Health and Social Care Committee

Paul Williams Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Dr Wollaston]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. The point is that if someone goes into prison with a serious underlying medical problem, it is simply unacceptable that they cannot access the healthcare that they should be receiving. That is what we heard time and again: people’s appointments are cancelled, issues are not addressed and thing are not followed up. Sometimes an outside appointment with a specialist, for very serious conditions at times, will simply be cancelled, and then there is no continuity and follow-up, so the person simply falls out of the system. Undoubtedly, therefore, people’s health is suffering and, as I said at the beginning, no one is sentenced to worse healthcare when they are sentenced to deprivation of their liberty. The situation is unacceptable.

[Dr Paul Williams (Stockton South) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Lady not just for her presentation today, but for so ably chairing the inquiry. Her presentation put across very eloquently the fact that we put in prison a population of people who are very unhealthy already, but unfortunately our prison environment makes them even less healthy instead of taking the opportunity to reduce health inequalities and improve their health. It makes them even less healthy for two reasons. One is the prison environment that they are in, which is very unhealthy. The second is prison health services. Despite some excellent prison health services that really work, we found that on the whole prison health services are not adequate. The hon. Lady has already talked about the need for accountability and consequences. Can she say something about the role that we recommend the Care Quality Commission might play in that?

[Dr Wollaston]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his own really important role in the course of our inquiry. He highlights the point about the CQC. The CQC has no powers of entry into our prisons. We now know that it can carry out unannounced inspections just about anywhere else, but it cannot in prisons. The other challenge that it faces is being able to take a whole-system approach to the way services are commissioned. We heard from it again, in relation to a separate inquiry, earlier this week that it would like to have the powers independently to look at a whole-system approach, rather than just very narrowly looking at one aspect of it. It was very clear to us that a whole-system public health approach needs to be taken to the commissioning and provision of healthcare.

The hon. Gentleman’s other point was about the conditions in our jails. Keeping people in conditions where there are broken windows, cockroach infestations and so on is wholly unacceptable. No one should be living in those conditions in Britain today.