Prison Staff: Health and Safety

John Howell Excerpts

Wednesday 18th March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Kenny MacAskill (East Lothian) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered health and safety of prison staff.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I start by paying tribute to the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris), because this debate is of his instigation. It was his idea, and it is regrettable that he is not here to move the motion, but he is doing the correct thing by self-isolating. I understand that the same is true for the ministerial Benches; it is the appropriate action to take. I thank the hon. Gentleman and his staff for the support and guidance they have given me, and for the opportunity to speak in a debate that is especially important not only at this juncture, but in the wider context of recent years.

We have to start with an explanation of who we are dealing with when we talk about prison staff, because there is a great lack of awareness, if not ignorance. As a young lawyer in Scotland many years ago—over a generation now—I would give a jury speech that would basically explain that the ladies and gentlemen of the jury did not know the jury system in Scotland. They knew more about Henry Fonda in “12 Angry Men” than they did about the fact that jury trials in Scotland have 15 members and three verdicts. Things are obviously slightly different when it comes to prison staff, but in many ways the context is the same. Many people’s impression of a prison will come more from “The Shawshank Redemption” than from the prison in the locality near them, or where people from their communities go. We have to challenge that.

The lack of awareness also extends to those who work in the Prison Service. That is why I put on the record the fact that they are a uniformed service; they are also an emergency service, although they are not classified in that way by Government. I think others will comment on that issue when we talk about how their pensions are treated: it is an outrage that people are expected to operate on a landing at the age of 68. Some jobs are age restricted, and being a prison officer should most certainly be one. They deserve to be treated the same as other services.

This is a historic issue. My good friend Professor Andrew Coyle served at both Peterhead prison in Scotland and Brixton prison down here in London, and is a global expert on prisons. I remember reading in his history of the Prison Service in Scotland that in the initial stages, police and prison officers had parity. The pay of a constable and the pay of a prison officer were the same until the latter part of the 19th century, but then that changed and since then prison officers’ pay has never caught up. To some extent, that is a tragedy, but it is where we are. I do not think we can reverse that, but we can mitigate it and take action, whether on pensions or other terms and conditions.

That brings me to the question of who we are talking about. As I say, there is a great deal of misunderstanding; I remember going into the Prison Service and chatting away to officers about this. There are many occupations at the present moment, such as health service workers, police officers or those who work with the children and elderly, where people will cross the street to thank them and shake their hand. That rarely happens for prison officers—they get a sharp intake of breath instead—but the service they give often mirrors that contributed by those other services, and the work they do is valuable.

There is also a sense of misunderstanding among those going into the service. I remember asking young officers at the training academy at Polmont in Scotland whether the job was what they had anticipated. They said they had gone in thinking their job would be like a security guard’s, but it was much more like that of a psychiatric nurse. Those of us involved in the prison estate know how much of the work is like that of a psychiatric nurse, even though these people are not properly trained or qualified for such work. It is about dealing with deeply troubled people; prison officers do have to deal with deeply violent people on occasion, but the work they do with young offenders, women prisoners and vulnerable prisoners is really quite exceptional. It is a matter not of brutality but of humanity, which is why we have to put on record our tribute to them.

We also have to remember that these people are not particularly well trained for this work, nor are they well paid. As I understand it, a prison officer in Norway goes through a degree course of four years. In Scotland, as in England, a person will be able to be active and working—albeit not necessarily on the landing—within a period of weeks that they can count on both hands. That is hugely different from what other regimes expect, but it is expected here. Indeed, once we include people’s toes as well as their fingers, they will be on the landing and expected to deal with frontline work. I do not argue that there needs to be a degree course, but I do think that we need to expect and understand the challenges that prison staff face, because they do that with sparse training and not for a king’s ransom, as has been mentioned in relation to a variety of other issues.

That takes us on to the particular issues. The first issue that I want to touch on is why the Minister and I are here. The reason is that the coronavirus is striking down Members of this institution as it will strike down members of our community.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

Before the hon. Gentleman moves on to the coronavirus, will he accept that a large part of the problem that prison officers face is the working conditions and prisons’ terrible state of repair? On the Justice Committee, we estimated that the cost of the repairs would come to £900 million.

[Kenny MacAskill]

Yes, I fully concur. In many areas, the prison estate is Victorian; sometimes it even predates that era. It has to be upgraded. Good work has been ongoing in Scotland—that does not come cheap—and I know that work has been established here. Equally, we have to have the right institutions. Super-prisons are not the way to go. We have to have the right prison estate, and it has to be a suitable prison estate.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. It is also a pleasure to have two Front Benchers in this debate who have both been members of the Select Committee on Justice. They understand the sort of comments being made by the hon. Member for East Lothian (Kenny MacAskill), and I hope that they recall the report on prison governance that we produced, which covered a number of the issues.

We are in an enduring crisis of safety and decency in our prisons. As the hon. Gentleman pointed out, this crisis is not something that has just happened; it has been going on for a long time. Violence is at an all-time high. Up until March 2019, there were more than 34,000 assaults in the prison system and, of those assaults, more than 10,000 were on staff. That is an increase in assaults on staff of 15%.

A major contributory factor to the level of violence and the state that prison officers must endure is working conditions. As the hon. Gentleman pointed out, the prisons are mostly Victorian—or earlier—constructions. We need to tackle the level of accumulated maintenance in such prisons, but the focus of Government activity seems to be on 10,000 more prisoner places, rather than on curing the maintenance problem.

I give full credit for the £100 million put into the Prison Service to improve safety and security, and we should not lose sight of that, but the concentration on providing an additional 10,000 places has meant that repairs to prisons have taken a back seat. We can address much of that, and the prison in Leeds is doing so. Working parties of staff and prisoners together carry out maintenance activity within the prison. I would like to see something similar taken on board by other prisons, to get the work done. The Justice Committee looked at this and came to the conclusion that the backlog of maintenance required in prisons came to about £900 million—an increase from £716 million in 2018. That that is an incredible backlog, and it shows that not enough is being done to tackle this.

Several things contribute to the problem. One is a real crisis of leadership in prisons. There has been a tremendous amount of activity to try to give governors more power over what happens in their prisons, but I do not think that that has gone far enough. We need governors who really have control of their prisons, because after all, they see the detail of where maintenance is required and can deal with it continually.

Another significant aspect is space being made available for purposeful activity. There is no doubt in my mind that purposeful activity plays a strong part in prisons. I have said in the House before that, with previous Justice Committees, I have been to Denmark and Germany to see how prisons there deal with purposeful activity. In Denmark, one thing that made the biggest difference was not purposeful activity in the sense of making things, but the way in which the prisoners were treated. What made the biggest difference was that they did not eat communal style, as in the “Porridge” series, but were allowed to earn their own money and to cook their own food. There were some restrictions, such as knives having to be chained to the wall, but that made a huge difference in keeping the lid on violence in that prison and making sure that the prisoners were fit for rehabilitation. The German prison I visited—this goes back to the point that the hon. Member for East Lothian made about where in a prison these issues can be tackled—had a big warehouse for making furniture. The prisoners all played a part in making furniture, which had an enormous impact on their lives.

My last point, which I will just make before I leave space for others to come in, is that there has been too much ad hoc dealing with the problems in the Prison Service over the years. Nobody has taken a strategic direction, grabbed the issue by the neck and sorted it out. If there is one message that I would give to the Minister, it is that strategic direction needs to be put into the Prison Service. The issue needs to be addressed, because it is not just a question of prisoner safety, but of prison officer safety.