Prison Safety and Security

Yasmin Qureshi Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2016 Westminster Hall

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall. May I start by echoing the sentiments of the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Richard Arkless) and paying tribute to the hard work of our prison officers, who face daily dangers and carry out valuable work? I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) for securing today’s timely and important debate, which I am pleased to be able to respond to. Given his experience as a Justice Minister and a member of the Justice Committee, his views on the current situation and what must be done are most welcome.

There is clearly an agreement that the current prison system is not acceptable. My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), a member of the Justice Committee, highlighted additional areas of concern, such as IPP prisoners. The state of our prisons and the growing levels of violence shame our nation.

Prisons are becoming increasingly volatile and dangerous environments for both staff and prisoners. In the 12 months to June 2016, there have been nearly 6,000 assaults on staff, 24,000 prisoner-on-prisoner assaults and 105 self-inflicted deaths of prisoners, an increase of 13% from the previous year. There are 6,000 fewer officers on the frontline than in 2010. Ministry of Justice statistics show that poor mental health and distress among prisoners is higher than among the general public. Incidents of self-harm in prison have increased by over 25% in 2016 from the previous year.

Nick Hardwick, the former chief inspector of prisons, has said that prisons are at their worst level for a decade. We have seen riots breaking out at Her Majesty’s prisons Moorland and Bedford and prisoners escaping from Pentonville. While the prison staff and the tornado teams who deal with these incidents should be commended, it is clear that prison conditions are simply not good enough. Violence continues to increase and safety continues to decrease.

The austerity experiment on our prisons has failed. Working in prisons has become less appealing and more dangerous. The presence of fewer officers, who are overstretched and overwhelmed, means a stricter and increasingly unsafe prison regime. It means that prisons cannot effectively reform and rehabilitate in the way that prisoners and wider society need.

Staff shortages meant that a prisoner was not allowed out to visit his dying mother. He was allowed a phone call, but it was too late; his mother’s life support machine had already been turned off. It has still not been confirmed whether he will be allowed to attend her funeral. Again, that is the result of staff shortages. When questioned on that issue at the Justice Committee on Tuesday, Michael Spurr of NOMS was not even aware of the incident. Will the Minister confirm when he became aware of that incident? How often do such incidents take place in our prisons?

Front-line prison officers leaving their jobs outstripped new recruits over the past year. Almost 14% of prison officers leave the prison after serving less than 12 months. The Government have failed to explain how they will deal with the problem of retention. Even more alarmingly, it appears that the number of deaths will not form any part of the assessment of how safe a prison is.

[Mr Gyimah]

On that point about whether the number of deaths will form part of how prisons are evaluated under our reform programme, I refer the hon. Lady to the White Paper. It explicitly says that under safety, deaths in a prison will be one of the outcomes looked at.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I thank the Minister for that clarification.

Some 324 people have died in prison this year so far, which includes 107 suicides. It appears that assaults on prison officers by prisoners are not being appropriately dealt with. Although the Minister has said there is “swift justice”, and although we welcome a zero-tolerance approach to violence, it is increasingly clear that prison officers do not feel safe at work. Has there been any consideration of what impact consecutive sentences for assault will have on prison capacity and overcrowding?

It is clear that a range of hugely complex issues need to be considered in order to reform the prison system. While I welcome prison reform, I am afraid that the Government’s White Paper does not provide the rapid action that our prison system so urgently needs and has long asked for. It is a matter of particular concern that despite a sustained recruitment exercise, described by one Minister as going at “full throttle”, the net increase in public sector prison officers was only 440 last year.

While the commitment to increase the number of prison officers by 2,500 is much needed, it is not a cause for celebration. Four hundred of those jobs have already been announced, and it is 2,500 extra after a reduction of more than 6,000 on the frontline. Where will the first 400 go? How will they be allocated to prisons? How were the 10 most challenging prisons identified? They do not appear to be among the worst prisons for violence and self-harm. As it stands, this is far from being the biggest overhaul of our prisons in a generation.

The lack of detail in the White Paper is worrying. It is difficult to believe that these proposals have been fully thought out. Instead, they seem to have been hastily assembled. That is indicative of the lack of detail in the Ministry’s proposals on, for example, mandatory drug-testing. We are told that the drug testing regime will be enhanced,

“supporting governors to enable drug testing on entry to and exit from prison as part of a more extensive testing programme, increasing the frequency and range of drugs tested for”.

Putting aside whether mandatory drug testing has proved effective, given the widespread availability of drugs in prisons, that could add thousands more tests each year, but there is no analysis of the impact on cost and staff resources, especially as both are in short supply.

