Prison Safety

Robert Neill Excerpts

Thursday 15th September 2016 Westminster Hall

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered in the Sixth Report from the Justice Committee of Session 2015-16, on Prison Safety, HC 625, and the Government response, HC 647.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer, and to welcome the Minister to his place. I think this is the first time he has had the chance to reply to a Westminster Hall debate on this topic.

I am grateful to the House for this opportunity to debate the Justice Committee’s report; I thank all my Committee colleagues for their work, and other hon. Members from across the House who have a long-standing and informed interest in justice. I am particularly pleased to see the former prisons Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), to whom I pay tribute for his work in an always difficult and intractable area of public policy.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

There are two former Ministers here!

[Robert Neill]

Indeed. I was referring to the immediate former prisons Minister with whom the Committee worked. The right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) graces us on the Select Committee and we have had the benefit of his input.

Let us be blunt. Prison safety is terrible. Those are not my words, but those of the former Secretary of State, my Friend the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), in a prompt and frank response to our inquiry. He is entitled to credit for that.

The difficulty, which the current Minister will recognise and accept, is that prison safety was terrible when our report came out and it has got worse. I have hesitated until now to talk about a crisis in prison safety, but I think we are now at that stage. I say that because on every measure, safety has deteriorated and has continued to do so over a long time. That cannot be regarded as a one-off blip and we see no sign yet, despite considerable Government endeavour and intervention—which I do not dispute—of the situation or the underlying reasons being turned around. The situation has become grave and our report is particularly timely. That is important for two reasons.

First, whatever one’s view about the purpose of prison and how much emphasis we place on rehabilitation on the one hand and retribution or prevention of danger to the public on the other—all legitimate considerations to put in the mix—when the state legitimately takes it upon itself through proper process to incarcerate someone for their wrongs against society, there is an element of punishment in doing that properly, but we also take on board responsibility for ensuring that they are treated not only humanely, but safely. If the state fails in that, it fails in one of its primary obligations.

Secondly, in respect of broader policy, the current Secretary of State, like her predecessor, and the Minister, like his predecessor, are committed to a policy of prison reform. I hope that all of us in Westminster Hall today are committed to a policy of prison reform. The reality is that the less safe the prisons are, the harder it is to achieve reform. If we want real rehabilitation, real change and to reduce reoffending, a raft of interventions in prison is required, which can be properly delivered only if prisons are safe to start with.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

In the context of what my hon. Friend is saying, does he share my disappointment with the Government response? It seems to paraphrase what we said in our report without giving any substance to our recommendations or to what we want to achieve.

[Robert Neill]

I agree. Although the response runs to several pages, the substance is not yet there. As I will say to the Minister in due course, I am glad that the Secretary of State has talked in terms of a prison reform and safety plan. That is good. There is movement on publishing statistics, but what are absent are the matrices that we said are critical to any proper monitoring. There is also a disconnect in the timeframe of those statistics being available and being made available to the House for scrutiny.

Those were important parts of our report—I will develop the point—because, for a number of reasons, many of us are increasingly questioning the sustained ability and capacity of the National Offender Management Service, as currently constituted, to bear down on this issue. Frankly, NOMS needs a continuing light of scrutiny on it and I know the Secretary of State is keen to achieve clear delivery markers against which progress can be measured. She is right to want that and it is disappointing that we have so little detail so far. I will return to that issue in more detail. My hon. Friend is entirely right.

We have seen a period of decline, not just in the view of the House and the Committee, but independently. Report after report from Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, the prisons and probation ombudsman and a raft of criminal justice non-governmental organisations have all spoken of the real difficulties and decline. We have had debates in the House and urgent questions. NOMS has put in place various measures, but the truth is that it does not seem to be delivering on some of the key issues. That is why I say we have reached a crisis point. We need urgent action to identify those difficulties.

My other concern about the Government response is that there is no sense of urgency that, if I may be blunt, we did get from the initial response of the previous Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath, in his swift reply to us. I am not insinuating that good will and good intentions have gone away. It is classically said that there are no votes in prison reform, and one of the tasks of a Justice Department is to keep it at the top of the agenda, to make the case publicly and perhaps to challenge some long-entrenched practices. A sense of urgency must be engendered, not least because the deliverability of the whole broader prison agenda depends on getting safety right so that there is a stable environment in which to deliver it.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

On deliverability of the ambitious and welcome programme, does my hon. Friend agree that a healthy and safe ratio between staff and prisoners is vital and that ultimately we must grasp the nettle? There must either be more prison officers or fewer prisoners to get the ratio back into equilibrium.

[Robert Neill]

My hon. Friend is right. There is no other solution but to grasp the nettle. Some will assert that we should increase the staff, and they have to grasp the nettle that that means more public spending. I do not think most of the public are in the mood for that, but I think the public mood towards prison reform has changed markedly in the last 20 years. It has changed during my time in the House. It was apparent in debates during the last Parliament that people are, rightly in my judgment, much more open-minded now about the need for prison reform. No one is beyond rehabilitation—that is an exaggeration: precious few people are.

