Prisons and Courts Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Suella Braverman and Holly Lynch

Committee Debate: 1st Sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 28th March 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Suella Fernandes]

Q My second point I would like to raise with all members of the panel relates to health and mental health provision in the Bill and also in the White Paper. In those, there is considerable detail on how governors can work together with the local clinical commissioning group or other health providers to assess the health needs of prisoners, co-commission services and assess quality of performance, instilling a bit more responsibility and flexibility in the system to safeguard health and mental health concerns. I would like the panel’s views on the mental health and health provisions.

Joe Simpson: When you are bound to outside agencies, especially in prisons, they are not there 24/7. The only people who are there 24/7 are prison officers and prison staff. One thing that we are going on from mental health is also social care in prisons. We have a lot of older prisoners who need more social care. Between the hours of 7 o’clock at night until 7 o’clock the next morning, they do not have access to that, and we do not have access to that as prison staff. We have no training whatever in order to assist prisoners who have those needs.

Mental health and health wellbeing should start on reception at the prison, when the prison officer brings the prisoner into prison, goes through the reception process and then passes them on to our colleagues for the mental health check. From that should come a plan of care, but that is not there, for the simple reason of time—“Let’s get them through because staff need to get off,” or, “We need to do this; we need to do that.” It is constant pressure on the regime and having the staffing available to do that.

If you are dependent on an outside agency that has its own staffing problems, it is not going to be done. That is the frustrating part from our members’ side. They identify a problem and nothing seems to be done for two or three days because we cannot get that expertise in. Why not utilise the person who is already there—the prison officer—and train them to do those duties, so that we can give better mental health care and increase wellbeing?

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

Q May I return to the issue of prison officer safety? I have tabled some new clauses that I hope will be helpful in that regard. On Second Reading, we touched on the issue of a prison officer being assaulted in prison by a prisoner. Is that referred to the police, followed up by the Crown Prosecution Service and taken to court, or is it dealt with internally within the prison? What is your experience of the decision making around that process, and what would be the preference of the Prison Officers Association for dealing with those types of incidents?

Joe Simpson: Our view is that somebody who assaults our members should be punished. As for the question of who does that, we are not really bothered. Our experience, and my members’ experience, of the police and CPS is actually getting a policeman in to do the investigation. More often than not, what comes back from the CPS is that it is not in the public interest, because that person is serving a sentence and in prison anyway. That demoralises our members. They feel as if they go to work and they are just punchbags. There was a big campaign by the trade union to try to change people’s thinking on that, because we work behind a wall—people do not look in and we do not look out. We would like our members to be protected by the law and to be taken seriously when they are assaulted at work.

Some incidents are serious physical assaults, but you also have to look at the mental aspects, especially in relation to spitting and biting. Let us say that a prison officer is bitten. We do not know the prisoner’s history. We do not know whether they have any blood-borne disease or anything like that. The officer then has to spend six months on antiviral treatment and everything like that, and along with that goes the mental anguish, not just for the member of staff, but for their family, because they cannot interact properly with their family for six months. That leads to its own problems: high rates of divorce, cases of alcoholism and people just not wanting to come to work. That develops into mental health problems. While they are in the service, they are looked after, but once they are dismissed by the service, all that assistance stops, because the employer turns round and says, “Well, we’re no longer responsible for that care.” Sometimes we are putting really poorly and ill prison officers back into society with no assistance whatever, because of something that has happened in the course of their work.

One of the most disgusting things ever is potting. It is especially the female members of staff who are targeted. A prisoner or prisoners will fill a bucket or whatever with excrement and urine, wait for the officer and then tip it over them. We are seeing an increase in that, because prisoners seem to think that it is more acceptable than hitting a member of staff or hitting a female member of staff. They still see that as a bit of a taboo subject, but that is starting to break down. They are not just targeting male staff; they are now targeting female staff as well, especially with potting, which is absolutely disgusting.