[Mr Gyimah]

The hon. Lady seems to be disagreeing with a lot of the proposals in the White Paper. Can she tell us what she would do instead to sort out our prisons?

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I am not disagreeing with the White Paper; I am saying that it fails to deal with a lot of issues. There are a lot of unanswered questions in it. On one level, the Government want there to be more drug testing, but the question we are asking is: what about the impact on staff and resources? The White Paper singularly fails to provide answers on the details. For example, it says there will be rehabilitation and education programmes, but who will provide those? Where will the money come from? Will there be an unlimited pot? A number of issues are not clear in the White Paper. I look forward over the course of the next few months to hearing how the Department will deal with those issues.

What do the Government think they will learn from testing on entry and release, given that prisoners will most likely simply avoid drug taking in the run-up to those periods? The argument that counting the problem—and not even counting the problem in a particularly robust way—is the same as dealing with it seems unrealistic, at best.

Overcrowding is another issue contributing to the level of violence in prisons. As of July 2016, 76 prisons—just over 60%—were overcrowded. Overcrowded prisons held 9,700 more prisoners than they were designed to hold.

The White Paper sets out a programme for building new prisons, but also points to more prison closures. Since coming to power in 2010, the Government have announced the closure of many prisons, with a combined operational capacity of over 4,100. Again, the Government’s policy is muddled. Are they trying to build their way out of overcrowding or will they address the number of prisoners coming into the system?

Finally, we all acknowledge that the prison system is no longer working and is increasingly unsafe. The Justice Secretary continues to say that prison reform is a priority, but the level of violence in prisons has not even stabilised, let alone begun to improve. Urgent action is needed now, not in a few months or a few years. The matter goes beyond politics. Livelihoods are at stake and lives are at stake, and the fact that we have unsafe prisons must not be ignored.

One of the main reasons why prisons are unsafe is the number of prison officers who were made redundant and the reduction in their number. We have been told that we need at least 8,000 prison officers to deal with prison safety and prison issues. The Government do not seem to have got anywhere near achieving that. Will the Minister think about the prison officers who have been made redundant? Has there been any consideration of the idea of re-employing them, even temporarily? The Government say they are trying to deal with the matter, but if they had not cut the number of prison officers in the first place, we would not be in the mess we are now in.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gyimah]

Obviously, private prisons determine pay and conditions. The deal we have agreed is for members of the Prison Officers Association in bands 3 to 5. I will write to the right hon. Lady with more details.

I echo the concerns raised by the right hon. Member for Delyn on this important topic. I hope the new money we secured for staffing, the new money for the Ministry of Justice and now the new deal on pay, pensions and health and safety indicate that, as I said in my intervention, our interest is long not just on aspiration. We are determined to deliver. This is all happening in the four months the new team has been in post.

The right hon. Gentleman rightly challenged us on the White Paper and on providing concrete plans to tackle drugs, phones, recruitment and the old Victorian estate. We have announced a comprehensive plan to tackle these and other crucial components of the prison system. Despite the inevitable time lag—it will take time because some of the problems have been long in the making and did not arise overnight—we are working to make sure that what can be delivered today will be delivered, and we are confident that we will see lasting benefits in the coming months and years.

As we set out in the White Paper last month, we will invest £100 million to recruit an additional 2,500 staff. Reference has been made several times to the number of staff in 2010, but we have closed 18 prisons and secure detention centres since that date. More importantly, our desire to recruit 2,500 extra staff is based on evidence. We want to create a system in which every prison officer handles the cases of six prisoners. That is what we call the new offender management model, which was recommended in the Harris review, which Members have mentioned. We are implementing it via our new staffing model.

The investment will provide the capacity for prison officers to play a dedicated officer role and to build constructive relationships. As the former prisons Minister is aware, we are talking about a people business: it is about relationships and about prison officers being able to listen prisoners’ frustrations, to diffuse tensions and ultimately to reduce the level of violence. That is a vital component of our plan to stabilise and then decrease the level of violence, self-harm and suicide, as well reforming offenders more generally. With nearly half of all offenders going on to commit crime within a year of being released, we believe that giving each prisoner a dedicated officer will help prisoners to turn away from crime in the long term.

We recognise the challenge in recruiting an extra 2,500 staff. That is why, as I told the Select Committee, we will launch a number of initiatives to help us to do that.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

The Minister says that 2,500 extra staff will be employed, but achieving the things that he has mentioned will require far more than 2,500 prison staff.

[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.