Prisons

Elizabeth Truss Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Elizabeth Truss)]

I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “House” to the end of the Question and add:

“welcomes the Government’s comprehensive proposals for major reform of the prison system set out in the White Paper; further welcomes plans for an extra 2,500 prison officers, to professionalise the prison service further and to attract new talent by recruiting prison officer apprentices, graduates and former armed service personnel; notes new security measures being introduced to tackle the illegal use of drones, phones and drugs which are undermining the stability of the prison system; welcomes the commitment to give governors in all prisons more powers and more responsibility to deliver reform whilst holding them to account for the progress prisoners make; and welcomes the Government’s proposals to set out for the first time the purpose of prisons in statute.”

Since becoming Justice Secretary, I have been clear that the violence in our prisons is too high. We have very worrying levels of self-harm and of deaths in custody. Tomorrow, we will see further statistics on violence for the period from July to September 2016. The last set of statistics reaffirmed why we need to take immediate action. I have been clear that these problems have been years in the making, and will not be fixed in weeks or months. In fact, in a piece he wrote this morning, the hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) acknowledged that there is no “magic fix” for these issues. We certainly did not hear any magic fixes in his speech today.

[James Berry (Kingston and Surbiton) (Con)]

There may be no magic fixes, but does my right hon. Friend agree with the hon. Member for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods) that this Government should take responsibility? They should indeed take responsibility for banning novel psychoactive substances at the request of prison officers, and they should take responsibility for a plan to increase the number of prison officers—she has outlined that plan—again at the request of prison officers.

[Elizabeth Truss]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. I am absolutely determined to turn around our prisons. Unless our prisons are places of safety, they cannot be purposeful places where offenders can reform. That is why we have taken immediate action, as my hon. Friend says, to stabilise security in our prisons and to tackle the scourge of drugs, drones and phones. It is why we have secured additional funding of £100 million annually to recruit an extra 2,500 prison officers to strengthen our frontline and invest in wider justice reforms.

[Toby Perkins]

It is good news that there is some additional money and that some more prison officers are coming into the service, but the Secretary of State is right to say that the scale of violence in our prisons is terrible. She and the Government must take responsibility for the lower number of prison officers that we now have. Will she tell the House how many prison officers are currently off work sick as a result of assaults received at work?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I have been clear that we need extra staff on the frontline. A number of issues have resulted in the situation that we now face, including the rise in the numbers of psychoactive substances, drones and phones. I have been clear that we need to address the issue of staffing, and we are determined to do so. We monitor the level of sickness in our prisons specifically to address that issue.

[Mr Jackson]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the only concrete analysis given by the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman in his 30-minute speech was that there is a demonstrable link between staffing and violence. That has been controverted by evidence given to the Justice Committee by Dr David Scott of the Open University, who rejected such a link. There are other much more complex societal factors in the prison population and across the estate.

[Elizabeth Truss]

There are a number of factors, and psychoactive drugs are one. We need the proper level of staffing, which we are putting into prisons, to ensure that prison officers can supervise and challenge offenders properly. That is important not just for safety, but for reforming offenders.

The “Prison Safety and Reform” White Paper, which was published last November, detailed the biggest overhaul of our prisons in a generation to deal with the issues we are discussing. It is right that prisons punish people who commit serious crime by depriving them of their most fundamental right, liberty, but they need to be places of discipline, hard work and self-improvement. That is the only way we will cut reoffending and reduce crime in our communities.

[Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)]

I am really grateful to the Lord Chancellor for giving way. I want to help her on the staffing point. The benchmarking by the Ministry of Justice indicates that 89 prisons are under the staffing levels that her Ministry thinks is right for them. When the 2,500 prison officers are recruited, how many of those prisons will still be under her own benchmarking staffing levels?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I will address how we will recruit the additional staff later in my comments, but all of those prisons will not just be brought up to the benchmark level; we are increasing staff levels beyond that. We have to recruit the additional staff to bring prisons up to benchmark and then further additional staff. That is all within our plan to recruit 4,000 officers this year.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Elizabeth Truss]

I will give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield) and then make a bit more progress with my speech.

