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"the Home Office is warming to the idea of giving the sites to private developers in return from them building smaller, privately managed remand centres nearer the crown Courts".

Obviously New Builder has some insight into what is going on in the Tory party and its relationship with the building industry. It makes absolutely fascinating reading.

Conservatives may argue that, although the Woolf report concludes that the prison system is in an appalling state and in need of change, the Labour party is being a dog in the manger because it will not go along with the Tory party's insights into how to change such dreadful conditions in our prisons. Such an argument is a red herring. The Woolf report should lead to a radical improvement of the present prison system, not the development of a few brand new prestigious private prisons.

We believe that the state of the penal system is too important to deal with on party political grounds. The future penal system should be agreed upon by the two parties and the Woolf report should be agreed upon by the two parties, and the Woolf report should be the basis of that agreement. If the Conservative Government could bury their ideological hang-up on privatisation of prisons, they would discover that there was enormous support for policies that would radicalise our present penal system.

It is important to note the poisonous effect that the obsession with privatisation will have on the men and women working in the prison service. Such privatisation is opposed by everyone who works in the prison service-- certainly the prison governors do not want it. In that connection, how on earth could Ministers introduce an amendment in January concerning what the press described as "flying governors"? No matter how the wonderful private remand centres or prisons are extolled by the Government, it seems that, when a riot takes place, they cannot cope.

The Government suddenly introduced an amendment to provide that a governor from a proper prison in the public sector would be flown in at a moment's notice to deal with any crisis. That is bad enough in itself, but the Government did not consult the governors about that proposal. I understand that the Minister had met representatives from the Prison Governors Association only a couple of days before, but no mention was made then of that proposal. That is a strange way in which to deal with the professionals who run our prison service. The right hon. Lady should think again before she opens the door a bit more to the amendment tabled by the right of her party. On reflection, she will appreciate that it represents a dangerous path. Such a privatisation measure could sink the one opportunity we have to catch up with the civilised part of the world on penal policy.

Mr. Bruce George (Walsall, South) : I should not think that many hon. Members or people outside believe that our prison service is anything other than a national disgrace. It is not right simply to point the finger of guilt at the present Government, as the deficiencies within the prison system did not start in 1979--the blame must go back many generations.

In the past 11 years, the Government have had opportunities to make the necessary reforms, and some things have been done that I applaud wholeheartedly. It is regrettable, however, that in typically British fashion it took a crisis in the prison service--the riots--to precipitate the encyclopaedic report that was presented to us today.

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Just because matters are in crisis does not mean that we should move to an aberrant system that is shifting, however incrementally, to a system of private prisons. I believe that Woolf and Tumim have pointed the way and that, if the Government, and future Governments, are prepared to devote resources and provide the political support, we shall have a prison system about which we need not feel a deep sense of shame. If Ministers were asked to take foreign visitors round many of our city-centre prisons, built in the previous century, I am sure that they would refuse to do so. No person of any compassion could feel anything but acute embarrassment at visiting many of our city-centre prisons.

The state of such prisons is no criticism of prison officers, who cannot like to work in such an environment. At least prisoners are in and out in a set time in most cases, but prison officers must spend much of their careers in that dreadful environment and in many senses the effect is degenerative. In passing, I pay a tremendous tribute to the men and women of the prison service who have been engaged to work for many years in adverse surroundings.

We all know that there is much scope for improving the system, but we tend to forget that there is much in the prison service that is experimental and innovative and about which we need not feel the same sense of humiliation. We need to build on those positive elements of the prison service. Lord Justice Woolf has pointed the way in which Governments must go. I cannot accept, however, that even a limited experiment with privatisation is worthy of anything other than condemnation. If by some misfortune the Government accept the amendment, more than a simple experiment would be involved, because that experiment will lead to a mushrooming of private prisons. That cannot be endorsed.

I support many reforms in the prison service and many of the alternatives to prison, but there will always be a place for prisons. I do not belong to the utopian wing of my party, which believes that if only we provided good opportunities for people they would not commit crimes, and that we must create alternatives to prison for almost all who would otherwise go there. That is nonsense. There are people who need punishment, which should be paralleled by a reforming element. So let us reform, but let us not indulge in this nonsense. I should have thought that the privatisation mania to which we have been subjected had run its course. Perhaps the Government have been tempted to support plans for more privatisation than we had expected to prove to some of their supporters outside, who may be feeling depressed about how the Government have evolved in the past couple of months, that there is still a strong ideological commitment to privatisation and to some of the dottier ideas of the past 10 years. Without wanting to insult friends in the academic world, I must point out that such ideas should have been confined to professors' offices ; but now, because of the peculiarities of the political system, they have been enshrined in legislation of which we are suffering the consequences.

