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12.45 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State forthe Home Department (Mr. George Howarth): I congratulate the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) on securing this Adjournment debate and raising this important matter. The chief inspector of prisons, the board of visitors and others have raised serious concerns about the operation of Feltham young offenders institution, and I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising some of those concerns and for giving me the opportunity to respond to them.
I shall answer briefly the points that the hon. Gentleman raised in the concluding part of his speech. The first responsibility for Feltham or any other institution for that matter, lies with the Prison Service and the new Director General of the Prison Service, Martin Narey. Responsibility is then devolved through the area management structure to the governors. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary made it clear almost as soon as he came to office after the election that Ministers are no longer prepared to make an artificial division between policy and operations, and pretend that it is someone
else's fault. Unlike the previous Government, we accept that, in the final analysis, we are responsible for what goes on in the Prison Service. We take that responsibility very seriously.
The hon. Gentleman was kind enough to mention that I have visited the establishment. It is also significant that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State visited that institution on 13 February 1998, as did the then Minister of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth (Mr. Michael), on 6 April 1998. There has been a high level of ministerial interest in the establishment.
The chief inspector's report of his short, unannounced inspection of Feltham young offenders institution last December is highly critical--I have no wish to pretend otherwise. It is particularly critical of the fact that few of the recommendations in the chief inspector's report of the full inspection of Feltham, which took place in 1996, have been dealt with. My noble and learned Friend the Minister of State, the Home Secretary and I found aspects of that report shocking, and I well understand the anger and concern expressed by the hon. Member for Twickenham about what has been done and what needs to be done. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I do not cover in the time available all of the issues that he has raised. I give an undertaking to write to him about any of the areas that I am unable to touch upon.
The Prison Service and the Government are determined to turn the establishment around and to make further substantial progress on the serious concerns that have been raised. The newly appointed governor, Niall Clifford, who took up his post in April, and the new area manager responsible for Feltham have been charged with that task. However, in recognising the problems, we should not overlook the successes at Feltham as reported by the chief inspector. They include the Nightingale pre-release course and the Quail murder charge project, both of which received recognition recently in the form of Butler trust awards.
The chief inspector said that "virtually nothing" had been done to action the recommendations in the 1996 report. I do not believe that that statement is wholly true; nor do I accept that there has been a marked decline in conditions as suggested. However, it is true that progress has been too slow in improving conditions in some areas. Fundamental problems undoubtedly existed at Feltham, and the Prison Service published an action plan addressing all the chief inspector's recommendations--almost all of which were accepted in principle.
Some recommendations, however, would bevery resource intensive, and implementing all181 recommendations immediately would have been prohibitively expensive and, perhaps, physically impossible. Where action on recommendations was not taken, the reasons are almost without exception related to population pressures, to which the hon. Gentleman referred; funding and recruitment difficulties, or industrial relations issues. That said, some areas in Feltham have improved since the chief inspector's 1996 visit, and the additional resources that have been made available through the comprehensive spending review should, if they are used properly, ensure that further progress can now be made.
In response to the most recent inspection report, the Director General of the Prison Service established a task force, led by a senior governor when the report was made available to the Prison Service. The task force has charted a plan for improvement that we intend will be implemented over the next six months. To that end, an additional £320,000 was immediately made available for 1998-99 and a further £500,000 is available for1999-2000.
Further additional funding has been made available through the comprehensive spending review, and that includes £700,000 for extra education, the drugs strategy and a bail information scheme, all of which the hon. Gentleman mentioned. The drugs strategy and bail information scheme are particularly important. The Government have made available £2 million for a new regime for prisoners under the age of 18. The task force has also commissioned a scoping study to consider long-term problems and their underlying causes.
I shall turn now to the specific and important concerns raised by the chief inspector and echoed by the hon. Gentleman today. Concern was expressed by the chief inspector about the lack of practical support from senior Prison Service management. The director general has recently agreed in principle with the area manager an outline strategic development plan for Feltham which will not only directly address many of the chief inspector's concerns, but chart the establishment's direction for the next three years and provide for the separation of the site into dedicated under-18 and young offender establishments.
