Prison Safety and Security

Richard Arkless Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Hanson]

The Minister heard me say that I welcomed the additional resource, but if the Government cut 7,000 prison officers over six years and only decide to put something in urgently once the estate starts to creak —all the indicators that I mentioned are now heading in the wrong direction—in a sense, that is backtracking on a problem of the Government’s own making. However, I am saying to the Minister, “Let’s put that to one side.” He has some aspirations, and I am trying to tease out from him what the beef is so that he can build on them.

Some things are costly and cost-effective. Simple things can be done in the prison estate to help support the aspiration of the Secretary of State. We cannot address the issue of reoffending if we do not address the levels of violence or the safety issues that exist in our prisons. For example, what assessment will the Minister make of the lock-up regime, in particular in those prisons with serious levels of violence? If prisoners are locked up for 23 or 24 hours a day, of course they will face frustrations. What if no elements of support are in place for training, employment or drug rehabilitation, or if prisoners are not out of their cells doing things that might punish them, because they are in prison, but help with their reform so that when they leave prison they are in a better place? If such things are not in place, the Minister will again have a kettle that is boiling furiously. That shows the difficulties we face.

[Richard Arkless (Dumfries and Galloway) (SNP)]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a characteristically powerful speech. Does this not cut to the heart of the issue? If a substantial proportion of the prison population is locked up for 22 or 23 hours a day, prisoners’ frustration and the decimation of the relationship with the officers will be causing the tension. The officers are powerless to stop that, and it is directly triggering the increase in violent disorders.

[Mr Hanson]

I thank the hon. Gentleman—or my hon. Friend as I will call him—for his support of that particular assertion of mine, but it is one factor in a range of factors. Fewer officers are dealing with frustrated prisoners who have more and more challenging needs because of drug abuse and mental health problems and cannot participate in any important training, support or even recreation. That is part of the pressure cooker that is the Prison Service.

What strategy does the Minister have for looking at safer custody issues, the risk assessment changes or the prisoners coming in? When I was Minister, I regularly chaired a safer custody group. I do not know whether the Minister does that. Will he tell us whether he does, and if he does not, why? He should focus on what we can do to make custody safer. What assessment has he made of the pressures created by gangs in prisons? Such gangs cause difficulties, which prison officers, given their smaller number, are finding it more difficult to deal with. What innovations will he introduce to tackle prisoners’ mental health problems? We have an ageing prisoner population because of historical sex offences. What impact is that having on the care given by prison officers? Are they unable to deal with other types of prisoner because they have to invest more in that cohort of older prisoners? What assessment has he made of prisoners with sentences of imprisonment for public protection, whom we have talked about? Everyone agrees that those prisoners need to be released if they are over tariff and able to be released into society, but the assessment of support for them is not being carried out to the extent that we want it to be, so there is an element of frustration there as well.

All those things are in a difficult and challenging pot. Prison is never an easy place for the people who are in it, the people who work in it or the people who have policy responsibilities for it, but I want the Minister to put some more meat on the White Paper. I want more discussion—a discourse—with him and I want him to explain where he is heading. The Harris review made wide-ranging and simple recommendations, but the Government have accepted only 29 of those. Will the Minister revisit some of those recommendations to see whether they would help reduce the pressure on prison populations?

Finally—I have had a good run at the time available—as the Minister knows, there are measures that could be taken to help address the problems in prisons but that would be difficult to manage politically. If overcrowding is part of the problem of violence and stress in prisons, there are groups of people that we could look at removing from prison or sentencing to less time in prison. This is not an attack on the Government, who have indicated that they want to look at reducing the number of prison sentences of less than 12 months. There is no point sending someone to prison for 14 days or 30 days when they will come out and find their whole life in a skip in the centre of London, Birmingham or Newcastle; they will reoffend. There is no point giving many of the women my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston is particularly concerned about short prison sentences for not paying their television licences, or for offences linked to their lifestyle, perhaps involving drugs or prostitution, which could be tackled with a firm community sentence. The Lord Chief Justice told the Justice Committee as much last week.

