Suicide and Self-harm in Prison (England)

Debate between Sam Gyimah and Luciana Berger

Wednesday 1st March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mr Gyimah]

We are making the training available to all prisons, and we expect prison governors to ensure that as many of their staff as possible can take it—particularly those who are operating on wings and have direct contact with prisoners. The full training package takes about 1.5 days to complete.

[Luciana Berger]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Gyimah]

I would like to make some progress and develop these points. I will perhaps take an intervention later.

We are also making improvements to the assessment, care in custody and teamwork process—the case management process in place in our prisons to support and manage prisoners at risk—and identifying opportunities to make it more effective. That includes changes to relevant training and developing a new self-harm diagnostic tool for use by prison governors and staff, which brings together information for each prison about numbers and types of incident, and where and when in the prison they are happening.

We are also improving infrastructure and partnerships. To support governors and prison staff across the estate, we have put in place specialist roles—regional safer custody leads—in every region to provide advice to prisons and to spread good practice on identifying and supporting prisoners at risk. We are also committed to developing partnerships with others who can help us. In addition to the funding already provided to support the prisoner listener scheme, we will be providing extra funding for the Samaritans to provide targeted support for prison staff and to prisoners directly, including by piloting emotional resilience training for new prisoners, delivered by released ex-listeners.

In the immediate term, a national learning day will be held on 14 March for prison staff on suicide and self-harm. We also strive to continue to learn from others and from completed and ongoing reviews. It is critical that we respond to the independent advisory panel’s ongoing review of women’s self-inflicted deaths. We continue to benefit from individual reviews into deaths in custody by the prisons and probation ombudsman. As hon. Members will have seen, we have introduced the Prisons and Courts Bill, which contains measures to put the ombudsman on to a statutory footing, with powers of entry and requirements on the Secretary of State to publish responses to the ombudsman’s reports. It will give those reports real teeth and will introduce an imperative in the system to follow through the recommendations and ensure that they are implemented. The Bill gives effect to long-standing commitments by successive Governments to give the ombudsman permanent status. I hope that hon. Members will welcome and support the Bill as it progresses through the House.

We will also redouble our efforts to support protective and environmental factors, which evidence tells us reduce risk. We know that strengthening family ties and peer support can support prisoners’ wellbeing and make custody safer. Governors will be held to account for the family services in their prison, and from autumn 2017 the family service budgets will be devolved to governors so that they have flexibility over how they resource family services to best meet the needs of their prisoners. We are also supporting digital developments in prisons, including the roll-out of in-cell telephony, to enable prisoners to call their families more easily and at cheaper rates. We will learn from Lord Farmer’s review to investigate how helping prisoners to engage with their families can support their rehabilitation and provide encouragement.

[Luciana Berger]

rose—

[Mr Gyimah]

The hon. Lady is itching to make an intervention, so I will give way.

[Luciana Berger]

I thank the Minister for very kindly giving way. I can see he is about to conclude, and we still have a few minutes left in the debate. Can I bring him back to two points? First, on the training that may or may not be available to prison staff, I urge him to reflect on the fact that there are people who have served in our Prison Service for decades but have never received any mental health training. It is important that every single one of them receives such training. Secondly, is the Minister’s Department looking at how to reduce risk in prisons, in the same way as we reduce the risks from ligature points in mental health settings?

[Mr Gyimah]

On the hon. Lady’s second question, absolutely yes, we are reducing risk in prisons, in terms of the fabric in cells and so on. In addition to the training and opportunities for prison officers to become better skilled and better able to identify suicide risk and to deal with mental health issues, last week, as she will be aware, we announced a promotion for all band 3 officers—they can get promoted to band 4 and get an additional salary at band 4 if they specialise in certain roles in prison. One of them is specifically to do with safer custody. Therefore, a prison officer today can choose to specialise as a safer custody officer and get paid more to do so. Some 2,000 prison officers across the country could benefit from that increase in pay and from the training that I have outlined.

In the light of the disproportionate number of self-harm incidents among female prisoners, we are exploring ways of improving family links, including overnight visits, family days, child-centred visits, homework clubs and the delivery of relationship and parenting programmes. We are also taking account of evidence that shows that prison environments have a direct impact on prisoners’ wellbeing and rehabilitation, as the hon. Lady rightly pointed out. Our plans for estate transformation include ensuring that prison sites are configured to support prisoners’ access to fresh air, exercise and meaningful activity.

Fundamental to supporting that activity and improving the safety of all those living and working in our prisons will be the recruitment of the additional 2,500 frontline staff we are funding. Extra staff will enable prison officers to conduct new ways of working and transform the culture in our prisons, so that every prison officer is responsible for the supervision and support of about six prisoners. The 1:6 model is in part based on the work of Lord Toby Harris on self-inflicted deaths, which particularly focused on the youth estate. That is why we are introducing the important key worker role.

