Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260
- 279)
WEDNESDAY 18 OCTOBER 2000
SIR DAVID
RAMSBOTHAM, MR
COLIN ALLEN
AND MR
GEOFFREY HUGHES
260. One of the witnesses giving evidence yesterday
described the search as rather like "stormtroopers",
acting in that way. Whether that is an exaggeration or not one
does not know. However, you are aware of the deep controversy
over the way in which the search was conducted?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Oh certainly. People have written
to me and people have told me about it: the numbers of the people,
the time that they arrived, and so on. Certainly these have incited
comment.
261. Should the Prison Service or the Home Office
hold an inquiry into the way that search was conducted?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) The Prison Service has held
its own internal inquiry.
262. I mean more than an internal inquiry.
(Sir David Ramsbotham) I am not aware of any others.
263. Should the Minister, Sir David, hold an
inquiry?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) To be quite honest with you,
I was surprised that an event like this was not actually controlled
from Prison Service headquarters. It is a fairly serious event
to produce 80 people in the middle of the night to descend on
a prison. Presumably they put the numbers there because they were
concerned that something serious might happen as a result. It
did not, in the event, but I, personally, am rather surprised
that this was not something which was handled by and from Prison
Service headquarters rather than left down to the local area,
in the same way that I have to admit to some surprise that the
person who conducted the subsequent inquiry was the person who
had been a previous governor at the prison, who had been in charge
at the time of previous events there, and who was, at the time,
the governor of Elmley Prison, which was one of the prisons responsible
for sending people to Blantyre House in the first place. I would
have hoped for something rather more external and independent
in terms of an inquiry, to be quite honest with you, but that
is because I come from an independent and outside viewpoint on
all these things.
Mr Winnick: As always, Sir David, you have been
very forthright in your responses. Thank you very much.
Chairman: I take it you would not be surprised
to learn, as one of the inmates told us yesterday, that while
all this mayhem was going on, one of the prisoners asked the guys
doing it "Would you like a cup of tea? I am just about to
make one", and he got a mouthful of bad language as a result.
Mr Linton
264. Just a supplementary on that. You said
it was normal, if there was police information, for the governor
of the prison to be informed and, in this case, the governor was
not informed, he was removed and a search party sent in. What
conclusion do you draw about the attitude of the Prison Service
to the governor?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) I think, again, I have to be
careful about differentiating the Prison Service from the Area
Manager who is involved. As I have already mentioned to you, I
have the deepest respect for the Director General and his outlook
and his wishes for his service. The decision not to share information,
I suspect, must have been the Area Manager's for some reason,
but I would have hoped that the prison service itself insisted
that information was shared with governors—unless, of course,
it is information about the governor himself. However, we are
led to believe that this was information about prisoners for whom
the governor was responsible. Having been in an operational service
all my life, I know how important it is for commanders to share
information with their subordinates, because otherwise the subordinate
cannot play his part in the chain or the role in which they are
involved. If you really did suspect that something was wrong with
prisoners, the thing to do is to get everyone concerned in on
the act as quickly as possible and stop it. You do not keep it
to yourself and then act in an independent way. You must take
your governor along with you.
265. Would you say it was a clear implication
of the way this was carried out that what they were looking for
was not evidence against prisoners but evidence against the governor?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Well, you wonder, because if
a mass of stuff had been found, if you had found horrendous things,
then you might have been able to suspect things against prisoners.
However, bearing in mind the checks and balances which the Area
Manager is meant to maintain on the prison and the fact he had
attended our debrief on our very recent inspection where we had
already indicated things were going well, one can presume that
actually the Governor being removed was the main purpose of this
exercise, which I do not think is a very healthy way for a service
to proceed against its own people.
Mrs Dean
266. You said earlier that you would have expected
such an operation to have been led by headquarters, but have you
actually ever come across a similar search done by either headquarters
or a regional office?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Again, may I bow to my colleagues,
who are members of the Service?
(Mr Allen) The Prison Service quite frequently has
to do lock-down searches of establishments, but in our experience
we cannot remember a similar case where the governor was removed
more or less at the same time as the search was done. Again, in
my experience of lock-down searches, they are generally as a result
of specific intelligence about the existence normally of a fire
arm or escape equipment, which would justify such a use of staff
in that kind of way, and also reduce the regime for prisoners
because that is obviously a consequence of it.
Chairman
267. Forgive me, you would not necessarily need
84 officers, some of them dolled up in riot gear, to go and look
for a gun or a key, would you?
(Mr Allen) Well, I think, yes. It depends on the size
of the prison, but if you are asking the question about Blantyre,
whether that was necessary or not—
268. Was it proportionate?
(Mr Allen) I would not have thought so, personally.