I spent 25 years practising at the criminal Bar. I dealt with some very nasty people indeed and some dangerous people, some of whom needed to be locked up and kept away. I also dealt with some stupid people. [Interruption.] I leave aside members of my profession or even the judiciary, but I dealt with some people who were stupid and got themselves into trouble because of that. I dealt with people who did not have an education or skills and who made certain choices. They got their lives into a mess through drugs, alcohol and disrupted families. I suspect that they make up the majority. Whenever I visit the women’s estate and talk to women prisoners, I find that the vast majority of one kind or another have certain issues in their lives—often mental health problems and related issues.

We cannot treat this matter in a simplistic fashion. Simply saying, “Keep the numbers up and just produce more staff” makes no sense to my mind as a Conservative given the need to keep public spending under control, because we would be giving a demand-led blank cheque; it also makes no sense in terms of the ambitious agenda for social reform that the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State, the Minister and I believe in.

It seems to me that the answer to the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk), based on his own considerable experience as a practising barrister and his having seen exactly the same people, is yes, we must grasp that nettle. It is pretty obvious to my mind that the answer is a greater emphasis on rehabilitation, education and reform, and that is why getting safety right is all the more critical.

I think that all or almost all of us share the same objectives, but the question now is about willing and providing the means to achieve them, and that is what our report was about. I hope that the Minister will tell me that the Government response was a measure of work in progress. I quite understand that when a new ministerial team come in, they need to reflect, take stock, review priorities and consider, in the light of the circumstances that they have inherited, the shape that they want progress to take, but if he told me that, it would be further reassurance that the progress will be genuine and speedy. The Secretary of State talked about reform proceeding “at pace”. Can we have a bit more flesh on the bones of what is there? We ask that in a spirit of complete good will towards the Government’s intentions.

[John Howell]

My hon. Friend may recall that at a recent Justice Committee meeting, I asked the Secretary of State how she would deal with the legacy of the previous Secretary of State’s reforms and the actions that he had taken to deal with prison safety. The response that she gave caused the press to argue that she was going back on the commitments that he had made. Does my hon. Friend share that view?

[Robert Neill]

When I was a Minister, I was sometimes portrayed unfairly in the press, so I shall adopt a practical approach: let us see what happens. But I do think it important that we do not, any of us, send any signals that reform is less pressing or less important. Were that to be the case, it would be disappointing and, I think, an error. I am conscious of the clarification that the Secretary of State issued after her appearance before the Justice Committee, and I will take her at her word on that, but we need the measures that we talked about to be brought forward swiftly. If Brexit means Brexit, to adopt a phrase, pace means pace, but pace requires detail in order for there to be credibility in how things are delivered. That is the approach that I take—we want to be constructive and assist the Government on what I think is the right path, provided that it is followed through consistently.

I shall touch on just a few more matters before I finish so that other hon. Members can speak—this is a well-attended debate. First, I have referred to the matrices showing that everything is going in the wrong direction at the moment, such as on assaults, self-harming and deaths in custody. All those figures are going the wrong way. The data are set out well in a report that is readily available in the public domain, so I shall not cite a raft of figures, because I suspect that that would not add a great deal, but the trend is clear.

Secondly, despite genuine efforts by NOMS to recruit staff, the number of new staff coming in is significantly offset by the lack of retention. The problem is that we are very often losing some of the most experienced officers—some of the coolest heads. When there are difficulties to do with safety, such as dangerous situations arising on a wing, one wants to have experienced prison officers around to deal with it.

The fewer there are, the greater the risk that things will escalate rather than being brought back under control, so there is a direct link between retention and safety, which we highlight in our report. That is one thing that the Government need to do more to address. We are not convinced that NOMS has a deep-seated understanding of what causes that lack of retention, why recruitment is increasingly difficult and what underpins both those factors, so we need more flesh on the bones of that.

Let me deal briefly with some other matters. Steps have been taken—again, let us recognise that—on the possession of knives and new psychoactive substances in prison, but I am not sure that we are fully on top of that issue, either, particularly in relation to those new substances. The issue is one of technology: the ability to fly in substances and a raft of other things with drones is enormous.

Of course, that brings us back to the circular issue referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham. If, as we have seen on our visits, people are locked up in their cells for 23 hours a day, and if there are illegal substances in prisons, prisoners’ ability to make use of them is all the greater given their close confinement and the growth of gang culture and peer pressure. The more that people are out of their cells and doing something purposeful, the better it is to combat the misuse of substances. That cannot be done sustainably with the current prison population, which is a very important issue.

The direction is right, but we need to be more vigorous and radical in tackling some of those important issues. That brings me back to a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell): we are disappointed about some of the detail in the Government response. We called for the Ministry and NOMS jointly to produce an action plan on prison safety, addressing the underlying factors behind violence, self-harm and suicide. We said that that plan should include preventive and punitive measures, because those two things have to be in the toolbox of any prison governor. We also wanted objectives and indices. The Secretary of State is right to commit to a prison safety and reform plan—that is good—but it is the missing detail that people need to see urgently.

