Prison Reform and Safety

Lord Hanson of Flint Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)]

Starting from now, Mr Deputy Speaker.

This is a particularly hard-hitting motion; it does not draw back from the challenges the Prison Service faces. It is important that today Select Committee members focus on specific issues and ask the Minister for the Government’s response to the major challenges, and we will do that. As the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), the very good Chair of the Justice Committee, said, the situation is deteriorating; the problems in prisons are getting worse.

While staff are doing an excellent job and trying their best in difficult circumstances, there have been 300 deaths in prison custody in the past 12 months, of which 77 were self-inflicted deaths. Self-harm has reached a record high and increased by 12% over that period, and the number of incidents requiring hospital attendance rose by 9%. Meanwhile, prisoner-on-prisoner assaults have risen to record highs, and the numbers of assaults on staff and of hospital admissions continue to rise, so there is a real challenge in the system.

I contend that there is a challenge because of reductions in resources and staff numbers, but there is also a challenge because of an increase in the amount of psychoactive substances and drugs getting into prison. It is a difficult job and a challenge to tackle, but if we do not get the basics right in our prison system, the aims of reform, rehabilitation and turning positive individuals back into society will be hampered.

[Norman Lamb]

Over the past year, people in prison have taken their own lives at the rate of one every three days. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the prison services should set a zero-suicide ambition, that we should be seeking to save every life and that it is intolerable that so many people are losing their lives in the prison system?

[David Hanson]

Absolutely. The threat assessment and self-harm assessment are extremely important, but this requires staffing, so a watch can be kept on individuals and they can be supported through what are often challenging mental health problems, particularly in the first few days and weeks of incarceration, when people are coming off alcohol and drugs, or are arriving in prison with severe mental health challenges.

We must tackle these issues in a positive way. One of the Minister’s challenges is to ensure that we undertake a review of the strategy, particularly on psychoactive substances and drugs. The Government have said that they have rolled out new tests for psychoactive substances across the estate; can the Minister tell us how many have taken place and their outcome? The Government have said that they have trained more than 300 dogs to detect these substances; does every prison have access to those dogs, and do those dogs ensure we catch substances that are smuggled in? The Government have said they are making smuggling psychoactive substances into prisons and possession of them criminal offences; I want us to monitor how we enforce that legislation.

The Minister must look at introducing planned searches of prisoners in prisons. He must also look at whether there should be searches of prison officers and delivery staff. I spoke this week to prison officers who said they would welcome that because they want to weed out corruption among staff. I want the Minister to tell us how that will be undertaken generally. I also want the Minister to take further steps to ensure that all category C prisons have netting around them, to stop people throwing drugs and other things into prisons.

I want to see the re-establishment of the dog units, not just as the regionalised resource that they are now, but as a resource that can be allocated locally.

We must look at the criminal gangs inside and outside prisons who are making money out of the delivery of drugs into prisons by many means. What I do not get from the Government is what their overall strategy is, and I think that feeling is shared by external agencies such as Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons. I see a number of individual measures, but I do not get the overall strategy. Will the Minister also tell me what is happening with reform prisons? We had a report this week about Holme House prison, which showed that every indicator was going in the wrong direction. It showed more drug use, more self-harm and more attacks on staff—and that is in a reform prison. We need to know who is accountable for that, and what plans are in place to drive improvements in that prison.

Time is extremely pressing, so I shall just ask the Minister one more question. When the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee), appeared before the Justice Committee recently, I asked whether the Oakhill training centre was now performing to a contractual level with which he was satisfied, and he replied, “Currently, they are.” Since that discussion, a report on Oakhill has shown that, yet again, that establishment is not performing to the required standard. Will the Minister tell me what concrete steps are being taken to improve performance at Oakhill? If the improvements that have been set out are not made, will he seek to remove the contract from G4S, as has happened elsewhere?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gyimah]

The Chair of the Select Committee makes an important point about the repatriation of foreign national offenders. He will be aware that the most effective scheme to repatriate foreign offenders is the early release scheme, under which 40,000 foreign national offenders have been moved out of the UK since 2010. Prisoner transfer agreements are also in place but they are a lot more challenging because they require the co-operation of the receiving Government, who do not always seem that keen to receive their own criminals back. A cross-governmental task force is focused on that very point.

