of an inspectorate that operates, and is perceived to operate, fully independently of both the sponsoring Department and the organisations in its remit.

The last major point I want to cover concerns our transforming rehabilitation reforms. As the Committee will know, reoffending has been too high for too long, which is why we have reformed the way that offenders are managed in the community. The transforming rehabilitation reforms seek to get the best out of the voluntary, public and private sectors to help offenders turn away from crime. These reforms mean that for the first time in recent history, virtually every offender released from custody will receive statutory supervision and rehabilitation in the community, including those offenders sentenced to less than 12 months in custody. We expect the new providers to make real contributions towards reducing reoffending, and we are closely monitoring their progress. The reforms have made substantial changes to how we manage offenders in England and Wales, and I am proud to be part of the team that has made those changes happen.

Of course, there remains much work to be done as we embed these reforms, and I take this opportunity to thank probation and prison staff for their continued hard work. They are doing a magnificent job, and they deserve our congratulation and recognition.

Regarding work, I agree with the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell). I was interested to hear about the experience in German prisons; the Singaporean prison system also places a very high emphasis on both getting prisoners into work in prison and getting them into employment afterwards. I am grateful to him for making that point.

The hon. Member for Darlington was absolutely right to refer to the tragic death of Lorraine Barwell. It was an horrendous incident and I can assure the hon. Lady that it was taken extremely seriously within the Ministry of Justice; reviews are ongoing and a charge of murder has been brought. The flag on the Ministry of Justice flew at half-mast on the day of the funeral. The hon. Lady’s comments were absolutely right. I myself have said it many times before and I say it again now: prison officers are on the front line, keeping us all safe. We owe every one of them a debt of duty. They may not be in the public eye in the way other front-line professionals are, but what they do is every bit as important. We need to recognise that on every occasion.

Thank you very much, Mr Walker; I am very grateful for having had the chance to respond to the debate. I hope that I have managed to respond to all the points raised this afternoon. If I have not done so, I will gladly write to hon. Members.

[Mr Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

Mr Neill, perhaps we can hear from you for a few minutes in summary.