More specifically, the plan rightly addresses the treatment of remand prisoners and changes the way in which the Kestrel unit is operated to ensure, as far as possible, that remand prisoners return from court to the same unit and staff, thereby satisfying one of the major criticisms made by the chief inspector. The change in the operation of the Kestrel unit is planned to start on 7 June.
The strategic plan as a whole illustrates clearly the commitment that Prison Service managers are making to the future development of Feltham. The new area manager regularly visits the establishment to monitor progress on the action plan and, importantly, to lend support to the improvements that the new governor is already making.
The hon. Gentleman referred to hygiene. Conditions at Feltham are described by the chief inspector as disgracefully impoverished and filthy. The hon. Gentleman made a similar point in his speech. The general cleanliness of the establishment is being improved. Immediate improvements to cleaning schedules and mattress and blanket provision are in hand. Since December, 600 mattresses have been replaced and more are being made available. New cleaning schedules and arrangements for inspections have also been introduced to ensure that cleaning takes place, and senior managers have a direct role in those inspections. In addition, new laundry facilities are being made available at another prison. Funding was made available almost immediately to undertake a backlog of small repairs. It appears that the shower has been overlooked, but I hope that progress will now be made on that.
The hon. Gentleman referred to the level of regime at Feltham and time spent out of cell, which were covered in the chief inspector's report. As the hon. Gentleman conceded, Feltham, along with the rest of the prison
estate, has experienced pressure from the increase in the prison population, particularly the extra remand prisoners. That has inevitably put a strain on the provision of productive regimes for the young offenders in its care.
That said, the staffing and operation of some units requires improvements in certain areas, and the governor and Prison Service senior managers are working hard to achieve those. As a result, plans are well advanced to reduce the number of remand prisoners at Feltham by using accommodation soon to be available in other establishments closer to prisoners' home areas. That should also significantly reduce the number of prisoners sharing cells.
Efforts to improve time out of cell have also been affected by staffing problems, including an above-average level of sickness and difficulties in recruiting good-quality staff. Remedial action has been taken to improve recruitment at Feltham, and, as a result, 10 new officers started training in April.
Mr. Richard Allan (Sheffield, Hallam):
Some of us have been concerned because there seems to have been a slowdown in the provision of local authority secure accommodation for remand prisoners. The Minister just said that he expects more places to be available. Does that mean that more local authority secure accommodation will be coming on-stream?
Mr. Howarth:
If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I do not want to go into the facts and figures on that issue. I will perhaps respond to his question by letter. That lack of accommodation is clearly a problem, as he as pointed out, and we are trying to tackle it.
I have already mentioned that £2 million has been made available to provide a new regime for prisoners under the age of 18. I shall return to that matter on another occasion, when I will perhaps be able to deal with it in more detail.
Feltham is the only young offender remand centre serving London. The number of prisoners at Feltham has already been reduced by 57 to ease pressure on the
establishment and facilitate the opening of a new health care centre. The number of prisoners will be further reduced by at least 90 to allow for the refurbishment of other units and to end overcrowding. There will be an overall reduction in the proportion of remand prisoners as a result of a reduction in court catchment areas.
The Prison Service has for some years been looking for a site to ease the pressure on Feltham and has recently purchased a site next to Belmarsh prison. A planning application to build a young offender establishment serving east London and Essex is being taken forward. Unfortunately, however, it is unlikely that the new establishment will open before late 2002, at the earliest.
The hon. Member for Twickenham expressed concerns about health care. Those have been addressed in the existing Prison Service plan to move the in-patient facility to the newly refurbished health care centre which was implemented at the end of March. A shortage of health care staff and lack of staff continuity is being addressed in a number of ways including recruitment campaigns and secondment of nurses from a local NHS trust. It is not true to say that nothing has been done to improve health care at Feltham. Progress is being made, and we hope that there will be more progress in future.
On 29 March, we announced that, for the first time nationally--this is the joined-up government to which the hon. Gentleman referred--the Prison Service and the NHS will take a joint and systematic look at prisoners' health needs, the quality of the services available and the delivery mechanisms that are needed to meet those needs.
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