To realise our vision for prisons, we must first make sure that they are secure environments that are free from drugs, violence and intimidation. Again, I do not shy away from acknowledging that the use and availability of drugs in our prisons is too high. The House has often discussed how the rise of psychoactive substances in our prisons was a game-changer, but it was when organised criminal groups moved in to take control of supply routes into prisons that the rules changed. Those groups have embedded themselves throughout the prison estate, becoming ever more sophisticated in driving the drug market and making enormous profits from peddling misery to those around them. Their activities have been facilitated by the rise of new technologies, such as phones and drones, which they have used to try to overcome our security. Those things represent an unprecedented threat that we have not faced before.

As our prison officers and law enforcement partners across the country regularly prove, however, we are more than up to that challenge, and our investment in security is bearing fruit. Last year alone, HMPPS officers recovered more than 225 kg of drugs from the prison estate. Our new team of specialist drone investigators has already helped to secure over 50 years of jail time for those involved, and the team is supporting ongoing investigations across the country.

We are providing officers with the tools that they need. We have already introduced drug tests for psychoactive substances across all prisons, provided every prison with signal detection equipment and trained more than 300 sniffer dogs specifically to detect new psychoactive substances. The right hon. Member for Delyn (David Hanson) asked about the availability of sniffer dogs to prisons. The dogs operate on a regional basis and are therefore available for prisons to call on as and when they are needed.

We are investing heavily in security and counter-terror measures, including £25 million to create the new security directorate in HMPPS. This year we will also invest more than £14 million in transforming our intelligence, search and disruption capability at local, national and regional level, to enable us better to identify and root out those who seek to supply drugs to our prisons. That investment includes more than £3 million to establish our serious organised crime units, which will relentlessly disrupt our most subversive offenders.

We are already seeing early successes from the new capability. A recent joint Prison Service and police operation at HMP Hewell, involving our specialist search teams and dogs, recovered 323 items, including 79 mobile phones, 29 improvised weapons, 50 litres of alcohol and a large quantity of drugs.

[David Hanson]

The Minister is indicating that those things are all intelligence-led. They should be routine.

[Mr Gyimah]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, but we need to know what we are looking for, and we need to identify the prisoners who are most likely to have links with organised crime. We now know that about 6,000 prisoners have links with organised crime on the outside and are conduits for drugs into our prisons, and that allows us to be far more effective in what we are doing to combat those operations. It is still very early days, but the point I am making is that we are beginning to see success. As we go forward, we intend to build on these successes, through our new drugs plan, which he mentioned, and our work on corruption, where it exists—even if it be only among a very few officers. He will be hearing more from me about that shortly.

Of course, this is not just about seizing or intercepting drugs. We should never forget that we have a duty of care to our prisoners—we want to help offenders with drug problems—and more of our prisons now have specialist wings to support them in overcoming their dependencies. We are also working closely with health partners to provide information, guidance and support to prisoners, visitors and staff on the impact and damaging consequences of drugs.

Hon. Members have mentioned the safety of our prisons. Ensuring safety is partly about having the right staffing levels to deliver safe and consistent regimes, and we are making swift progress in recruiting the additional 2,500 staff in the adult estate we promised in 2016: 1,255 extra prison officers have been recruited in the last year, and officer numbers are now at their highest levels since August 2013. In the youth estate, we have likewise expanded frontline staff capacity in public sector youth offender institutions by about 20%.

Preventing suicide and self-harm is also a focus of mine. We are taking decisive action to reduce the levels of self-harm by strengthening the frontline. Each individual incident of suicide or self-harm is one too many and a source of deep tragedy. We have introduced new suicide and self-harm prevention training to give everyone working in prisons, whether officers or staff from other organisations, the confidence and skills they need to support those in their care. So far, more than 10,000 prison staff have started the training, and all new prison officer and prison custody officer recruits now complete the programme as part of their initial training. I am glad to say that the number of self-inflicted deaths in custody is significantly down from last year, although I will be the first to admit that there is still a lot of work to be done.

The Chair of the Select Committee referred to the architecture of the prison system and how we can hold ourselves to account. We are strengthening the ability of the inspectorate to hold the Government and the Prison Service to account and have introduced a new urgent notification process, which had formed part of the original Prisons and Courts Bill, to enable the Secretary of State to be alerted directly where the chief inspector has a significant and urgent concern about the performance of an institution. We launched that process last month. The Secretary of State will be directly alerted by the chief inspector if an urgent issue needs addressing to ensure that recommendations are acted upon immediately. A new team of specialists accountable to Ministers will ensure that immediate action is taken and will respond within 28 days with a more in-depth plan to ensure sustained, long-term improvement for the prison.