Oral Answers to Questions

Colin Clark Excerpts

Tuesday 18th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Colin Clark (Gordon) (Con)]

10. What steps the Government are taking to prevent violence in prisons.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)]

Violence in prisons is fundamentally driven by three things: drugs, the conditions in the prison, and relationships between prison officers and prisoners. We are addressing all three. To cut down on drugs, we are putting much more perimeter security in place to make it more difficult to get drugs in. Secondly, we are investing a great deal in decency and cleanliness in prisons. But the most important thing is the training and support for our hard-working prison officers so they can develop the right relationships with prisoners—ones that are strict but also humane—in order to bring proper behaviour management into place.

[Colin Clark]

Clearly reducing violence in prisons does depend on effective training of prison officers, but what assessment has my hon. Friend made of improvements in the way violent offenders are handled?

[Rory Stewart]

We repeatedly survey this; we have a specialist team looking at it. We have a long study under the violence reduction strategy, and the real conclusion is that it is about training. It is about what happens at the cell door—about how we develop respectful relationships in the same way that a good teacher would. There are high expectations on prison officers and on prisoners, so that we can have a safe, humane relationship that also has boundaries in place to control behaviour.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gauke]

I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman is best placed to lecture on common sense versus ideology.

The reoffending rate has fallen in the time since “Transforming Rehabilitation” and we would like it to fall further. There are issues with how the system is working, which is why we took the entirely pragmatic approach of bringing the contracts to an end and making some important and necessary changes to ensure that we can do more to reduce reoffending.

[Colin Clark (Gordon) (Con)]

T3. Will the Minister update the House on progress towards the abolition of the same roof rule?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Edward Argar)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question. Further to the Secretary of State’s answer a few moments ago and the tabling today of the written ministerial statement on the review of the overall scheme, let me say that earlier this year we committed to remove the pre-1979 same roof rule more swiftly. In that context, I pay tribute to the work of the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) in her campaign on this issue. As the Secretary of State has said, we anticipate, subject to the parliamentary timetable, to be able to lay an order as swiftly as possible.