[Maria Caulfield]

HMP Lewes is mentioned in the Opposition motion, but I have not heard that the shadow Secretary of State has visited it, unlike the prisons Minister. The shadow Secretary of State dismissed the effect of having a high number of sexual offenders in the prison, but that affects the retention of prison staff. To dismiss it out of hand shows a lack of experience and knowledge about what is happening in our prisons.

[Elizabeth Truss]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will come on to the prison population later in my speech and address the specific issue of sex offenders.

[Sir Simon Burns (Chelmsford) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Elizabeth Truss]

Very quickly.

[Mr Speaker]

There was no danger of the Secretary of State not hearing the right hon. Gentleman. I rather assumed that she would give way, because Chelmsford prison has been referred to.

[Sir Simon Burns]

The extra prison officers my right hon. Friend proposes to recruit are welcome, but I understand that it takes about nine months to fully train a new prison officer. As a short-term stopgap, would it not be sensible to relax the rules or give more powers to governors so that they could bring back into work retired, experienced prison officers on short-term contracts?

[Elizabeth Truss]

My right hon. Friend’s assessment is absolutely right and we are, indeed, bringing back former prison officers on a temporary basis.

I will move on to what we are doing on recruitment and retention, because that is the most important issue we face as a Prison Service. We will not achieve our aims of reform if we do not have enough officers and if we do not train them properly and have proper career development to make the most of our workforce. In October, we started by announcing our plans to recruit an extra 400 staff in 10 of our most challenging prisons. I am pleased to say that we have so far made 389 job offers. We were due to do that by the end of March, so we are ahead of target. We recently launched a graduate scheme called Unlocked, which is like Teach First for prisons, to attract the top talented graduates. We had more than 1,000 expressions of interest in the scheme and within 24 hours, we had 350 graduates from Russell Group universities applying for it.

The idea that people do not want to do the job is not right. There are a lot of people out there who want to reform offenders and to get involved in helping us turn around our Prison Service. We need to talk up the job of being a prison officer, because it is incredibly important. One prison officer described themselves to me as a parent, a social worker and a teacher. What could be more important than turning somebody who lives a life of crime into somebody who contributes to society? We find that when we go out and recruit, a lot of people are interested in the role.

Of course we have to retain our fantastic existing prison officers, but I want to correct the hon. Member for Leeds East. In fact, 80% of our staff have been with us for longer than five years, so the idea that we do not have a strong depth of prison officers is wrong. However, we do need to ensure that they have career and promotion opportunities. That is why we are looking to expand the senior grades in the service and to promote our existing staff. We want to give them a career ladder so that they have opportunities to train on the job and get the additional skills they need.

We are giving prison governors the opportunity to recruit locally for the first time. We have launched that in 30 of our most hard-to-recruit prisons. That means that the governor can build much more of a relationship with the local community, get people involved, show people what life is really like inside prison and encourage people to work there. The local recruitment and job fairs have been really successful.

Of course this is challenging. Recruiting 4,000 people in one year is challenging, but I think we can do it. We have the opportunity to do it, we are enthusiastic about it and we have the budget to do it for the first time in a number of years.

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. The opportunity for the governor to do more proactive recruitment has been welcomed in Bedford. In the amendment, she talks about decentralising authority to prison governors to enable them to make their own decisions. Does she find it interesting that that idea has been missed completely by the Labour party?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I agree with my hon. Friend that we need to give prison governors power over what happens in their own prison. They should decide what regimes to operate and what staffing structures to have. They should motivate and recruit their own team. They should also have more say over how lives are turned around. For example, we are giving them the power over their own education providers. We will hold prison governors to account for how people are improving in English and maths; how successful they are at getting offenders off drugs, which we know can lead to rehabilitation; and how successful they are at getting people into work when they leave prison, which will encourage them to work with local employers and set up apprenticeships. However, we need to give governors the levers and the responsibility that will enable them to do those things. We are also working on leadership training so that governors have the skills and capabilities to take on those extra responsibilities.

