Prisons: Staff Safety

Lord Beecham Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

The Question asked in the House of Commons related to the safety of staff in prisons following walk-outs and protests last week by between 5,000 and 6,000 officers protesting about the rising tide of violence threatening both staff and prisoners. Assaults on prison officers reached 5,500 last year, an increase of 36%, while last year there were 32,000 incidents of self-harm, up by 74% since 2010, a shockingly high number given that the prison population is around 85,000. There were 100 suicides in 2015-16.

Is it not clear that our prisons are both chronically overcrowded and dangerously understaffed? The Howard League for Penal Reform has chronicled the deteriorating position in a worrying number of prisons. In Lewes, for example, 50% of its 640 inmates were being locked in their cells during the working day, some of them for as much as 23 hours a day. In February, staff at Wetherby young offender institution refused to let 300 prisoners out of their cells for a day because of rising violence. We recently had a Statement on the dreadful conditions in Wandsworth prison in which assurances, albeit of a rather vague character, were given about rectifying the situation revealed in a television programme. The Lord Chancellor talks a good game about improving conditions and replacing old and unsuitable prisons, but then he is the Lord Chancellor who set out on the road to his political Damascus in support of Boris Johnson, only to recant and discover at the very last minute that if Boris was the answer he had been asking the wrong question for weeks.

When will the Lord Chancellor, or whoever succeeds him—I rather hope it might be the noble Lord, Lord Faulks—recognise that the crisis in our prisons cannot sensibly be tackled without a significant reduction in the number of prisoners and a significant increase in the number of properly trained staff with adequate support in relation to issues of mental health? Will he now revisit his decision to spend just £10 million to increase safety, approximating to around all of £125 per head of the prison population, which is not of course, a static number?

Is it not time for another high-powered review of the state of the service, along the lines of the inquiry into Strangeways conducted by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, 26 years ago, but extended to the entire custodial system?

[Lord Faulks]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his thorough criticism and the questions that he raises about the state of our prisons and the safety of staff and indeed of other prisoners. We freely acknowledge that there is a problem and that we have to do something about it. It is not a problem that is easily solved and, as the Statement indicated, there are a number of factors. There is an increase in the number of violent offenders in our prisons. Substantial problems have been caused as a result of the use of psychoactive substances. It is clearly far less than desirable that prisoners should be locked in their cells for long periods and not engaged in purposeful activity. The Secretary of State clearly wants to involve as many people as possible and as many organisations as possible in trying to improve the situation. That was why he invited the BBC into Wormwood Scrubs to see the conditions there.

There has been new funding of £10 million for prison safety, allocated as appropriate, and that will be supplemented by £2.9 million from existing budgets so that a significant number of governors—those facing the greatest challenges—will have an opportunity to improve safety levels. There is also £1.3 billion, which the Secretary of State secured from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to modernise the prison estate. That will be a long-term project, but one which the Secretary of State is most anxious to help with.