Prison Services: Insourcing

Lord Woolf Excerpts

Wednesday 5th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

The noble Lord raises two important points, which I have been very focused on since I took on this role. I am a commercial person, so I have been interested in getting into the detail on this. On PECS—the prisoner transport contracts—the performance levels are exceptionally high but, when things go wrong, often it is not down to the PECS providers; it is down to our own self-inflicted problems at the prison. With regard to electronic monitoring, we inherited a problematic contract and, although it is performing much better now, there is still some way to go. Serco’s leadership team has been in my office a number of times and we are working really well together. I recently visited its Warrington office and saw its performance, which really is improving. What we need to do is get to a point where the service that it delivers is excellent.

[Lord Woolf (CB)]

My Lords, is it not the Minister’s experience that prisons are unlike the outside world and, as I found when I was giving my report into prisons, it is very important to understand those differences? Is there not a danger, if we do not continue to allow prisons to look after their own affairs, wherever possible, that they will not be looked after even as well as they are now?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I can only play the ball that is in front of me. What I am trying to do is to make sure that our prisons run excellently. It is very much a hybrid model of the voluntary, private and public sectors. I will give the noble and learned Lord one good example. We imprison lots of people who have skills we could use in a prison, and it is important that we use more of them. We have two schemes—one called Q-Branch, the another called CRED—operating in 70 prisons, where about 750 prisoners are employed each month. In HMP Lewes, the team repainted and sorted out all the floors, saving huge amounts of money. So I want to see more prisoners doing more work in prisons.