There is a whole cohort of foreign national prisoners, which we talked about on Tuesday. In my experience, ministerial drive is needed to secure the removal of certain foreign national prisoners from the UK to their home nations, so which countries is the Minister focusing on? What efforts is he making to secure the transfer of such prisoners? Every prisoner who goes out to a foreign country leaves a space and allows pressure to be taken off the UK system.

I hope I have not rambled too much. The Minister’s role is difficult and challenging, but every indicator is going in the wrong direction. The Government have responded in part—they have set a series of aspirations. My purpose in securing this debate was to give the Minister a chance to flesh out those aspirations and allow other hon. Members to hold the Minister to account and ask him what he is going to do in the next 12 to 15 months, so that we can see whether there is going to be a change. I say to him in a non-threatening way that if, despite the actions he takes, the indicators continue to go in the wrong direction, the House will hold him and the Secretary of State to account for the actions that they could, should and must take to alleviate those pressures.

Prisoners and people who work in prisons have a right to safety, and the public whom we all represent have a right to see the people who leave prison after their sentences—I remind hon. Members that that is ultimately most prisoners—return to society in a way that does not lead to further reoffending and prison sentences.

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[Richard Arkless (Dumfries and Galloway) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall. I think this is the first time; I may be mistaken. I first pay tribute to the staff who work in our prison estate, not only in England and Wales but across all nations of this Union. At the moment, they are all hard-pressed and they feel demoralised and isolated, and we ought to recognise that—and I think we do. I hope the Minister will say something likewise to reassure them that they are in his thoughts at what is an unquestionably difficult time for them.

We have heard two speeches and on the plus side both were excellent, but on the negative side they have left me very little to say. The right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) gave a characteristically powerful speech, in which he pointed out with great clarity that the direction of travel of the statistics is troubling. We ought to recognise the difficulties for prison officers, not only because it is polite and respectful, but because of the vivid statistic, mentioned by both Members who spoke, that 6,000 prison officers are assaulted each year while at work. That is up 43% on the previous year and translates, on the ground, to 16 assaults a day—three of which are serious assaults. In that context, it is no wonder that they feel demoralised.

The right hon. Member for Delyn began his speech on the premise that things are not quite right, which I think is somewhat kind. He laid out some pertinent questions, and I will be interested to hear the Minister’s replies. He was right to praise the Minister’s aspirations, because there is no doubt that this is a difficult job—a point well made by the former Minister for prisons, the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous). It is not an easy job, and it is right to have those aspirations, but the right hon. Gentleman is also right to ask for some meat to be put on the bones of the White Paper. I hope the Minister will provide some clarity.

The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), my friend, gave an excellent speech, and she clearly has a keen and detailed interest in the topic. She was right to say that we stand at an acute point, and that a “cocktail of problems” necessitates the change that we all want to see. She was right to say that we need to work towards a consensual model, and that toughening the regime will not work. The relationship between inmates and officers is key, and she put that point very well.

I also pay tribute to the hon. Lady for raising what is not an easy issue to raise, as it is perhaps not politically sexy or attractive—the size of the prison population. I do not believe that we serve society, our prison officers or our youth well by locking people up for short sentences. The Scottish Government have introduced an assumption that short sentences are only necessary in the most extreme of circumstances. The point she made about people going in for short sentences, coming out on licence, breaching that licence and ending up in a perpetual circle in and out of prison, does not serve anybody well. I beg the Minister to have a serious and detailed look at the use of short sentences, and to try to at least recognise that the increasing prison population is a huge contributing factor in the problems that we are speaking about. The hon. Lady deserves credit for making that point.

Why have we ended up in this situation? As has been discussed, a cocktail of factors—including synthetic drugs, mobile phones, drones and other external factors—is causing this problem. However, I want to make it abundantly clear that I see one problem—resources—as more pertinent than the others. I am honoured to be a member of the Justice Committee. We travelled to Wandsworth prison a few months ago, and we heard from both prison officers and inmates about the stress being put on the relationship between the two by lack of resources. The majority of the prison population are locked up in their cells for between 22 and 23 hours a day, simply because there are not enough officers to get them out of the cell and into purposeful activity.

