Prison Reform and Safety

Laura Pidcock Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Laura Pidcock (North West Durham) (Lab)]

I want to concentrate on just one aspect of the prison system: the workforce. Prison officers are working with people with complex mental health issues and people who have experienced trauma throughout their lives. Prison officers work day in and day out with people who may assault them. They keep watch over people who want to end their life. They are at the forefront of tackling organised crime; work to intercept drugs; have to work in high-conflict and high-tension situations; and suffer intolerable abuse. Prison officers have told me about the unbelievable and disgusting practice of “potting”, which involves prisoners dumping a bucket of urine and excrement over the head of a prison officer. They are routinely spat at. Every day, 20 staff are assaulted.

Somehow, prison officers are not seen as frontline workers, but I want to challenge that in the strongest terms. Although their work is behind closed doors, their heroics should be seen and valued in the same way as other public sector workers.

The increase in violence and tension in prisons cannot be seen in a vacuum. It is part of the perfect storm that has been mentioned—huge cuts to prison staff, a massive increase in the use of the drug Spice, and an historically high prison population. Thousands of prisoner officer jobs have been cut. I know there has been an effort to recruit more prison officers, and that is welcome, but they enter the service on very different terms and conditions from those with longer service. Even those with longer service have had their terms and conditions radically altered. They are now expected to work much longer. Recruitment drives aside, the ability to retain new recruits remains in question.

I agree with the POA that 68 is too late a retirement age for such a strenuous and stressful job, and I support its members in challenging that increased pension age. It would be hard to argue against a clear correlation between the difficulties in recruitment and retention of prison staff and the erosion in pay, terms and conditions, alongside the difficult circumstances I have described. I met a prison officer recently who said that their pay was only £13 more than seven years ago, and that was someone with more than 30 years of service. That cannot be right.

Staff shortages are more pronounced in the south, but those shortages have an impact on other regions—in particular, the north-east—through the detached duty system. If I get anything out of this debate, I hope it is an assurance that the Minister will look into that system. It sees prison officers from my region being asked to work away from home for prolonged periods of time, staying in hotels and being sent to prisons where they do not have a long-standing relationship with the prisoners, and have no in-depth understanding or knowledge of their needs, issues or personalities, making shifts more precarious. The Justice Committee found that the first 13 months of the scheme cost the taxpayer £63.5 million. I would like to know how much that system has cost to date. Should the Department not have considered spending that money on providing incentives for those jobs, making it more likely that people in the south would apply? I am told that many workers in the north only accept detached duty because of their own dwindling pay.

If we are serious about addressing the crisis in our prisons, we must start with the workers. We have to ensure that they are working in safe conditions—I believe that that safety is in numbers—and that there is a concerted effort to keep more experienced workers alongside newer staff. Through the cuts, we have lost far too much organisational knowledge and experience in our Prison Service. There must be acknowledgement that being a prison officer is a strenuous frontline job. It is completely untenable to make these people work until 68, with that really difficult fitness test. In fact, it would be more expensive for the service through things such as temporary injury benefits and medical inefficiency payments.

We have to value these workers by turning the Prison Service into something that offers a career again, rather than just a job. To do this, we must stop wasting millions of pounds on short-term sticking-plaster solutions, and really invest in the workforce.