We asked for quarterly reports on progress on the plan, rather than the six-monthly reports suggested in the Government response, not as a matter of caprice but because we wanted the reports to coincide with the publication of the quarterly safety in custody statistics. Otherwise, frankly, they are pretty meaningless. The whole point of transparency and scrutiny is to have the two sets of figures together so that we can compare and contrast. That is why I urge the Government to rethink their response on that matter. The information is collated, and there is no doubt that it is available—I am sure it is available to Ministers on a regular basis. There is no practical reason at all why it cannot be made available in the way we suggest in our report. It is not an expensive or a difficult ask, in other words.

We are also looking for specific information on incidents of disorder in prisons, including the deployment of the national tactical response group; a more comprehensive set of data about staffing; and performance ratings for individual prisons. We do not know yet whether the previous Secretary of State’s league table initiative will continue, but certainly we want performance ratings for prisons. I accept that it is not always easy to make complete comparisons, but on safety it is, actually. We can compare data on safety even if we cannot do so for rehabilitation in a particular prison, so there is no reason why those data cannot be available.

The same goes for data on the average number of hours each day that prisoners spend locked in their cells—I stress that in particular. I mentioned this earlier, but the amount of time that people spend locked up is entirely linked to safety levels. Boredom, the abuse of substances, the internet and a raft of other things, and the peer pressure of groups of people locked up together in a confined space for long periods all contribute directly to a deteriorating safety environment.

[Alex Chalk]

Is it not also the case that meaningful rehabilitation does not take place inside a prison cell? It is only when people are outside their cells and engaging in courses—be they on anger management, substance abuse or whatever—that they can truly come to terms with the problems that may, in some cases, be the reason why they got into prison in the first place.

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[Robert Neill]

That is entirely correct. Heavens, one would have thought we had learned that lesson from the failures of the old Victorian silent and solitary system. Rehabilitation can only ever work when people are out of their cells and in workshops and education classes. Unless they do that, they will not get anywhere, and the regime has to be safe for the officers to get them out of their cells. That is why we have to tackle this problem at root.

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

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Dr Huq]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Robert Neill]

I will give way to the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd’s Bush first.

[Dr Huq]

That is not yet the redrawn boundary—my constituency is Ealing Central and Acton at present, although it may be changed.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way and pay tribute to him for his sterling work chairing our Select Committee. He mentioned how things are interlinked with education. That point has been vividly brought home to us on the many visits we have made, in particular to Aylesbury and Wandsworth, where we heard that prisoners sometimes want to go on educational courses but there are not the staff available to relieve others so that they can do it. It seems to be a Catch-22 situation, and people are locked into a cycle. They want to get education, but there are not enough staff to supervise the groups travelling across the courses. That means that courses are often cancelled, which is an unacceptable situation.

[Robert Neill]

The hon. Lady is right. I am probably so old in politics that I can remember a constituency configured that way in the past. She is quite right—it comes back to this same circle.

People who say that the only answer is more and more imprisonment and more and more lockdown perhaps ought to go into prisons more. There are an awful lot of people—even people who, frankly, deserve to be in there for some time—who are none the less interested in engaging in purposeful activity. That makes them less inclined to behave in a way that threatens safety and gets them involved in gangs or other forms of violence. It is a win-win at every level. Whatever the level of the sentence, providing such activity is a good and, basically, a morally right thing to do. However, we cannot put prison officers or instructors into environments where it is not safe for people to be out of their cells to get that education and personal activity. That is why getting the regime safe is critical to everything.

[Richard Arkless]

I add my voice to those of others on the sterling work that the hon. Gentleman has done in leading the Justice Committee since my election in May last year.

I reiterate the point about the vicious cycle that the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) touched on. The lack of resources means that prisoners are locked in their cells for 23 hours a day and cannot get purposeful activity—there are not enough prison officers to construct it. The lack of purposeful activity then means they are predisposed to violence and to not being rehabilitated through the system. Clearly, the hon. Gentleman will agree that it is a vicious cycle. The key, as the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) said, is to grasp the nettle by either reducing the prison population or resourcing prisons properly, so that prisoners come out into society rehabilitated.

[Robert Neill]

The hon. Gentleman is entirely right. I am grateful for his support for all our work on the Justice Committee, because although justice and prison matters are devolved to Scotland, we can learn lessons from each other about how things work across the whole of the United Kingdom. We do have to break that vicious circle. Resource is important, and to be fair, when our report was published, the Government did put in extra resource, which is welcome and to be commended. We are now saying that we have to see the detail of how we can monitor the use of that resource, so that it is used to the very best advantage. That is the most important thing that we need to be saying as we go forward.

