House of Commons
Wednesday 12 May 1999
The House met at half-past Nine o'clock
PRAYERS
[Madam Speaker in the Chair]
Prison Service
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. Hanson.]
9.33 am
Mr. A. J. Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed): The purpose of this debate is to raise in the House some of the wide concerns about the management of the Prison Service, especially those concerns highlighted in the reports of the chief inspector of prisons. I seek a response from the Government to those concerns and to some of the ideas that I will advance.
As of last Friday, the Prison Service held 64,238 prisoners in 127 directly managed establishments and in seven prisons run by private sector companies. I have chosen not to debate the issue of private prisons on this occasion, but we believe strongly, on principle, that the state should not deprive people of liberty and then hand the key to the private sector. However, that does not mean that private sector prisons cannot be managed well, and we can learn some lessons from them. I shall briefly explore that issue later.
The Prison Service employs about 40,000 staff in the prisons that it manages directly and the operating costs of the service total about £1.7 billion. A service of that size must be managed as effectively as possible and must achieve its stated purposes, giving value for money.
I do not believe that the Prison Service is in decline. It has made considerable achievements in recent years under particularly stressful conditions, most notably--although not exclusively--in prison security and in reducing the number of escapes. That is not surprising, as all efforts have been directed at those areas. The chief inspector pays a particularly warm tribute to the work of the former director, Richard Tilt, who was the first director appointed from within the Prison Service. He took control of the service in difficult circumstances when morale hadbeen damaged dramatically and made significant improvements.
While criticising the management of the Prison Service, I acknowledge that friends and people whom I respect work at every level of the service, from prison officers to top management. I know the dedication and commitment that they demonstrate. However, the fact remains that there are significant problems and that something is seriously wrong with the management of the service.
Members of Parliament tend to know when something is wrong with organisations from the way in which individual cases are handled. I have had problems with the Prison Service over the years. While trying recently to secure the transfer of a prison officer from Scotland to
England, I discovered that the England and Wales Prison Service and the Scottish Prison Service have been in dispute over transfers since 1995, and that that dispute remains unresolved.
While pursuing another case involving a prison officer who I believe was wrongly dismissed and unjustly treated, I discovered that Prison Service headquarters had told a local authority inquiring about his reference that that man had never worked for the service. When such things happen, one begins to explore the situation more deeply. Those painful individual matters--the first has been resolved satisfactorily, but the second has not--cause concern, but I have many other reasons to be worried about the management of the Prison Service.
Many of my greatest and most obvious concerns date back to the closing years of the previous Government. The Prison Service will never forget the years when it was run "Howard's way". His was an era when the Home Secretary interfered in all aspects of the service, but was never prepared to take responsibility for it, especially if something went wrong--as it often did. The revelations of the then outgoing Minister of State, now the shadow Secretary of State for Health, the right hon. Memberfor Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe), confirmed all our worst fears about the then Home Secretary's approach to the management of the service.
However, the problems had begun even before that. The Woodcock report on the Whitemoor escapes stated:
A major theme of the report is the lack of consistency within the Prison Service. Service standards and conditions identified by the chief inspector vary greatly and include variations within the same category of prison establishment. With the exception of dispersal prisons, there appears to be considerable inconsistency of standards within each category of prison. Factors such as whether a prisoner's offending behaviour will be challenged through education, work or offending behaviour programmes, how much time prisoners spend locked in their cells and whether those cells are overcrowded depend upon which prison an offender is sent to.
Referring to young offender institutions, the chief inspector's report states:
The chief inspector suggests that the problem might have originated from the abolition of the Prison Commission in 1962 and the consequent Whitehall takeover of the management of prisons. He believes that from that point, the ethos has been wrong. The emphasis has been on a service to Ministers, rather than the delivery of required operational outcomes. I have always suspected that the Home Office's tendency to second-guess Prison Service decisions, or the fear that it will do so, blurs management responsibility and weakens managers.
The chief inspector does not blame individual operational directors, area managers or governors, but argues that the organisational structure needs reform. He contrasts the experience of dispersal prisons with the rest of the prison service. Dispersal prisons are under a single director with financial authority, so there is much greater direction and consistency, which contrasts with the geographically organised management of the rest of the Prison Service. He concludes that there should be much greater functional management of the service.
Recent changes have addressed some of those issues, but I share the chief inspector's concern that those reforms may not have gone far enough, and some aspects of them may create new problems. A positive step is the creation of a new position of director of regimes, as well as assistant directors for adult training, women prisoners and young offenders. However, the concern remains that, because there is not direct authority over all aspects in each of those areas, the necessary improvements will not be made.