That is the only way we will turn lives around. Whatever I and my civil servants do in the Ministry of Justice, we are not the people on the ground in the wings who are talking to prisoners day in, day out. It is those people who will turn lives around. That is why we need motivated staff and governors who are empowered to do that job. That is what our reforms will achieve.

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

I think the whole House will sympathise with and support the right hon. Lady’s comments on the morale of prison officers. When the hon. Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth) and I were prison officers together in Dartmoor prison, it was evident to us that prison officers felt that they were out of sight and out of mind. They felt that nobody had any interest in their work until something went catastrophically wrong. Does she agree that it would be an excellent idea for right hon. and hon. Members not just to contact the Prison Officers Association, but occasionally to visit prisons to show that we do care and that they are not out of sight nor out of mind?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point. I am delighted to hear that he is a former prison officer. Perhaps he could be a shining beacon of the scheme to bring former prison officers into service.

[Stephen Pound]

I am so reluctant to disabuse and disappoint the right hon. Lady, but the hon. Member for Aldershot and I were only temporarily in Dartmoor as part of a television programme called “At the Sharp End”.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

I thank Mr Mackay.

[Elizabeth Truss]

In any case, we are setting up a parliamentary scheme so that we can work more closely with prison officers and give them the kudos they deserve, because they do an incredibly important job, often behind walls. As part of the reform programme, I want to see prisons reaching out more into the local community and working with local employers. As the shadow Secretary of State said, ultimately, the vast majority of people in prison will one day be on the outside and be part of the local community, so we need to work on that.

While we are putting in place the long and medium-term measures to get additional staff in to reform our prisons, we are taking immediate action to improve security and stability across the estate. That includes extra CCTV, the deployment of national resources and regular taskforce meetings chaired by the prisons Minister. He holds regular meetings with the Prison Service to monitor prisons for risk factors, and that allows us to react quickly to emerging problems and provide immediate support to governors, on anything from transferring difficult prisoners to speeding up the repair of damaged facilities.

Hon. Friends have talked about psychoactive substances, which have been a game changer in the prisons system, as the prisons and probation ombudsman has acknowledged. In September, we rolled out to all prisons new mandatory drug tests for psychoactive drugs, and we have increased the number of search dogs and trained them to detect drugs such as Spice and Mamba. We are also working with mobile phone operators on new solutions, being trialled in three prisons, to combat illicit phones, and we have specific powers to block phones too.

[Philip Davies]

I am disappointed that my right hon. Friend has not mentioned the impact on the behaviour of prisoners of automatic release halfway through sentence. If someone is sent to prison for six years but knows that by law they will be released after three, irrespective of how badly they behave in prison, surely their behaviour in prison will be worse than if they know they might have to do the full term if they do not behave. Is she not going to address that issue?

[Elizabeth Truss]

Clearly, if people do not behave, they will receive additional days. That is an important part of the levers that governors have in reforming offenders.

I was talking about security issues. We are also working to deal with drones, rolling out body-worn cameras across the estate and dealing with organised crime gangs through a new national intelligence unit.

Hon. Members have also talked about mental health. We are investing in specialist mental health training for prison officers to help to reduce the worrying levels of self-harm and suicide in our prisons. The early days in custody are particularly critical to mental health and keeping people safe.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

As the Secretary of State will know, many women in prison have severe mental health problems, having been subjected to much abuse in their lives. Why is there so little about women in the White Paper? What is she doing to implement the recommendations of the Corston report?