I know many Members wish to speak, so I will conclude. I am glad that there is going to be a prison safety and reform plan in the autumn, and I gather that legislation is likely to be brought forward. I understand that the shape of it is not always possible to commit to greatly in advance, but it is really important that we maintain the pledge made in the Queen’s Speech that prison reform would be a key part of the Government’s agenda. I hope the Minister will bear that in mind. I am not going to press him now to say what the shape of the legislation will be, but he could give us commitments to provide more details following the Government response.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Sam Gyimah)]

I thank the Chairman of the Justice Committee for giving way to me so early in the debate. I assure the Select Committee that prison reform, which was a key plank of the Queen’s Speech for this Session, remains so. That commitment still exists.

[Robert Neill]

I am grateful to the Minister for a considered, and therefore authoritative, intervention. That is appreciated, and I think it will be welcomed by everybody on the Committee and everybody in the sector. I promise the Minister that the Committee will continue to work constructively with him and his colleagues in delivering that; it is an important message, for all the reasons that I have set out.

The Minister provides an appropriate point for me to bring my remarks to a conclusion. I hope we will soon have an idea of what shape the legislation is going to take. Are we going to continue along the route of governor autonomy? Will we progress down the route of reform prisons? Are there alternative routes?

In particular, we urge the Minister to do some things that would not require primary legislation, such as working on earned incentives and privileges regimes, and making appropriate use of the release on temporary licence scheme. Those things could be delivered fairly quickly and could be consistent with the thrust of the forthcoming legislation. I apologise if I have taken some time outlining the Justice Committee’s report, but we regard this as an important issue. I commend the report to the House and look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

The Minister has asked for and received the Chair’s permission to take his jacket off. If other right hon. and hon. Members wish to take their jackets off, they also have the Chair’s permission.

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[Philip Davies]

I understand my hon. Friend’s point, but he is looking at it from a perspective different from mine. My view is that we should not manage the prison population to fit an arbitrary figure that we have decided is the limit that we will allow in prison; we should imprison the people who should be in prison, and it is the Government’s job to build the capacity in the prison system to cope with those people. That is the bit on which the Government need to get a grip.

I was going to come to this later but, as we are on the subject, I will deal with it now. One area on which I happen to disagree with the Chairman of the Select Committee, although it pains me to do so, is the size of the prison population. We have to address the myth that has been perpetuated that the UK has a very high prison population. The fact of the matter is that we do not, and I will explain why. Yes, the absolute number of more than 80,000 represents a high prison population, but the UK is a very highly populated country so of course we have a high prison population. That is a meaningless measure.

If we look at the number of people in our prisons as a proportion of the population as a whole, we are not at the top of the table by any means, but I concede that we are above average. We are in the highest quartile but, again, it is a meaningless measure. The only meaningful measure of prison population is the proportion of criminals that we send to prison. In other words, for every 1,000 offences committed in the UK how many people go to prison? That is the most meaningful measure of whether we send a lot of people, or not many people, to prison. Comparing those figures with the figures for other countries across the world shows that we have a very low prison population. For every 1,000 crimes committed in the UK, we send some 18 people to prison. I challenge anyone to name four or five countries that send fewer people to prison, because they will be hard pressed to do so.

Our prison population is very low, so we have to end the myth that has been built up by these prison reform groups, which frankly just do not like anybody being sent to prison. We have to address the myth that has built up over the years that we have a high prison population. We send very few people to prison. Everyone knows that it is difficult to be sent to prison in the UK. People get community sentence after community sentence—the only people sent to prison are either very persistent offenders or very serious offenders. Courts bend over backwards not to send people to prison. We have to nail that myth.

Contrary to what my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) said in his opening remarks, I do not think that public opinion is that we should have fewer people in prison. I do not think public opinion has moved an awfully long way. Clearly, my hon. Friend is much more expert than I about public opinion in Bromley and Chislehurst, and I bow to his superior knowledge, but I invite him to come up to Shipley. He can knock on the door of any 100 houses he wants to ask people, “Do you want to see more criminals or fewer criminals in prison?” I suspect that a number in the high 90s would say that they would like to see more criminals in prison, not fewer. I accept that Bromley and Chislehurst may differ, but I am here to represent Shipley.

[Robert Neill]

I respect my hon. Friend’s point, but I want to put my point to him in a different way. I suspect that both his constituents and mine would like to see fewer victims of crime and fewer crimes being committed, so they also might like to see people in prison being more effectively rehabilitated so that they reoffended less. Does he accept that overcrowding in our prisons prevents rehabilitation? Reducing such overcrowding would be in his constituents’ interest.

[Philip Davies]

I agree with one part of what my hon. Friend says, which is that we should be doing our best to rehabilitate people while they are in prison. I do not see how anyone could possibly disagree with that. What I do not accept is that we should have fewer people in prison. I want more people in prison.

The Minister and I were discussing this not too long ago, and we observed that the UK prison population has increased quite substantially over the past 20 or 30 years. Lo and behold, what has also happened in the UK over the past 20 or 30 years is that the crime rate has gone down. Members here might want to try to pretend that those two things are alien to each other, but I contend that one follows from the other.