The failure within young offenders' institutions is an example. Despite the Home Secretary's statements on improving the juvenile secure estate, senior operational managers were found to be failing to achieve their targets. The chief inspector said that, at Werrington, operational managers were sanctioning extensive doubling up in single cells and young people were being required to share cells with strangers on their first night in prison. At Feltham, conditions were even worse than when he had inspected the establishment two years earlier. He said:
The chief inspector has therefore repeated his call for greater direct functional management for aspects of the Prison Service, including making one person responsible for all aspects of individual functions, with the authority to allocate resources. The priority areas are women and young offenders, with one overall director needing to be responsible for all day-to-day activities in any prison in each of those categories. The Government have so far resisted that call, and I should like to know what their latest thinking is.
The chief inspector has also drawn attention to the fact that prison governors have extensive delegated powers over the budgets for their establishments, but also face a heavy bureaucratic load, which inhibits their ability to exercise leadership and remain in close contact with the prison. He says:
Part of the answer to improving management may be the extension of service delivery agreements within the Prison Service. We welcome that approach, which makes clear what is expected and how it is to be achieved, and that oversight of outcomes is needed. This is not, as I have said, the occasion for a debate on the ethics of the private management of prisons, about which we have concerns, but it is relevant to note private prisons' clear advantage, which we can learn from, which is that they are told precisely what is expected of them.
The Prison Service has a key regulatory role for private prisons, which do not always achieve their targets, as the long list of reduced contract payments demonstrates, but there are lessons to be learned from private management and the system by which those prisons' requirements are set. In the public sector, there needs to be proper assessment of the needs of each individual prison. Funding should follow needs more effectively, and reform should be based on that concept.
The biggest problem that the Prison Service faces is overcrowding. Excessive numbers not only lead to unacceptable conditions but undermine the work of the service. The focus becomes containment and security--keeping prisoners inside--instead of the more positive work that can be done. Overcrowding drains resources, reduces morale and undermines the capacity to undertake constructive work with offenders. It is understandably difficult to manage a service in which demands constantly outweigh resources. Overcrowding is a theme to which the chief inspector returns every year.
Overcrowding jams up the prison system. In theory, prisoners should move through categories of prisons by completing the required parts of their sentence at each level. However, the chief inspector points out that
According to the chief inspector, in the past year, local prisons were, on average, holding 26 per cent. more prisoners than they are resourced to hold. That category of prison is the greatest cause for anxiety because they are centres of inactivity and idleness. They have by far the highest suicide rate. Suicide is a major problem in the service. The figures for the first quarter of this year suggest that record numbers last year may be matched this year.
This country has 122 prisoners for every 100,000 people, compared with 110 in Spain, 90 in France and Germany, 85 in Italy and Holland, 80 in Belgium, 65 in Denmark, 60 in Sweden, 55 in Norway and 50 in Greece. Our prison population is well over double those of Greece and Norway. In the whole of western Europe, only Portugal jails a higher proportion of its population. We are similar to ex-communist countries in our rate of imprisonment.
Liberal Democrats have continually challenged the false argument that excessive use of prison sentences makes communities safer; it has the opposite effect because it maximises reoffending and consumes huge resources that could be used more effectively to protect the public. There seems to be a belief in the Home Office that the new community sentences in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, the introduction of home detention curfews and some lessening of the "lock 'em up" rhetoric will reduce the prison population to a more reasonable level, but there is no guarantee of that. We have yet to see
the results for the prison population of the Government's adoption of the previous Government's policy of mandatory sentencing.
Mandatory sentencing will not only affect those convicted of offences with mandatory sentences, but will almost certainly ratchet up other sentences when comparisons begin to be made between someone who gets a defined, mandatory sentence and someone whose offence seems to the courts and the public to be worse and more violent and therefore to demand a sentence greater than that for an offence carrying a mandatory sentence.
Overcrowding and excessive demands on the Prison Service have probably been directly responsible for the provisional figures for the results achieved against the key performance indicators, which were published in a parliamentary answer to me this week. Those figures demonstrate that the service has failed on five of the 11 targets. The areas where the Prison Service failed to meet the set targets were assaults, time out of cells, purposeful activity, completion of the sex offender treatment programme and cost per prisoner. Those are key areas. If we want to cut reoffending, good work now--in the provision of effective treatment for sex offenders and of constructive activity, and in cutting violence and bullying in prisons--is essential to help to protect the public in future.
