Prison Officers (Work-related Stress)

Chris Ruane Excerpts

Wednesday 10th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

The background to the debate is the publication last month of a report on work-related stress and the well-being of prison officers. It was commissioned by the Prison Officers Association because of the union’s ongoing serious concerns about the health of its members, especially in the light of the Government’s policy of increasing the retirement age to 68 for prison officers and the startling cuts that have taken place.

The report was undertaken by three experts in the field of occupational health, and particularly occupational psychology, at the university of Bedfordshire. I pay tribute to those researchers for their assiduous work. They were Dr Gail Kinman, who is professor of occupational health psychology; Dr Andrew Clements, a lecturer in occupational psychology; and, assisting them, Jacqui Hart, a PhD candidate and researcher. All of them are appropriately qualified and have high reputations in the field.

Let me take the House through some of the findings of the research, which many of us have found shocking to say the least. The Health and Safety Executive establishes benchmarks to measure and monitor work-related stress among employees. Those benchmarks have been developed into a framework after extensive consultation with employers and the unions, and they are agreed standards by which organisations employing staff can assess the work-related stress experienced by those staff.

There are seven elements of work activity—described as the psychosocial hazards—and they are the most critical predictions of employee well-being. They relate first to the demands of the job—the work load, pace, and hours of work—and to control of work, which is the way a person can control their working environment. There is also management support, peer support—the help workers receive from their colleagues—and relationships, which includes interpersonal relationships, interpersonal conflicts and bullying. The benchmarks also include the measurement of the role and whether the job requirements are clear, and whether or not there is belief in the objectives of the organisation. The final benchmark is about change and how well that is communicated and managed in an organisation. The Health and Safety Executive has developed a self-reporting questionnaire that is widely used across industry and the public service.

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

Last week I met representatives from the Prison Officers Association to discuss mindfulness in the Prison Service. Mindfulness has been accepted by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence as an intervention for repeat episodes of depression, but it also improves compassion, reduces absenteeism, helps with relationship building, and reduces stress. Does my hon. Friend think that mindfulness in the Prison Service could help improve job satisfaction and the mental and physical health of prison officers?

[John McDonnell]

I pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend in this House in introducing mindfulness training for Members as well as staff, and developing that whole concept. I have explored the development of mindfulness which, despite elements of contention, has become extremely popular in its application in working environments. I will suggest to the Minister that we need a meeting to talk about the strategy from here on in, and one provision we could include in that is the offer of services such as mindfulness in the sector, which could prove extremely effective.

[Chris Ruane]

A new prison is to be built in Wrexham and the chief executive of North Wales health authority is predisposed towards mindfulness. Does my hon. Friend think that teaching mindfulness to prisoners and prison officers at that new prison from the outset would be a good experiment and pilot scheme for mindfulness in prisons?

[John McDonnell]

Given our concerns about that prison—a Titan prison that will house a larger number of prisoners than any other prison has housed—and about the scale of such a prison and the problems that will result from it, I think mindfulness would be an important strategy that should be built in from the beginning.

As I was saying, the health and safety questionnaire was developed in consultation with employers and union representatives. It is now used widely across the public and private sectors and is based on a self-report questionnaire. It is a standard procedure used by academics who in this case established a survey online. They received 1,682 respondents, which is as large as any national opinion poll, and it was a fairly representative sample.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

I echo the thoughts of the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd), and thank you, Mr Speaker, and the Minister for letting me speak, and also my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell). I also congratulate him on securing this debate.

I had not intended to speak. I was halfway out the door when I heard the subject of the debate, and I came back to listen to it because it is an important subject. My hon. Friend has given some crucial facts to us, such as that 60% of prison officers feel under tremendous strain and one in 10 feel that life is not worth living. These are terrible statistics. I would like to add to those the statistics that I have received from parliamentary questions, such as that 90% of prisoners have one of the top five psychiatric conditions, and, as my hon. Friend said, that there has been a 69% increase in prison suicides over the past year alone. If we have prison officers on one side who are highly stressed and prisoners on the other side who are highly stressed, that is a recipe for disaster. It is a potentially explosive situation which I think needs to be looked at in the round.