To be honest, it is not rocket science. It is blindingly obvious, certainly to most of my constituents, that the more criminals there are in prison, the fewer criminals there are out on the streets committing crimes. It is obvious that the more criminals we lock up, the less crime we will have. I accept that we want people to be rehabilitated while they are in prison, but I do not accept that the answer is to send fewer people to prison in the first place. In my opinion, it is too hard to be sent to prison and most people are not sent to prison for long enough.

The idea that short sentences do not work is another myth. The reoffending rate for people on short sentences is 60-odd per cent. Virtually every single person in prison on a short sentence has had community sentence after community sentence. The reoffending rate for that cohort while they were on a community sentence was 100%, which is why they ended up in prison in the first place, so a 60-odd per cent. reoffending rate for the cohort on short sentences is actually a rather good record compared with the alternative. We do our prisons a disservice. The longer people spend in prison, the less likely they are to reoffend. That point is made clear by all the Government statistics.

Prison safety is also undermined by fixed-term recall, which is little known. We have a system in the UK whereby people are released halfway through their sentence. If a prisoner reoffends, most people would expect them to go to prison to serve the remainder of their original sentence, but I am afraid not. The last Labour Government did for that, too. They introduced fixed-term recall, whereby people are sent back to prison not to serve the remainder of their sentence but to serve 28 days. Again, people have no incentive to behave themselves when they go back because they know they will be out in 28 days, come what may—that is the whole principle of fixed-term recall.

There is no incentive in our sanctions for these people to behave themselves when they go back into prison, and there are lots of them—I think there were some 7,000 people on fixed-term recall last year. In fact, many of them make a point of going back into prison just to see how their illicit operations have been doing while they have been out. They know that they will get only 28 days if they commit another offence, which gives them enough time to see what is going on before they are back out again. The whole thing is an absolute scandal. These are the things that the Minister needs to get a grip on if he is to do anything about prison safety.

Drugs are clearly a massive issue in our prisons, and the number of people who take drugs for the first time in prison astounds me. It cannot be beyond the wit of the Government to address drugs in prisons. They have to be much more robust on that, too.

Members will know that I have an interest in the comparative treatment of men and women in prisons. More women than men, per 100 of the prison population, have been punished for disciplinary offences while in prison. There were 130 adjudications per 100 women prisoners, compared with 106 adjudications per 100 men prisoners, according to the Ministry of Justice’s publication “Statistics on Women and the Criminal Justice System 2011”. We have a massive problem with violence by women offenders in our prisons. This is not a men- only problem.

The other thing that I wanted to mention is radicalisation in our prisons, which is a massive cause for concern. I put in a freedom of information request to the Ministry of Justice a year ago asking which prisons had reported instances of or concerns about religious radicalisation in the last year. The MOJ’s reply did not tell me which prisons had had such reports; it told me which prisons had not, because there were so few of them. When I totted them up, there were only seven prisons in the whole UK that had not reported instances of or concerns about radicalisation. If we are to do something about prison safety, tackling radicalisation in our prisons must be a top priority for the Government. It is a massive area of concern. We cannot let political correctness be an excuse for inaction; we must get to grips with that particular problem.

I agree with the right hon. Member for Delyn about prison officers. We clearly need more of them in our prisons. To me, that is blindingly obvious. They do a valiant job of trying to keep order in our prisons in difficult circumstances; we cannot keep cutting their numbers, as has been done in recent years, and expect there to be no consequences. We must invest in our prison officers.

In summary, I look at the issue from a different point of view from the Chairman of the Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst. He said that he did not think the public wanted more public spending on prisons. I disagree; I think that our constituents do want it. They want less public spending on things like international aid and more spending on locking up criminals in our prisons. I genuinely think that that is the public mood. They do not think that too many people are being sent to prison; they think that it is too easy for people to get out of prison, or not to be sent there in the first place. We should be wary of getting out of touch with public opinion on this issue.

There are many areas that the Minister can attend to in order to improve prison safety while also improving public confidence in the criminal justice system. He must not be seduced by the bleeding-heart liberals whose basic agenda is that they want fewer and fewer people in prison because they do not believe in sending people there. He must be robust and stick up for public opinion a bit more, ensuring that criminals are in prison and that they serve the sentences handed down by the courts, preferably in full.

The Minister certainly should not allow them to be released halfway through their sentences when they are still a danger to the public and have behaved badly in our prisons. That is not fair to the public, and it is not fair to the prison officers who have to deal with such people and see them released halfway through their sentences, much to their disgust. I welcome the Minister to his position, and I trust he will tackle some of those issues and not be seduced by the bleeding-heart liberals.

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[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, Ms Vaz. I assure my hon. Friend the Minister that I will speak as a critical friend who will be willing him and the whole ministerial team on to success in this important area. I completely agree with what the Chair of the Justice Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), said at the start of this debate about the duty of care that we all owe to prison officers and prisoners. One of the most upsetting parts of my job as prisons Minister was to read the daily operational reports and see that prison officers had sustained broken jaws, broken noses and black eyes in the course of their duty.