I am not opposed to all forms of privatisation. As I said in Committee, I would not fight to the death to return some privatised companies to the private sector. Some concerns will inevitably remain outside public control, but I cannot concede that privatising the prisons is anything more than an idea supported by the more dotty Members

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of the House. I had hoped that privatisation of the prisons was just the death rattle of the ideological passions of the 1980s, but perhaps my assessment was too optimistic.

Privatisation of the prisons can come in many guises : in the form of contracting out services such as catering or cleaning ; and in the form of allowing contractors to build, manage and operate. There is no single model for privatisation.

Why are private prisons to be inflicted on us? They may be a consequence of the ideologically impoverished seeking inspiration from other societies that have gone through the process and picking up their ideas, running them across the Atlantic and trying to translate them, in their feeble way, into British clones of the American experiment. Many of the perceptions of the success of the privatised prisons in the United States have been based on simplistic analyses. The Select Committee on Home Affairs investigated private prisons, and the aspects of its report that relate to private prisons contain more of the ethos of the political pamphlet than the ring of a serious report by a Select Committee.

8.15 pm

The report by Mr. Young for the Adam Smith Institute was also based on limited research experience. Extrapolating on the basis of limited experience, the report judged, wrongly, that the experiment had been successsful in the United States.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) said earlier, the experiment in the United States has been too limited. An excellent book recently published by Ryan and Ward on private prisons in America and on whether the American experience has any relevance to us states :

"The American experience of privatising the delivery of punishment overall in the United States is both uneven and limited. It is uneven in that it is more prevalent in the south ... more common in the juvenile sector than in adult corrections ; more likely to apply to service delivery than to ownership and/or management."

So that research has shown that the experiment in the United States has been limited, and we should not draw the wrong conclusions from it. The Adam Smith Institute, which is closely connected with the Heritage Foundation in the United States, has praised a system that is undeserving of eulogy. Mr. Young could see no evil in the private sector and was unwilling to see Governments do anything in the prison sector free from his criticism.

The Select Committee that visited the United States produced a political report. By that I do not mean to criticise its Chairman, who has not attempted to hide his close connection with the private security industry. He has been an able proponent of the private prison system, and his predecessor as Chairman--this is also a matter of public record--now serves as chairman of an organisation that is considering building private prisons.

The Home Affairs Select Committee did not perform a good service for the House. I am appalled by the idea of a prison industry, by the idea of the state delegating responsibility for punishment to the private sector and by the idea of prisons being run for profit. I fear that a private prison system will be largely unaccountable. It will not deliver the nirvana that some of its proponents argue it will places where the food is great, where warders run around not dressed in uniform and where wonderful recreational facilities abound : in short, places not unlike Hi-de-hi holiday camps. That is all an illusion.

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On the basis of my experience of the private security industry, I must conclude that the private sector is ill equipped to manage, run and staff prisons. I shall discuss later why I believe that. Bidding for contracts can mean only that good companies will be driven down to the lower level of their competitors. Staff salaries will suffer, as will staff training. We shall not begin to reach the stage recommended by Lord Justice Woolf. He has argued that, although the standard of training in the United Kingdom could be described as reasonable, we must aim for higher standards. The Netherlands may provide us with a model.

Our standards of training are already light years ahead of those in almost every private security company. If the private sector cannot remotely match even the present system of training, which Woolf has argued is inadequate, I cannot believe that it will have either the resources or the enthusiasm to emulate the standards that he requires of prison officers in both sectors.

I hoped that the Bill would merely introduce a narrow experiment and that, when that experiment had been properly evaluated, it would be allowed to die the death. I fear, however, that the Government have other things in mind ; and I deplore that.

Mr. Maclennan : The case in principle against the clause has already been adequately deployed, and I do not propose to continue with that line of argument. I wish the Minister to explain how she expects the clause and the amendment--with which she is rumoured to be sympathetic--to fit in with the Woolf recommendations for remand prisons.

In my view, both the clause and the amendment are inconsistent with the purposes of the Woolf report ; moreover, they make the achievement of the ends recommended in that report--after careful consideration--much more difficult. According to Woolf,

"the inquiry has concentrated particularly on the position of remand prisoners. This is because they represent a significant proportion of the prison population, and because they unjustly suffer some of the worst conditions in the prison system To emphasise the importance of these matters, the inquiry recommends that there should be a separate statement of purpose setting out the prison service's responsibilities relating to remand prisoners. This statement of purpose should reflect the principle that remand prisoners should normally be accommodated, treated and managed separately from convicted prisoners."

