Prisons and Courts Bill (First sitting)

Holly Lynch Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st Sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 28th March 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Suella Fernandes]

Q My second point I would like to raise with all members of the panel relates to health and mental health provision in the Bill and also in the White Paper. In those, there is considerable detail on how governors can work together with the local clinical commissioning group or other health providers to assess the health needs of prisoners, co-commission services and assess quality of performance, instilling a bit more responsibility and flexibility in the system to safeguard health and mental health concerns. I would like the panel’s views on the mental health and health provisions.

Joe Simpson: When you are bound to outside agencies, especially in prisons, they are not there 24/7. The only people who are there 24/7 are prison officers and prison staff. One thing that we are going on from mental health is also social care in prisons. We have a lot of older prisoners who need more social care. Between the hours of 7 o’clock at night until 7 o’clock the next morning, they do not have access to that, and we do not have access to that as prison staff. We have no training whatever in order to assist prisoners who have those needs.

Mental health and health wellbeing should start on reception at the prison, when the prison officer brings the prisoner into prison, goes through the reception process and then passes them on to our colleagues for the mental health check. From that should come a plan of care, but that is not there, for the simple reason of time—“Let’s get them through because staff need to get off,” or, “We need to do this; we need to do that.” It is constant pressure on the regime and having the staffing available to do that.

If you are dependent on an outside agency that has its own staffing problems, it is not going to be done. That is the frustrating part from our members’ side. They identify a problem and nothing seems to be done for two or three days because we cannot get that expertise in. Why not utilise the person who is already there—the prison officer—and train them to do those duties, so that we can give better mental health care and increase wellbeing?

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

Q May I return to the issue of prison officer safety? I have tabled some new clauses that I hope will be helpful in that regard. On Second Reading, we touched on the issue of a prison officer being assaulted in prison by a prisoner. Is that referred to the police, followed up by the Crown Prosecution Service and taken to court, or is it dealt with internally within the prison? What is your experience of the decision making around that process, and what would be the preference of the Prison Officers Association for dealing with those types of incidents?

Joe Simpson: Our view is that somebody who assaults our members should be punished. As for the question of who does that, we are not really bothered. Our experience, and my members’ experience, of the police and CPS is actually getting a policeman in to do the investigation. More often than not, what comes back from the CPS is that it is not in the public interest, because that person is serving a sentence and in prison anyway. That demoralises our members. They feel as if they go to work and they are just punchbags. There was a big campaign by the trade union to try to change people’s thinking on that, because we work behind a wall—people do not look in and we do not look out. We would like our members to be protected by the law and to be taken seriously when they are assaulted at work.

Some incidents are serious physical assaults, but you also have to look at the mental aspects, especially in relation to spitting and biting. Let us say that a prison officer is bitten. We do not know the prisoner’s history. We do not know whether they have any blood-borne disease or anything like that. The officer then has to spend six months on antiviral treatment and everything like that, and along with that goes the mental anguish, not just for the member of staff, but for their family, because they cannot interact properly with their family for six months. That leads to its own problems: high rates of divorce, cases of alcoholism and people just not wanting to come to work. That develops into mental health problems. While they are in the service, they are looked after, but once they are dismissed by the service, all that assistance stops, because the employer turns round and says, “Well, we’re no longer responsible for that care.” Sometimes we are putting really poorly and ill prison officers back into society with no assistance whatever, because of something that has happened in the course of their work.

One of the most disgusting things ever is potting. It is especially the female members of staff who are targeted. A prisoner or prisoners will fill a bucket or whatever with excrement and urine, wait for the officer and then tip it over them. We are seeing an increase in that, because prisoners seem to think that it is more acceptable than hitting a member of staff or hitting a female member of staff. They still see that as a bit of a taboo subject, but that is starting to break down. They are not just targeting male staff; they are now targeting female staff as well, especially with potting, which is absolutely disgusting.

[Holly Lynch]

Q Mr Lomas, when you do inspections of prisons, is how assaults on prison officers are investigated something that you would look at?