Yet again, I put on record the fact that our prison officers are some of the finest public servants in our country. When we talk of public servants, we often mention teachers, doctors, nurses and police officers—rightly so, as they do outstanding work, too—but we need to remember that even though prison officers are behind those tall walls, they are on the frontline of duty in keeping us all safe. We have a duty to keep prisoners safe, too.

I will concentrate on what the Government said in response to the Select Committee. They mentioned a number of specific actions that they are taking to deal with violence. We have had brief mention today of body-worn cameras. I went around HMP Glen Parva to see their use there, and I was told by prisoners and prison officers that they felt that the cameras were reassuring and helpful. I understand that the advice is that body-worn cameras are even more effective if the five-minute intervention—the measure by which every interaction between a prison officer and a prisoner is meant to be rehabilitative and positive—has been rolled out. I know that work is being done on the violence diagnostic tool to understand in detail the different areas of prisons where violence is happening, and the times of the day. There is increased staff training to equip staff better to deal with those issues.

I was pleased to see mention in the Government’s response of the important work that the Crown Prosecution Service and the police need to do to protect our brave prison officers. I was upset to hear from prison officers in some prisons that on occasion they have gone down to the front counter of the local police station to report assaults, because it was bureaucratic to do so within the prison.

Just occasionally, the view has grown up within police forces that, “Prisons have prison officers, and we are out there to protect the public and the open community.” That is not the case. Police officers have a duty to ensure that order runs within and without the prison wall. Prison officers and prisoners need the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to take that duty seriously. In my experience as prisons Minister, the relationship between police and local prisons was variable. If there was a good relationship between the borough commander and the prison governor, things were good. Sometimes, that relationship was not as good as it should have been.

The Government rightly talk about the importance of getting the early days in custody, the critical first month, right for prisoners. We know the preponderance of self-inflicted deaths—suicides—within the first month. It is important that we help people, particularly those who are in prison for the first time, to cope with the overwhelmingly strange and traumatic experience of going to prison for the first time. Those are all positive things that the Government have mentioned.

One thing that the Government could do on recruitment is to try to speed up the process from the moment someone expresses an interest in joining the Prison Service. If people have to wait too long—of course, proper checks need to be done—their enthusiasm may wane. They need to put bread on the table to feed their families, so they may go to do something else. We need a speedy process that captures people’s enthusiasm to do an outstanding job of public service. We need to ensure that prison officers can get real job satisfaction from doing rehabilitation properly.

On Monday morning, my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) and I had the pleasure of meeting a former prison officer from HMP Northumberland. He was talking with enormous pride of how, when he walks around Newcastle, people come up to him and say, “You helped me 20 years ago in prison. I now have a job. I am paying a mortgage. I know I was a difficult prisoner, but you showed me the right way.” That is why prison officers join. It is an outstandingly important job in which they can make a difference. But new prison officers get frustrated. If they come in and are not able to do the rehabilitative work, they leave to do other things. Empowering prison officers to do the job that they joined to do to the best of their ability is really important.

[Robert Neill]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making such an important point, which is reflected in a concerning statistic. One of the growth areas we have seen in retention issues has been the number of people leaving the service through resignation as opposed to other reasons—it is up from about 37% to 39%. He may know better than I, but perhaps that relates to people coming in and getting frustrated because they are not able to do the job they want to do, and so not being retained in the way we would wish.

[Andrew Selous]

My hon. Friend makes a fair point. We have improved prison officer training. It is now a 10-week course. It is an increasingly good course and, quite rightly, within that training there is a lot of focus on rehabilitation. The ability to turn lives around and prevent people becoming victims by changing lives is the purpose of the Ministry of Justice. If people cannot do that job, it will lead to frustration, which may lead them to resign and take up other work.

Mobile phones that get into prisons illegally are a cause of violence that makes prisons less safe. They are used to help get drugs into prisons. It is not just inhaling psychoactive substances that is a problem but the extreme violent behaviour caused by such substances, which give an adrenalin rush that enables prisoners to fight prison officers for longer. That is why such drugs are so evil. Cracking down on phones, which the Government are starting to do by working with mobile network operators, is really important.

I was pleased to see that one of the good things in the Government’s response was the recognition on page 3 that phones should be used for legitimate family contact. Phones can be provided in the prison, or perhaps in time there could be a type of in-cell telephony that can be listened into in a legitimate manner using the PIN phone system to enable prisoners to contact their families. Prisoner voicemail could help with that. That is all part of creating a safer environment for prisoners and prison officers.

I have talked about the terrible evil of drugs and the extra violence caused by them. The Department is engaged in developing world-leading technology to detect drugs. We should not underestimate how difficult that is. I was glad to see mention in the Government response of the body scanner at Wandsworth. I am keen to know how the scanner has been assessed. It has been there since just before May 2015, so more than a year and a quarter. I understand that similar scanners are in widespread use in the United States of America. I hope that we will shortly have a full evaluation so that we can decide whether they are value for money, whether we roll them out and whether they are effective in dealing with the terrible scourge of drugs that leads to violence in prisons.