Detecting drugs with new measures, introducing mobile phone blocking systems and drone no-fly zones, and getting prisoners out of their cells for more than two hours a day all depend on resources. They depend on having enough prison officers to make them happen, and clearly we do not. We have lost 7,000 prison officers over the past six years, while the prison population has increased.

It is laudable that the Minister recognises that and notes that we need to increase the number of prison officers, but we have a huge retention and training problem. To June this year, there was an increase of 500 officers, but that took a recruitment drive of nearly 2,500. There is an endemic problem with prison officer morale that will make it difficult to get the number of prison officers that we need. The right hon. Member for Delyn crystallised it perfectly by saying that although we have ambitions to recruit another 3,500 officers—which I applaud; it is the right thing to do—current problems dictate that we will need to recruit some 8,000, or perhaps even more if the situation persists.

I will finish with a quote from the Justice Committee from earlier this year, which sets it out in stark terms. Even though we have differing views on some things, all members of the Justice Committee agreed on this point:

“In particular, we conclude that the fall in staffing levels…are bound to have reduced the consistency of relationships between officers and prisoners, and in turn affected safety.”

Without the numbers on the ground, we cannot get inmates into purposeful activity. If we do not get them into purposeful activity, their agitation and frustration grow, and the manifestation of that is the violence that was so adequately demonstrated in the statistics given by Members. I am interested to hear what the Minister has to say, I recognise that his is a very difficult job and I would be grateful if he, too, could pay tribute to the service of our officers, who are so hard-pressed at this time.

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[Mr Gyimah]

That figure is 2,500 new staff over and above what we would ordinarily recruit. In the Select Committee, the National Offender Management Service chief executive, Michael Spurr, made it clear that in practice that means we will have to recruit 4,000 staff next year and 4,000 staff the following year. It is a challenge, but that is why we have new resources and investment. We will also do it completely differently from how it has been done historically. In the past, prison governors did not have the freedom to recruit themselves. They could not hold open days or advertise locally. People who ended up being recruited into our Prison Service had never visited their place of work or met anyone they will work with beforehand. In addition to the national recruitment effort, we will give the governors of the 28 most challenging prisons the power to recruit for themselves, and that will make a huge difference. It is a question of someone seeing an advert on the internet versus seeing that their local prison is recruiting and they could get a local job.

A question was asked about pay supplements and where they would apply. In fact, that is already happening. For example, HMP Feltham can pay £4,000 extra per person in recognition of how difficult it is to recruit there. Many of the people that Feltham would interview might be choosing between a job there and working at Heathrow airport, which they might feel is a less aggravated environment in which to work. That is why in those establishments the governor can use a supplement to attract staff. For our 10 most challenging jails, we had a target of recruiting 400 staff and we allocated £14 million for that. We are halfway to that target already, so we are making progress.

We all need to recognise that prisons today are in a very different place from where they were 10 years ago. The issue of new psychoactive substances has been mentioned, and we cannot gloss over that. Those substances are incredibly dangerous. In one incident, even the officer who went to help someone who was on those drugs had to be hospitalised because of how potent the drugs are. I mentioned in the Select Committee that taboos are being broken. Prisoners never used to attack female prison officers, but we have seen such incidents, including potting. Also, prisons magnify the community outside, so gang violence is being imported into our prisons. We are also seeing serious cases of mental illness. Yes, staffing is part of the solution, but the problem with which we are dealing, as the right hon. Member for Delyn recognises—he is nodding—is incredibly complex. We must ensure that we deal with it.

[Richard Arkless]

Of course I welcome the proposal to recruit 4,000 prison officers in each of the next two years. Is that a net figure and, if so, what is the gross figure that the Minister is aiming for? We have a huge retention problem, so to get to a net figure of 4,000, we would need to recruit substantially more. What is the figure?

[Mr Gyimah]

Four thousand is the net number that we need to recruit to meet our targets. [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman asks what the gross figure is. A lot of people are leaking through in different areas of the prison estate and I cannot give the overall gross figure.