I want to be consensual in what I say, but I do think stopping prisoners receiving books, or proposing to do that, was a step backwards. It was a step towards the 19th century, not the 21st century. I hope the rest of my speech will be consensual, however.

Within society itself, there is a mental health crisis. According to another parliamentary question I put down, there was a 500% increase in the issuing of prescriptions for anti-depressants between 1991 and 2011, from 9 million prescriptions to 49 million. There is an issue in society, therefore, but it is exacerbated within prisons.

As I mentioned in my intervention, I believe that mindfulness can play an important role in helping us to get on top of these issues. Mindfulness was introduced in Parliament by me and Professor Richard Layard, a Labour Lord, in January last year. Some 115 MPs and Lords have been involved, and 10% of MPs have had mindfulness training. It has been introduced here in Parliament, which is a hothouse—there is a lot of stress here—and I think it can be rolled out to the Prison Service, the police service and the armed services.

What matters is how we pitch mindfulness as an intervention, so that it is accepted. In fact it is quite chic. Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post practises and preaches it. It is done by Apple, Google and all the top international companies. If it is good enough for the captains of industry, it is also good enough for ordinary workers like prison officers and police officers, and, indeed, their clients, in tandem—because mindfulness works best when it includes the teacher and the pupil, the GP and the patient, so that compassion is increased.

I believe that if we were to introduce mindfulness in prisons, it would help with a whole range of issues. Prisoners are literally a captive audience. They are in there 24 hours a day, and what do they do? Do they learn the skills that mindfulness brings—the skills of gratitude, appreciation, personal balance and equanimity that would help them to be better prisoners? Those skills would help them to be less violent towards the prison guards and to be better citizens when they move out into society.

This has worked in the past. Prison officers and police officers face stressful situations. A £5 million grant was given to the US Marines to undertake mindfulness training in a pre-combat situation. They were trained in the US before they went out to Afghanistan and Iraq and it worked. Indeed, it was such a success that it is now being rolled out to the US army. If it can work for big beefy Marines, it could work for British prison officers. The work with the Marines involved a five-year pilot project. The results are still coming in, but they are all positive.

The biggest impacts for the Marines were not only in the field among the officers and their fellow Marines, but in their relationships with their spouses and children when they got back to the US. My hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington mentioned the fact that prison officers felt disconnected when they went home at night and were unable to take part in family activities because they were so stressed out. Also, they do not earn fantastic wages. All jobs are stressful, but sometimes these officers’ family lives and community lives are destroyed because of needless stress. Sometimes we politicians take decisions that make people’s jobs even more stressful, and the stress for those officers has been cranked up in recent years with the increase in the number of prisoners and the reduction in the number of prison officers.

We have a golden opportunity to introduce mindfulness in prisons. Prison officers and police officers were in Parliament last week, in Westminster Hall, to meet representatives of the Mindfulness Initiative, which is looking into the use of mindfulness in the criminal justice system, in education, in the health service and in the workplace. We have taken evidence from experts across the UK and around the world, and we are now drawing up policies that we hope to present on 15 January next year. I will send the Minister a copy of those policies, and I hope that he will be able to make an assessment of the role of mindfulness in the prison service and the emergency services.

I hope, too, that the Minister will consider introducing mindfulness in the new prison in Wrexham. Health services are devolved; they are a Welsh Government issue and a North Wales Health Authority issue. Prison services, however, are not devolved. There needs to be a meeting between the health authority, Ministers in Cardiff and Ministers here in London to consider setting up a pilot project to measure key indicators such as the absenteeism of prison officers, the recidivism of prisoners and the stress levels of all involved. If mindfulness worked in the Wrexham setting, perhaps it could be rolled out across the whole of the British prison service for the benefit of the prison officers, of the prisoners and of wider society.