Martin Lomas: The specific technicalities of how they are investigated, no, but the fact of assaults on staff, yes, it is something we would look at. We would look to disaggregate the data to see whether we can get any learning from them, so we would look at fights and assaults—prisoner-on-prisoner assaults and prisoner on staff. There is no doubt that violence is increasing across the three, but it is notable that violence against staff is increasing; it has increased quite markedly in recent times. At an anecdotal level, we watch videos to try to get some sense of the—this is an unfortunate word—quality of the violence, and yes, some of it can be quite disinhibited, concerted and reckless. There was a case recently in which a member of staff in a midlands institution was very severely assaulted and hospitalised. They went through considerable trauma; the case has been reported in the media.

Yes, we report on violence as a feature of relationships between staff and prisoners, but the questions about policing priorities in a certain area or the decisions of the CPS in terms of public interest and what have you are matters that they would need to account for. But yes, we believe that staff should be supported and that prisons should be safer, and we believe the Bill is a positive measure in supporting that endeavour.

[Holly Lynch]

Q Can I press you on that point? Do you think this is something that you should be looking at in that case? It sounds as if you are collecting the statistical data about frequency, but not doing the follow-up about how violence is investigated to see whether there is evidence about how deterrents should be in place, for example.

Martin Lomas: We look at outcomes. The process of investigation and whether the investigation was competent, whether the police should be more engaged and certainly whether the CPS should have charged—we would not look at that.

[Mr Gyimah]

Q I would like to ask a question and get the panel’s views about accountability in the new prison system and how that works. Starting with Mr Lomas, what difference do you think the Bill will make to the effectiveness of the prisons inspectorate? Could you also comment particularly on how you see the notification trigger being used?

Martin Lomas: We think this is an important step forward. We think the Bill is helpful and useful. We have already talked about what it says to those who run institutions, with regard to their purpose and what they are meant to be doing. As far as the inspectorate is concerned, we believe it strengthens our institutional framework. It recognises us formally as an entity and clarifies our powers. At one level, those powers have not changed, but the Bill clarifies them, which is important in terms of asserting our independence and reflecting the public’s understanding of what we are about. We believe that the reference to OPCAT—the optional protocol to the convention against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment—is absolutely critical in emphasising the independence of the inspectorate and consequentially its authority and ability to speak to issues and to all stakeholders, including the Government and others.

We believe the specifics around the requirement to respond on recommendations—reflecting current practice, but raising the importance of the process, formalising it, and making it more accountable—is a very big step forward in terms of our impact. Added to that, the notification arrangement and the significant concerns that are referred to again reflect practice. We would not walk away from a disastrous prison and not do something. We do act, and in fairness to the National Offender Management Service as it is now—Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service—it does respond in those circumstances. This is about making that process more transparent and accountable and putting names to the responsibilities. It is most definitely a step forward.

Rachel O'Brien: I agree with all of that. We recommended that stronger role for the inspectorate. There is a question about what happens in between inspections; that is sometimes a bit strange. There are top-level things that drive change for the three or four years in between. That is a question that we did not answer. We looked at the possible role of the independent monitoring boards, for example, to look at the more institutional day-by-day changes in the shorter term, but also new issues that might come up. The danger is that sometimes we say, “Those are the three priorities” and meanwhile something changes over here, in the local drugs market or whatever it is, so there is a question about what happens in between.

My overall accountability freedom issue would be that I worry about the balance. There are a lot of new accountabilities, still from the top-down league tables. Are those governors and new group directors going to have sufficient freedoms to make local decisions? That is the key question. That cannot be defined in primary legislation; it is much more about the narrative coming out from Government and so on.

Joe Simpson: The POA welcomes the changes, but do not think they go far enough, both for the chief inspector and for the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman. We would like to see the same legislative powers given to them as the Health and Safety Executive. If someone is going to inspect prisons, then inspect prisons and everything that goes on. If there are recommendations, someone should turn round and say to the governor “You are not doing something right.” If we are giving governors autonomy, it is not the Secretary of State who is running the prison—it is the governor. He is the employer and the person who is in charge of that prison, so they should get the 28-day notice. What is the point in putting that all the way back up for the Secretary of State, so that she can say, “Yes, we have an action plan”? We would rather see something coming from the chief inspector of prisons go to the governor to improve things, and if they do not improve them, the legislative powers akin to the Health and Safety Executive given to the chief inspector and the PPO. If we are going to have independence—the independent scrutiny of prisons and the independence over deaths in prisons—they should have that legislative power to turn round and make things change, rather than wishing for it.