--- Later in debate ---

[Luciana Berger]

I thank the Minister for very kindly giving way again. Does he accept that those are not additional staff, but merely a replacement of the staff that have already been cut? We have lost more than 7,000 prison officers since 2010. We have only to look at the outcome of the inspection at Northumberland prison to see that there is a very significant issue of prisoners feeling so unsafe that they do not feel able to leave their cells.

[Mr Gyimah]

The 2,500 staff are additional to what we have, so at the end of 2018 we will have 2,500 additional officers. The baseline—the comparison with 2010—is not accurate because, although we lost 7,000 prison officers, we closed down 18 prisons. We are looking at a completely new baseline. However, the most important thing is the one-to-one support from a dedicated officer, which is at the heart of our prison reforms, ensuring that prisoners first and foremost are safe to benefit from the help they need to quit drugs, participate in education and skills programmes and acquire the skills to prepare for life after release.

The hon. Lady asked about the 75% of prisoners—she alleged—who face delays in being transferred to NHS hospitals beyond the 14-day deadline. That is obviously a serious concern, and I will work closely with Department of Health partners to look into it. Health partners are obviously important in supporting prisoners and meeting their physical and mental health needs. In 2015, just to put the statistic out there, there were 1,010 transfer admissions to secure hospitals from prison, but I admit that a lot more needs to be done.

I read the inquest report into the incredibly tragic death of Dean Saunders. Like the hon. Lady, I agree that we are a long way short of where we should be in terms of preventing such self-inflicted deaths. The points I have enumerated today show what we are doing now, and we will come forward with even more detail and further reforms to ensure that we bring down the number of these deaths as much as we possibly can. I look forward to working with the hon. Lady—I will be willing to discuss these issues in detail with her—and with the Saunders family and a number of other families who have lost loved ones in this way.

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).

Prison Officers Association: Withdrawal from Voluntary Tasks

Debate between Sam Gyimah and Luciana Berger

Tuesday 28th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gyimah]

I will certainly bear that in mind, although the pension deal offered to the POA and prison officers would have been fully funded by the Government.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

Last year 119 prisoners took their own lives in our prisons—the highest level of suicides on record. The POA instruction urges members to withdraw from ACCT—assessment, care in custody and teamwork. While I have every sympathy with the 7,000 POA prison officers who now face these challenges in our prisons, what impact will that withdrawal have on the already dismal mental health support available in our prisons?

[Mr Gyimah]

As I said earlier, involvement in ACCT processes and ceasing suicide and self-harm are fundamental to a prison officer’s duty. I would encourage and urge all prison officers to carry on with their tasks as they should.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sam Gyimah and Luciana Berger

Tuesday 6th September 2016 Commons Chamber

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

I thank my hon. Friend for that question. Some of the problems in society are magnified in our prisons. As the Prime Minister said, if we are going to have a country that works for everyone, prison reform is very much a part of that, including on literacy, training, work in prisons and employment opportunities when people are released.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

T4. The Secretary of State will know that Charlie Taylor was asked to carry out a review of the youth justice system last year. An interim report was published in February, and we were promised the final report in July. We still do not have it; can the Secretary of State tell us when we will have it, and give us an explanation for the delay?

Electoral Registration

Debate between Sam Gyimah and Luciana Berger

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gyimah]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, but I will not be tempted into that debate.

Individual electoral registration was first introduced by the last Labour Government and has cross-party support—there is nothing sinister or cynical about the transition. As with academy schools in education, Labour was right to seek to modernise our electoral system by introducing IER, but once again we are seeing the measure through while Labour Members seek to disown it. I wonder what has prompted the change of heart on the Labour Benches.

[Luciana Berger]

The Minister talks about the importance of including everyone on the register, but in Liverpool we have lost more than 20,000 people from our electoral register. He said earlier that Liverpool had received a sum of money, but obviously that has not worked so far. What else will his Department do to assist Liverpool to ensure that we get those 20,000 people back on our electoral register?

[Mr Gyimah]

As I said, in addition to the £161,000 of maximised registration funding, Liverpool received £288,000 to help boost its register. If that money was not enough, the city can apply to the Cabinet Office for more funding using justification-led bids. Electoral registration officers have statutory responsibility for maintaining the register, so perhaps the hon. Lady will ask her EROs what they have done with the money.

What has prompted the change of heart on the Labour Benches about IER? Is it because the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) is trying to taunt the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) and the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) in their bids to become the Labour candidate for the Mayor of London? Could it be that the Labour party, rightly scared of the next election, has retreated to the comfort zone of opposition politics and scaremongering about the Government’s policies?