That, surely, is a profoundly important recommendation. How does the clause fit in with it? It seems to want to establish a bifurcation in the custodial treatment of remand prisoners. At least the original clause did not intend all of them to be subject to privately contracted arrangements ; but, if the Woolf recommendations apply to the prison service, they will presumably have to apply, and be monitored, in the private sector, which strikes me as a bizarre administrative approach.

Woolf went on to consider the problems of remand prisoners in much more detail. On page 250, in paragraph 10.79, he wrote :

"The many initiatives which have been taken in recent years to try to tackle the problem created by the size of the remand population have on the whole been successful. Indeed the scale of their success suggests that there were, and almost certainly still are, a substantial number of people remanded in custody who should not be in prison The problems created by the unnecessary remands need to be tackled from a number of different directions. Each involves co-operation between the Courts, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Probation Service and the Prison Service."

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If the clause and the amendment are passed, a fifth wheel will be added. Similar co-operation will be needed with the private sector, involving a separate series of relationships. I believe that that will confound the present administrative confusion, in the part of the prison system in which the greatest problems are widely recognised to exist.

We must judge the appropriateness of the clause and the amendment by whether the tests recommended by Woolf are more or less likely to be met. On page 327, in paragraph 12.309, Woolf suggests

"Accredited Standards for remand centres".

That will mean a set of separate tests and monitoring arrangements to find out whether the privatised service is operating effectively, which cannot make sense.

The whole report reflects considerable disquiet about the management of the remand population. Woolf diagnoses that as stemming in part from the assumptions that are made about the degree of security that all remand prisoners require. The privatisation proposal strikes me as, at best, irrelevant to the solution of the problems described so cogently by Woolf, and, at worst, likely to make the task of eliminating them much more difficult.

As well as recommending the implementation of certain broad principles, Woolf suggested that helpful guidance would be provided by the proposals in the Prison Reform Trust's publication about regimes for remand prisoners, by Dr. Sylvia Casale and Miss Joyce Plotnikov. Will that helpful guidance be required of those who run the private sector? It is difficult to explain or justify a bifurcation of the system in a sector that has had so many problems, leading to--admittedly--so much unfortunate practice.

It is not as though the Government were proposing a "pure" privatisation. Those who run the prisons will have to operate according to rules and regulations established by Government ; the controller, for instance, will be a Crown servant. This is an example of gesture politics on the part of Home Office Ministers who are trying to placate the holders of an uninformed view within their own party, which carries no support outside that party and which the Government would be wise to reject. They now have the perfect reason not to act ; indeed, if they accept the amendment, it will be seen as a pre-emption of the Woolf recommendations--as, indeed, thumbing their nose at recommendations, and a pretty contemptuous approach to some serious suggestions. That would be highly unfortunate.

8.30 pm

Mrs. Rumbold : In Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway) moved several amendments to clause 66 that would have been rather more dramatic in their effect than amendment No. 116. Perhaps he listened carefully to the debate and to the comments of our hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr. Stevens), who said that, if we want to extend clause 66, which applies only to remand prisoners, we should proceed cautiously and step by step to ensure that contracting out is not only acceptable to the Home Secretary and the Government but an effective means of managing prisons. My hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale said that, if the Government accepted the amendment, that was the way in which he would expect us to proceed.

The Wolds is the only remand prison that can be contracted out under clause 66, which the Government are

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minded to enact. The hon. Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George) expressed concern about private prisons being a dreadful failure or an aberration. My hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale is saying only that, if it is proved that they can be effectively managed by the private sector, the Government, having carefully considered the implications and ramifications, might extend that proposal to, for example, a young offenders' institution. That is a reasonable proposition for the House to consider.

We have had a long and considered debate. The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) made the Labour party's position clear. It opposes the private sector being involved in the running of prisons. I understand that, but I do not necessarily agree with the ideological point that the prison service can be run only by the public sector. I do not accept that only the public sector should be responsible for the management of prisons.

The debate is being held on the day when the Wolff recommendations became public. I reaffirm--I hope that the hon. Member for Huddersfield accepts this in the spirit in which he made his comments to me--that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and I, and indeed the whole Government, are committed to improving the prison service. I do not agree with the suggestion by the hon. Member for Huddersfield that the Government have tried to improve the prison service simply "by throwing money at it", although since 1979 much public sector money has been spent on improving prison service establishments, which were in a distressful state.

As the hon. Gentleman rightly said, only three years ago, our prisons were full and it was not possible to refurbish them. We therefore opened eight new prisons, and will open a further 12 in the next few years. Coupled with the decision that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State announced today to end slopping out by 1994, that will contribute to achieving the important target of reforming the prison regime. If a prisoner must slop out four times a day, it does not help to establish a good regime under which he can undergo a sensible education, work and training programme.