[Elizabeth Truss]

We are working on a strategy for women offenders that includes looking after women on community sentences as well as custodial sentences. I want more early intervention to deal with issues that lead to reoffending, such as mental health and drugs issues, and we will be announcing further plans in the summer.

We are investing in an additional 2,500 staff across the prisons estate, but we are also changing the way we deploy those staff to ensure more opportunities to engage with offenders, both to challenge them and to help them reform.

[Keith Vaz]

May I put to the Lord Chancellor the question I put to the shadow Lord Chancellor about foreign national offenders? She will know that an easy way to reduce the number of people in our prisons is to follow through on the excellent work of her distinguished predecessors, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) and the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who are both in the House today, in signing these agreements to send people back to their countries of origin. Why has progress been so slow?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his comments, and I am pleased to say that a record number of foreign national offenders were deported in the last year. We are making progress, therefore, but there is more work to do. My hon. Friend the prisons Minister is leading a cross-Government taskforce on this issue.

I return now to our work in recruiting 2,500 new prison officers and changing the role of prison officers. By recruiting these new staff, we want every prison officer to have a caseload of no more than six offenders whom they can challenge and support. Our staffing model aims to ensure that we have enough prison officers to do that. One-to-one support from a dedicated officer is at the heart of how we change our reoffending rates and keep our prisons and prison officers safe.

The hon. Member for Leeds East talked about the prison population, although I was none the wiser about Labour’s policy after he had spoken. The prison population has been stable since 2010, having risen by 25,000 under Labour. As was mentioned earlier, fewer people are in prison for shorter sentences—9,000 fewer shorter sentences are given out every year—but more people are in prison for crimes such as sex offences. Not only are we prosecuting more sexual offenders, but sentences for sexual offences have increased considerably, which is absolutely right and reflects the serious damage those individuals do to their victims.

[Maria Caulfield]

It is much more difficult for prison officers to look after sex offenders than an average prison inmate—they often need to be segregated, but old Victorian prisons do not easily enable that—and that only adds to the pressure on officers.

[Elizabeth Truss]

We are doing important work on how better to deal with sex offenders and how to ensure they are on treatment programmes that will stop them committing such crimes in the future.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

The one policy that the Labour spokesman touched on was the future of the remaining IPP prisoners, of whom 4,000 remain in prison, years after the sentence was abolished and beyond their recommended term. Some are very dangerous and cannot be released, but is my right hon. Friend looking at how to make it easier for parole boards to reduce delays and alter the burden of proof and so release all those for whom there is no evidence that they would pose a serious risk to the public if released?

[Elizabeth Truss]

The Opposition talked about IPP prisoners. Of course, it was the Labour party that introduced that sentence, and my right hon. and learned Friend who abolished it, so well done to him. There is a legacy here, since some of them are still in prison, but I have established an IPP unit within the Department to deal with the backlog and ensure that we address the issues those individuals have so that they can be released safely into society. We must always heed public protection, however, and as he acknowledged, some are not suitable for release for precisely that reason.

[Mims Davies (Eastleigh) (Con)]

Local police have raised with me the impact, particularly in Hedge End, of psychoactive drug abuse before people enter prison. The types of prisoners being managed are of a different ilk, and the type of addiction is unknown and difficult to quantify. How difficult is it on the ground for our prison officers?

[Elizabeth Truss]

My hon. Friend is right; this is a very serious issue, both in society and in prison. We are looking at additional training for prison officers and have introduced tests to help to get prisoners off these substances, as well as prisoner education programmes. These drugs do have a serious and severe effect. On her point about the community, I want our community sentences to address mental health and drugs issues before people commit crimes that result in custodial sentences. Too many people enter prison having previously been at high risk of committing such a crime because of such issues. We need to intervene earlier, which I think is an effective way of reducing the circulation through our prisons, rather than having an arbitrary number that we release. What we need to do is deal with these issues before they reach a level where a custodial sentence is required. That is our approach, and I shall say more about it in due course.