I am pleased to see the commitment to building new prisons. In time I am sure we will be told where they will be built. Equally importantly, new prisons will enable us to close prisons that are not fit for purpose.

There were two issues that I had hoped to see more reference to in the Government’s response. The first was jobs for prisoners on release. I remember a prisoner saying to me in HMP Ford, “When I left the prison, I could mop a floor bloody well”—excuse my language, Ms Vaz—“but it wasn’t going to pay the bills.” I thought that encapsulated powerfully the shift that we need to make within prison industries. Of course we want prisoners out of their cells and doing something productive—that is 100 times better than having them locked up—but I am not satisfied with that, and I want to go a stage further. I want work in prisons to be related to getting a job on release. I could not see reference to that in the Government’s response. I hope my hon. Friend the Minister will reassure me that prisons will focus on making sure the work that is done there will help prisoners get jobs on release.

We have some good academies involving individual employers, but why not go a stage further and have sectoral academies for the construction industry, for butchery or for engineering? There are huge skills and labour shortages in the British economy, and prisons can absolutely be at the heart of helping to solve that. When prisoners have a purpose and see the prison regime engaging with them at the start of their sentence, I passionately believe that will help cut down some of the frustration that leads to the violence that makes prisons less safe—the subject of this debate. An increasing use of release on temporary licence, which I hope the Department will continue, is absolutely part of that.

The Government’s response makes reference to the importance of education. People deserve a second, third, fourth or fifth chance in life. If prisoners have not had a good experience of going to school when they were younger, we must not lose the opportunity to give them the education they did not get the first time round. I hope the Government will take forward Dame Sally Coates’s excellent recommendations.

I was pleased to see that the Royal Society of Arts has just published a paper by Professor James Crabbe called “Unlocking Skills Inside”, which talks about the possibilities of further education colleges linking up with local prisons. I was interested in the five broad themes that Professor Crabbe draws attention to: prison cultures, wellbeing, human capital, social capital and knowledge, and skills and employability. The first four of those relate to the importance of helping prisoners change their mindset so that they engage with the employability agenda as well.

Governor autonomy is absolutely key. I have talked about the importance of prison officers getting job satisfaction from what they do, but giving governors their head to run their establishments is really important. To illustrate that, I went to Aylesbury prison, which is a challenging one—I think the Committee visited it—and saw that one block of that prison has an enabling environment accredited by the Royal College of Psychiatrists. The prison has a much calmer atmosphere than others. Prisoners were doing things for the prison officers. When I asked the young men in there, “What effect has this enabling environment had on the number of assaults and violent incidents here?”, they said, “We can’t remember the last time there was a violent incident.” I think we need many more such enabling environments. I know it takes time to get full accreditation, but why not learn from what has happened in Aylesbury and spread it across the whole estate? That would be valuable.

I compared the Government’s response with some of the commitments made by the previous Prime Minister in his speech on 8 February, and some areas concerned me. They were in the speech on 8 February but not in the Government’s response. The final paragraph of the Government’s response, on page 3, talks about

“a clear set of measures to hold prison governors to account”,

but it does not mention holding governors to account on employment or on accommodation outcomes, which were mentioned in the speech on 8 February. It may be an oversight—perhaps the Minister will be able to respond to that. It is critical that we hold governors to account on both employment and accommodation, because that will drive greater engagement with the probation service and the local community, so that we do better in those two critical areas.

I completely agree with what my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) said about mental health. We can be encouraged that my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee), a qualified doctor, has responsibility for mental health in prisons, and I look forward to his proposals. In mental health, as in education, we should not ignore the capacity of prisoners themselves to be the answer to some of the problems.

One of the dangers of prison is that it infantilises prisoners. At Justice questions, I paid tribute to the outstanding governor of Wandsworth prison, Ian Bickers, who has taken 50 prisoners who have level 3 qualifications and said, “Right, you are now educators in this prison.” He has given them a uniform and a wage. They can lose their job if they muck up, and they are going to work on education in the prison alongside the staff coming in from outside. We can do similar things to help prisoners who are getting depressed or anxious. Prisoners can very much be part of the solution to the issues that we are talking about this afternoon.

I agree with what has been said about IPP prisoners. We have to recognise that that situation is a historic anomaly that is difficult to justify. People are now under a sentence given some time ago for a crime which, if committed today, would be given a different sentence. I know that the Department is looking seriously at that issue.

Lastly, I want to pay tribute to those carrying out the important work of chaplaincy for preventing suicide and generally improving the atmosphere in prisons. The week before last I addressed a conference of Catholic prison chaplains. They made the point that they want some of the work that they do to be allowed to take place within education. That work is important in helping to change prisoners’ mindset about engaging with education and employment in prison.

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[Mr Gyimah]

Ms Vaz, I have just shown hon. Members an example of a mobile phone that is designed to avoid electronic detection and is easy to conceal and smuggle into a prison. That demonstrates the lengths to which people will go to get such things into prisons and how lucrative the market is. I was not aware of that until I got this job. In response to the intervention by the hon. Member for Cardiff Central (Jo Stevens), the way to deal with such things is not necessarily just through staffing; we also need a technological solution. That is why I say that staffing is part of the answer but not the only answer.

