Prisons and Probation

Steve Rotheram Excerpts

Wednesday 27th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter]

I agree with most, if not all, of the provisions in the Bill. The issue we are dealing with here, however, is smuggling contraband into prisons by a number of means, including the increasing use of drones.

Turning to overcrowding, figures released by the Prisons Minister on Monday showed that 25% of all prisoners are in overcrowded cells. In some prisons, such as Wandsworth, the figure rises to over 80%. It is, in the words of the chief inspector,

“sometimes exacerbated by extremely poor environments and squalid conditions.”

This memorably led one member of staff to tell him, of a cell in Wormwood Scrubs, that he

“wouldn’t keep a dog in there”.

In the past 25 years, the prison population has almost doubled, from under 45,000 in 1990 to over 85,000 now. It is projected to increase to 90,000 by 2020. Staff are already struggling, following cuts on an unprecedented scale. There are 9,760 fewer operational prison staff than in 2010, and nearly 5,000 fewer prison officers since 2010. Some 250 prison governors resigned or moved jobs in the past five years.

On education, the Prisoners Education Trust reports that prisoners tell them they have to choose between going to the library and having a shower, because of the lack of staff to escort them. Nearly half of prisoners report having no qualifications and 42% of people in prison say they had been expelled or permanently excluded from school. The Lord Chancellor appointed Dame Sally Coates, the distinguished former head of Burlington Danes Academy, to review prisoner education. Perhaps he will let us know what progress she has made.

On mental health, according to an answer given to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger), 60% of prisoners who took their own life last year were not receiving assistance under the assessment, care in custody and teamwork process, which is supposed to identify prisoners at a heightened risk of suicide or self-harm.

[Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

My constituency has two prisons—Altcourse, which is privately run by G4S, and Liverpool Walton. Both were inspected recently. The common factor in both inspections was understaffing. Does my hon. Friend think that some of the factors he is identifying are due to the staff numbers at both prisons being the lowest in living memory?

[Andy Slaughter]

The cuts in staff lie at the root of many of the problems I am identifying. The fact that in many cases prisoners now spend 22 or 23 hours in their cell, and have restrictions on work, education and association, is leading to increased violence and poor behaviour in prisons. That is a very short-sighted development. I think the Government realise that, but perhaps too late.

Turning to probation and reoffending, figures I obtained last month revealed that almost one in 10 offenders are convicted of an offence within 18 days of release. HM inspectorate of probation’s fourth report on the implementation of transforming rehabilitation was published on 15 January. It highlighted the disparity in performance between the national probation service, which is still part of the National Offender Management Service, and the 21 community rehabilitation companies managed by private providers. For CRCs, one quarter of the offenders sampled had been convicted of a further offence, whereas for the NPS the figure was less than one fifth. On child protection and safeguarding on home visits, the NPS again outperformed CRCs. Earlier this month, the Lord Chancellor’s Department stopped publishing figures relating to staffing figures at CRCs. Why was this, except to conceal the hundreds of experienced probation staff being laid off across the country to promote the bottom line for the CRCs’ owners?

Let me turn to the youth estate, and in particular the role of G4S. We welcome the measures announced yesterday by the Lord Chancellor to effectively put Medway secure training centre into special measures. This is unsurprising, as they are exactly what I called for in an urgent question two weeks ago. I also welcome the decision by the director of Medway to stand down. However, individuals should not bear the entirety of the blame for what looks like corporate failure by G4S. I have now written to the Serious Fraud Office to ask that it investigates the allegations, made in the BBC “Panorama” programme on Medway, that instances of disorder were concealed to avoid G4S incurring fines under its contract. This is in addition to the ongoing SFO investigation into G4S and Serco’s manipulation of the tagging contracts for financial gain.

G4S has a truly dismal record of managing public contracts here and abroad. At Rainsbrook STC, six staff were dismissed and the contract was terminated last September, following an inspection report that said some staff were on drugs while on duty, colluded with detainees and behaved extremely inappropriately with young people. The company taking over the contract is MTCnovo. It is a name not well known in this country because, in origin, it is a US prison firm. As such, it presided over a riot in an Arizona state prison and ran a youth facility in Mississippi that a judge described as

“struggling with disorder, periodic mayhem, and staff ineptitude which leads to perpetual danger to the inmates and staff.”