From April, prison governors will be given new freedoms to drive forward the reforms and cut free from Whitehall micro-management. Governors will have control over budgets, education and staffing structures, and they will be able to set their own prison regime. At the moment, we have a plethora of prison rules, including on how big prisoners’ bath mats can be. Surely that is not the way to treat people who we want to be leaders of some of our great institutions.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I want to say how much I welcome the passage in the White Paper that gives to prison governors the very freedoms that my right hon. Friend has mentioned, particularly in respect of work and the commercial relationships that governors will be able to form with companies and businesses to get proper work into prisons. Will she say something about One3One Solutions?

[Elizabeth Truss]

My hon. Friend must have read my mind, because we were talking about One3One Solutions only this morning, and I know that he was involved in establishing that organisation. Employers are vital to our reforms, and what I want to happen on the inside has to be jobs and training that lead to work on the outside. We need to start from what jobs are available on the outside and bring those employers into prison. We are looking at how to develop that. First, governors will have a strong incentive, because there will be a measurement of how many prisoners secure jobs on the outside, as well as of how many go into apprenticeships on the outside. I want to see offenders starting apprenticeships on the inside that they can then complete on the outside, so that there is a seamless transition into work.

We already have some fantastic employers working with us—Greggs, for example, and Timpson whom I met this morning—but we need more of them to participate. Former offenders can be very effective employees, and we need to get that message across more widely. There would be a huge economic benefit if, once people leave prison, rather than go on to benefits they go into employment instead. That will also reduce reoffending. We shall launch our employment strategy in the summer. I will go into more detail subsequently and look forward to discussing it further with my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt).

A number of hon. Members have mentioned the probation service. Just as we are measuring outcomes for prison services, such as employment, housing and education, we want to see similar measures for the probation services. We need to make sure that when people are in the community, they are being encouraged to get involved in activities and to get off drugs, so that they are less likely to reoffend. We shall say more about probation in April, when we announce our changes to the probation service.

It is difficult, of course, for reform to take place in dilapidated buildings or in old and overcrowded prisons. That is why we are modernising the prison estate to create 10,000 prison places where reform can flourish. This is a £1.3 billion investment programme that will reduce overcrowding and replace outdated prisons with modern facilities. As part of that, we shall open HMP Berwyn in Wrexham next month, which will create over 2,000 modern places. We have already made announcements about new prisons in Glen Parva and Wellingborough, and we shall make further announcements about new prison capacity in due course.

I am pleased to tell hon. Members that the prison and courts reform Bill will be introduced shortly. It will set it out in legislation for the first time that reform of offenders as well as punishment is a key purpose of prisons. One of the issues we faced as a society was that we did not have such a definition of prisons. At the moment, legislation says that as Secretary of State I am responsible for housing prisoners. Well, I consider myself responsible for much more than housing prisoners. I consider myself responsible for making sure that we use time productively while people are in prison to turn their lives around so that they become productive members of society. That is going to be embedded in legislation, and it will be accompanied by further measures, including new standards, league tables and governor empowerment.

We will also strengthen the powers of Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons to intervene in failing prisons, and we will put the prison and probation ombudsman on a statutory footing to investigate deaths in custody. Hon. Members have referred to some of the very tragic deaths in custody, and the prison and probation ombudsman performs a vital role here.

The whole House will acknowledge that there is too much violence and self-harm in our prisons. It is also right to say that we have decade-long problems with reoffending. Almost half of prisoners reoffend within a year, at a cost of £15 billion to our society and at huge cost to the victims who suffer from those crimes. That is why this Government’s prison reform agenda is such a priority, and it is why we have secured extra funding and are taking immediate steps to address violence and safety in our prisons. This will be the largest reform of our prisons in a generation. These issues will not be solved in weeks or months, but I am confident that, over time, we will transform our prisons, reduce reoffending and get prisoners into jobs and away from a life of crime.

[Several hon. Members rose—]