To take the hon. Lady’s other example, drugs, we are trialling tests for psychoactive substances in 34 prisons. That is particularly important due to the ever changing nature of those drugs. Having an appropriate test allows us to be one step ahead of the game. In addition, we have trained more than 300 dogs to detect such drugs. That is another way in which we can respond to the threats in our prison system.

I have mentioned mobile phones. Technology is a problem, and technology is therefore the answer. We are trying to deal with that problem broadly by working closely with mobile network operators—that initiative was started by the previous prisons Minister and Secretary of State. I want those operators, which are responsible businesses with considerable expertise in this area, to support us in developing solutions to deal with the use of illicit phones in prisons, and I will be meeting them to drive that work forward. However, we are not standing idle and waiting for that long-term solution. We are introducing measures to block mobile phone signals, and new legislation introduced this summer means that mobile phone operators can now block individual handsets. Our work with mobile network operators will allow us to stop any handset operating within a prison.

We do not stop there. We are also concerned about social media—both people outside prisons posting things for prisoners on social media sites and prisoners accessing sites such as Facebook and Instagram. We are already engaging with social media companies to ensure that they act responsibly and work with us to remove material recorded on illicit mobile phones.

Not much time has been spent discussing drones during this debate, but they pose a serious emerging threat that we recognise must be tackled. As I mentioned, prisoners will go to astounding lengths to get mobile phones. We need to do more, and we are exploring what new technologies might offer us against that threat.

[Robert Neill]

The Minister mentions drones, and I agree with him about technological changes. Will he bear in mind that when we have visited prisons—particularly the older prisons in the estate, such as Wandsworth—one simple thing that we have been told could be done is for the repair of windows to be sped up? Very frequently, drones are thrown through broken windows on to wings, and greater rigour in inspection and repair would be a fairly cheap win in dealing with that problem.

[Mr Gyimah]

The Chairman of the Justice Committee is once again spot on. I am particularly concerned about the rate of repairs in our prisons. Carillion is one company that has a contract and receives public funds to perform such work, and I have not been impressed by what I have heard about its response speed. I will meet its management to ensure that it delivers what we expect.

We are taking several other operational measures. They are not glamorous or exciting—not all of them will grab headlines—but they show how gritty we have to be to address the problem of safety in our prisons. We are making operational improvements, such as rolling out body-worn cameras. My hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire is right that we should be driven by the evidence, which suggests that having cameras does not on its own necessarily solve the problem. Some prisoners say that cameras, on their own, could actually escalate situations, so they should be used with the five-minute intervention system. We are piloting a new case management programme for violent prisoners; updating assessment, care in custody and teamwork—the care planning process for prisoners at risk of suicide or self-harm, which the right hon. Member for Delyn was particularly concerned about—and creating a violence reduction taskforce to support and advise establishments with high rates of violence. We are also trialling a body scanner in Wandsworth prison, as has been mentioned.

Work and education in our prisons are also key; they are valuable in addressing reoffending, and I am committed to that. Today, we announced the transfer from the Department for Education to the Ministry of Justice of responsibility for education and training provision for those subject to adult detention in England. For anyone who was in any doubt that we are committed to reform, that is one piece of proof that we are committed and determined to proceed at pace. That so-called business of government transfer will enable us to give prison governors more power for delivering education in prisons.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Neill]

Thank you, Ms Vaz. It is a pleasure to be under your chairmanship. I think your powers of foresight are admirable, if perhaps optimistic.

It is a great pleasure to respond to the debate. I thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have contributed to it. It has been a generally well informed and serious debate about a serious topic—that has been true of all contributions from both sides of the House. We have been assisted in particular by the two former Ministers here, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) and my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous). Both of them showed great commitment to that role, and I say to the current Minister that he has done so too. The energy and engagement that he has shown in his Westminster Hall debut in the role have made for an impressive debut, and I, like you, Ms Vaz, am grateful for the detailed and comprehensive reply he gave.

There are a number of issues that we will no doubt wish to return to, and there are specific points in our report that we will wish to press further. Important matters have been raised that I will not detain Members with now, but the Minister knows that they remain to be addressed.

We have received reassurance that the reform proceeds at pace. I will take the Minister at his word, if I may put it that way, and say that if a plan is to be ready in two or three months’ time, by my reckoning that will be before the House rises for Christmas. I hope that we will be able to have him before the Justice Committee at our invitation to discuss that plan, and that we will perhaps be able to debate it further in Westminster Hall. Debates such as this do great credit to serious topics. I am particularly grateful to all members of the Committee and others who have attended the debate. To paraphrase Captain Corcoran in HMS Pinafore, I am pleased to command a right good crew. I am grateful to them for their support.

[Valerie Vaz (in the Chair)]

No singing, then.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the Sixth Report from the Justice Committee of Session 2015-16, on Prison Safety, HC 625, and the Government response, HC 647.