It probably left that reference out of its application, along with the fact that its directors helped to set up Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

The problems of the youth estate go way beyond G4S, however, which is why the chief inspector of prisons has called for an inquiry into the failings at Medway and the implications for the wider youth justice system.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Lady makes an entirely fair point. I do not deny the scale of the problem revealed in the statistics that she and her hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith deployed. The National Offender Management Service runs a violence reduction programme that involves studying precisely why there has been this upsurge in violence. Factors, which have been acknowledged by Members on both sides of the House, have contributed to that. One is the pattern of offenders. Prisons contain more people who have been convicted of violent and other challenging offences. It is also the case that the spread of new psychoactive substances—which have been misleadingly called “legal highs”, but which the Under-Secretary has more accurately termed “lethal highs”—has contributed to a lack of self-control and to psychosis, increased mental health problems and violence in our prison system. We must make some difficult choices to ensure that we limit the currently widespread availability of those drugs, and also keep people safe in our prisons. I shall talk about one or two of those choices shortly.

I agree that we face a problem—let me emphasise that—but I do not wish to use the word “crisis”, for two reasons. First, I think that it has the potential to undermine the morale of the people who work in our prisons. Secondly, I think that it might draw attention away from the incremental changes that we need to make, which can add up to a significant programme of prison reform. If we allow ourselves to be panicked by headlines and scared into overreaction, we may not be able to take the solid incremental steps that we need to take if we are to improve the present situation.

I was struck by the concern expressed by the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) about prison staff numbers. Those of us who care about not just the safety of staff but the effectiveness of the prison regime are understandably keen for our prisons to be staffed effectively, but let me make two points. First, the number of prison officers has increased by more than 500 in the last year. Secondly, there is no absolute correlation between the number of prison officers and the nature of the regime, and the number of violent incidents. I do not deny for a moment that we need to ensure that prisons are properly staffed and prison officers are safe, but the extent of the security that individuals enjoy in a prison is a consequence of a number of factors.

[Steve Rotheram]

The Secretary of State is absolutely right. Not only should there be safe staffing levels, but we have a duty of care to ensure that that is the case. However, it was Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons, not me, who identified the correlation between low staff numbers and the propensity for drug-taking on the prison estate.

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that, if we are to deal with this problem, we must be vigilant in ensuring that we have not just staff but the training that is needed to support them.

The hon. Gentleman’s mention of the chief inspector of prisons gives me an opportunity to repeat what I had a chance to say only briefly yesterday, and again to express my gratitude to Nick Hardwick for the role that he has played. His latest annual report certainly does not make comfortable reading for someone in my job, but I would far rather have someone who told us the truth, and ensured that we performed our duties as elected representatives and as Ministers in the full knowledge of the truth, than someone who felt, for whatever reason, that they had to varnish or edit the truth. As I think most people would acknowledge, Nick Hardwick and I do not come from exactly the same point on the ideological spectrum, but because I am committed to using every talented voice and experienced pair of hands that I can find in order to improve our prison system, I am delighted that he accepted my invitation to chair the Parole Board.

It is understandable that, during an Opposition day debate, the hon. Member for Hammersmith should point the finger at failings that he alleges are unique to the Conservatives, and it is understandable that he should focus on the trends and statistics that appear to have worsened under a Conservative Government. However, it is also appropriate to recognise that, as was pointed out by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier), there were problems under Labour as well. For example, the incidence of reoffending—which I think provides a real index of the effectiveness of our prisons—is broadly unchanged. I do not say that because I want to make a partisan point; I say it merely because I want to emphasise the difficulties that we all face in improving our prison and probation service. In 2009, 46.9% of those who served custodial sentences went on to reoffend. The figure is now 45.1%. If I wanted to make a partisan point, I would say that the number of reoffenders had declined, but in fact the difference is statistically insignificant, and it is a reproach to all of us.