Time does not allow for a detailed analysis of key performance indicators, although the chief inspector demonstrates that many of them are either false or misleading. He suggests that they would be more meaningful if, for example, they measured such things as the number of prisoners who have learned to read by the time that they are released.
Following the comprehensive spending review, the Government have allocated more money to the Prison Service, which is undoubtedly needed to sustain present demand. The figures that the Government use perhaps exaggerate the amount of extra money that the service will receive in real terms. Although the Home Office report refers to £49 million extra this year, £55 million next year and £56 million the following year, in real-term 1997-98 prices, we are talking about £3 million, £8 million and £7 million extra respectively. Having said that, the money is welcome in the Prison Service, and I see indications already of where it has been committed to valuable improvements.
"There exists at all levels within the Service some confusion as to the respective roles of Ministers, the Agency Headquarters and . . . Prison Governors. In particular, the Enquiry has identified the difficulty of determining what is an operational matter and what is policy, leading to confusion as to where responsibility lies."
The report made the further crushing observation:
"Any organisation which boasts one Statement of Purpose, one Vision, five Values, six Goals, seven Strategic Priorities and eight KPIs"--
key performance indicators--
"without any clear correlation between them, is producing a recipe for total confusion and exasperation amongst those undertaking a most difficult and dangerous task on behalf of the general public."
The new Home Secretary has rightly changed the management style that he inherited from his predecessor. He has stated clearly that he takes responsibility for the service, but his style is not one of constant and detailed interference. That is very welcome. It would be easy to assume that all the deficiencies in Prison Service management have been remedied, but the chief inspector's annual report makes it clear that serious long-term problems remain.
"We have continued to find some disgraceful examples of unacceptable treatment and conditions of children under the age of 18 and other young offenders, as well as some outstanding examples of good practice."
The reports on Feltham and Werrington understandably caused considerable alarm. The inspector also pointed out that Prison Service management is failing to identify the problems within prisons. He stated:
"Time and time again, my Inspectorate and I find ourselves reporting on matters that I believe should have been resolved by line management as a matter of course."
He continues:
"Unless senior management is ruthless in insisting on the maintenance of standards, never tolerating anything less than what is required, while recognising and enthusing over what is good, or better, no operational organisation can hope to succeed."
The chief inspector's conclusion is that the fundamental cause of those failures is that
"this organisation is inefficient, because it appears to be more about the management of financial resources than the oversight of operational delivery".
There must be something wrong with the management of a national service in which such contrasting results are achieved and significant problems are not identified by line management. That would not be acceptable in any other national service, and it should not be accepted in the Prison Service. There are varying circumstances for each Prison Service establishment, but that does not justify the results, which seem to be due to a failure in the organisation of line management.
"That senior line management in the Prison Service should even think that such conditions and treatment are appropriate, confirmed my fear that the Assistant Director of Regimes would be powerless to influence the day to day routines that are currently not her responsibility to fund, however much she might be able to design appropriate offending behaviour programmes."
The chief inspector gives the shocking example of HMP Brockhill, where, he says,
"disgracefully, we found that 80 per cent. of the uniformed staff were male, over a year after it had been converted to a women's prison."
He says that Holloway remains virtually unmanageable.
"To bog governors down in bureaucratic detail shows a lack of awareness of the load on them, and the fact that it is inhibiting their ability to walk their prisons is bound to have an effect on the operational performance of staff, which in turn affects the delivery of the operational aim."
There have been other recent reforms of the management system. The quinquennial review of the Prison Service has confirmed its agency status, which we have supported, but there have been further changes. A new strategy board is to be chaired by a Home Office Minister, Lord Williams of Mostyn, with the director general as his deputy, but there is also a separate Prison Service management board, which is chaired by the director general. There is concern that this unusual system of two overlapping boards will again blur the lines of responsibility in the Prison Service between operational and policy matters. How will that system work?
"this sensible procedure has been severely disrupted by the effects of overcrowding, the Prison Service having to operate at over capacity the whole time to ensure that every available bed-space is occupied."
It is welcome that the recent rapid rise in the prison population has decreased in the past year, but at more than 64,000 prisoners, it is stabilising at an overcrowded level. That is like saying to the inhabitants of various midlands towns, "It is all right, the floods will stay at about their present level, and they won't go up much more." The prison population is at a level above the Home Office's projection for this period.
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