Mr. Sheerman : The right hon. Lady has delicately avoided giving a firm commitment to implement the Woolf recommendations, which is what Labour Members have been waiting to hear.

Mrs. Rumbold : The hon. Gentleman has already received an answer. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary announced a package of measures to implement immediately a major part of the Woolf recommendations. As the report was published only today, he reasonably said that many of its recommendations will be considered for inclusion in a White Paper. No Government, of whatever political persuasion, could have done more than my right hon. Friend. I must confess to the hon. Member for Huddersfield that New Builder is not my early morning or bed-time reading. Perhaps I should ensure that I read it as well as Punch, the Spectator and The Economist. I must also confess that I do not yet read the New Statesman and Society.

Mr. Sheerman : What about Christopher Robin?

Mrs. Rumbold : As all my hon. Friends know, Christopher Robin is a favourite of mine.

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The hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) suggested that clause 66 and the amendments would be incompatible with the Woolf recommendations. I do not share that view. I do not see why private remand centres, which perhaps would use different methods but would have the same aims, could not operate successfully. They would operate under contract to the Home Office. I do not see why co- operation with other parts of the criminal justice system would be more difficult under these proposals.

Mr. John Greenway : Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Woolf recommendation to segregate remand prisoners within the prison regime was the basis of the recommendation of the Home Affairs Select Committee on private sector involvement in the remand system?

Mrs. Rumbold : My hon. Friend is correct. The Government are taking the first step in considering contracting out a remand prison. We believe that this opportunity will not easily arise again. As my hon. Friend the Member for Southend, East (Mr. Taylor) said, this is a chink of light. If, and only if, the contracted-out remand centre proves to be a success might we move towards privatisation of other parts of the prison service. The House should accept the amendment. Question put, That the amendment be made :--

The House divided : Ayes 258, Noes 174.

Division No. 79] [8.41 pm

AYES

Aitken, Jonathan

Alexander, Richard

Alison, Rt Hon Michael

Allason, Rupert

Amery, Rt Hon Julian

Amess, David

Amos, Alan

Arbuthnot, James

Arnold, Jacques (Gravesham)

Ashby, David

Atkinson, David

Baker, Rt Hon K. (Mole Valley)

Baker, Nicholas (Dorset N)

Banks, Robert (Harrogate)

Batiste, Spencer

Beaumont-Dark, Anthony

Beggs, Roy

Bellingham, Henry

Bendall, Vivian

Bennett, Nicholas (Pembroke)

Bevan, David Gilroy

Biffen, Rt Hon John

Blackburn, Dr John G.

Blaker, Rt Hon Sir Peter

Body, Sir Richard

Bonsor, Sir Nicholas

Boscawen, Hon Robert

Bottomley, Peter

Bowden, A (Brighton K'pto'n)

Bowden, Gerald (Dulwich)

Bowis, John

Boyson, Rt Hon Dr Sir Rhodes

Brazier, Julian

Bright, Graham

Brown, Michael (Brigg & Cl't's)

Browne, John (Winchester)

Bruce, Ian (Dorset South)

Buck, Sir Antony

Budgen, Nicholas

Burns, Simon

Butler, Chris

Butterfill, John

Carlisle, John, (Luton N)

Carlisle, Kenneth (Lincoln)

Carrington, Matthew

Carttiss, Michael

Cash, William

Chalker, Rt Hon Mrs Lynda

Channon, Rt Hon Paul

Chapman, Sydney

Chope, Christopher

Churchill, Mr

Clark, Rt Hon Alan (Plymouth)

Clark, Dr Michael (Rochford)

Clark, Rt Hon Sir William

Colvin, Michael

Coombs, Simon (Swindon)

Cope, Rt Hon John

Cormack, Patrick

Couchman, James

Curry, David

Davies, Q. (Stamf'd & Spald'g)

Davis, David (Boothferry)

Day, Stephen

Devlin, Tim

Dickens, Geoffrey

Dicks, Terry

Dorrell, Stephen

Douglas-Hamilton, Lord James

Dover, Den

Dunn, Bob

Durant, Sir Anthony

Eggar, Tim

Fairbairn, Sir Nicholas

Fallon, Michael

Favell, Tony

Fenner, Dame Peggy

Field, Barry (Isle of Wight)

Finsberg, Sir Geoffrey

Fookes, Dame Janet

Forman, Nigel

Fowler, Rt Hon Sir Norman

Franks, Cecil

Freeman, Roger

French, Douglas

Gale, Roger

Gardiner, Sir George

Gill, Christopher

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