Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kate Green and Sam Gyimah

Tuesday 6th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gyimah]

My hon. Friend asks a very important question. Across the Prison Service there are patches of good work aimed at employment post-release. We want to create a system to measure that, and to identify and rank prisons according to how well they do in that respect. That is precisely what our White Paper does. Employment post-release is one of the outcome measures against which governors will be judged once we proceed with reform.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Work experience outside prison can also enhance a prisoner’s employment opportunities on release, so what guidance is the Minister giving prisons—not just reform prisons, but governors of all prisons—in relation to release on temporary licence?

[Mr Gyimah]

Release on temporary licence has a huge role to play in helping prisoners to gain employment in the wider world. I have been speaking with Timpson’s, for example, which employs a lot of ex-offenders, and that is how they are trialled before release. We are looking at that to ensure that the guidance that governors receive allows them to do more with release on temporary licence, specifically in relation to employment opportunities.

Prison Safety and Security

Debate between Kate Green and Sam Gyimah

Thursday 1st December 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Gyimah]

We already have mobile phone blocking in some of our prisons. One challenge with mobile phone blocking is that in some prisons in urban areas we could end up blocking the mobile phones of people who are not in the prison. That is why we are developing a bespoke solution, working with the operators, and we have signed an agreement with them to go ahead with three jails early next year and then on that basis roll it out across the estate.

As for psychoactive substances, much has been said about drugs and our approach to them. We have trained more than 300 dogs to detect psychoactive substances. The point of mandatory testing, other than deterrence, is to help, because if someone is on those drugs, they need treatment, and the only way we can know that they are on the drugs is by testing and finding that they need help to come off them, or punishment where that is necessary.

[Kate Green]

I ask the Minister to keep the effectiveness of mandatory testing under careful review, particularly in relation to those substances, because if they keep being reformed and redesigned to make detection more difficult, the testing will not keep up with the changes in the make-up of the substances being used. I am not saying that he should not be doing mandatory testing and I understand his point about a deterrent effect, but I ask him to keep the effectiveness of that approach under review and to undertake to report to the House regularly on what it is achieving.

[Mr Gyimah]

Of course we will keep the effectiveness under review. Drugs are such a problem in terms of prison violence, safety and the effect on our prisoners that we ought to do so because we have to deal with the problem, and we will keep it under review.

A question was asked about drones and no-fly zones. We are looking to work with drone operators to programme the co-ordinates of prisons into drones so that if someone buys a drone from the operator and tries to fly it into a prison, it just collapses before it reaches the perimeter. That is technologically possible. On the point about the physical infrastructure, we have seen improved netting and CCTV, which help in dealing with that challenge.