But then the whole bit about the search of Blantyre, as I have
said, is extremely unusual because I cannot remember a similar
case where a governor was removed at the same time. It is true
that the Prison Service does have to do lock-down searches which
involve large numbers of staff and sometimes doing them very thoroughly—well,
hopefully, always doing them very thoroughly—but they are
very staff-intensive when they are done thoroughly.
(Mr Hughes) That would certainly be the case if there
was an internal search where the governor might be using his own
staff, but in these circumstances when it was deploying staff
from other prisons, and large numbers of staff from other prisons,
it would be a normal expectation that there would be a series
of a bronze commander, who would be locally based at the scene
of the particular incident, a silver commander who would be again
at the prison but commanding that scene, and normally I would
have expected a gold commander who would be in an incident suite
in Prison Service headquarters. It did seem odd to me, at least,
that that did not happen on this occasion.
Mrs Dean
269. Thank you for that. Sir David, you described
Mr Eoin McLennan-Murray as brave, what effect do you think the
events at Blantyre House will have on the ability of the Prison
Service to recruit and retain good, young prison governors in
the future?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) It worries me that an apparently
successful governor, and a successful governor as we have all
proved, can be treated in this way by the service of which he
is a member. It is the implications of that for the service that
cause me considerable concern. I do not know, because I have not
seen it—you have seen it yesterday but I have deliberately
held clear of going back to Blantyre—but if you destroy
something like that then you have the task of putting it together
again. Blantyre is fortunate in that it has a number of staff
who are committed to the ethos of the way it was going and therefore
you have something to build on, but I think you do your service
a considerable degree of damage if you let it be thought that
governors, governing governors, which is what the Prison Service
is all about, are not being helped, guided, supported and led
by a management structure which is on their side, because they
are part of the chain, they are not apart from it.
Mr Malins
270. Sir David, arising out of the search I
was quite intrigued to be told or read somewhere that one prisoner
was found with a spirit level and building tools, which were described
as being potentially very useful implements on an escape. My eyebrows
went up slightly on the basis that this work the prisoner was
doing presumably was work outside the prison and he would have
found it slightly easier just not to come back rather than escape.
My judgment, Sir David, having looked at this carefully for a
few days, is that this raid in May was not only unjustified but
was a terrible and ghastly mistake. Do you dissent from that view?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) No.
271. You would not?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) No. Can I just qualify that?
I have to be careful because the Director General is responsible
for deciding what happens in his service and I, like others, have
been wise after the event.
272. Yes, of course.
(Sir David Ramsbotham) I would not want in any way
to queer the pitch of the Director General to have the right to
do what he sees appropriate at any time in the service he leads.
273. Yes, but in any event, when you last saw
the prison, morale amongst prisoners, prison officers, boards
of visitors, everybody associated with the prison, was excellent.
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Yes.
274. Does it surprise you to hear that we have
found subsequently that morale amongst all those people has plummeted?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) No, because of the way this
has been handled and was actually handled, which they, who were
in the prison far more than we were, felt was thoroughly unjustified.
They were absolutely behind the Governor in what he was doing
and, of course, I think they felt understandably proud that they
were making a contribution to what was clearly an extremely successful
operation which appeared to be absolutely in line with the aims
of the Prison Service.
275. Absolutely. You have referred to the Area
Manager of the North East of the country who is and was terribly
supportive of a similar type of prison there. Let me get straight
to the real issue here, the inference I have drawn—can you
comment—from all my discussions is that the same level of
support was not present for the Governor of Blantyre House.
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Yes.
276. Indeed, could I go further and say there
was potentially a clash between the two different types of ethos,
the forward-thinking, in my words, attitude of the Governor, and
perhaps the rather different attitude from the Area Manager?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Yes. I think this is based
on what Colin said earlier, that the Area Manager probably had
a different approach from the way that the need to manage risk
was accepted by the Governor.
277. In fact, putting it in a nutshell, if the
Area Manager of the South East was the same type, perhaps the
same person, as the Area Manager of the North East, and one could
take out the Area Manager of the South East from this whole equation,
if, then none of us might be sitting here today? Do you think
that is possible?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) I think that is a pretty fair
supposition.
Chairman
278. We have this Chaucer team which the Area
Manager set up. As far as we are aware it reports only to him
and that apparently collected the intelligence which was given
as the reason for this raid on the prison. That is at the one
end of it. At the other end of it, the Prison Service itself then
claims to set up a series of inquiries into the raid itself, into
the management of the prison and other aspects of that. You will
not be surprised to know that there is immense concern in this
place about the police investigating themselves. Is it not the
case that the same criticism could be applied to the Prison Service,
and would it not be better if there was a more independent element
of inspection of the service as a whole rather than just prisons?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) Yes. I make no bones about
that and have done so for a while. Personally, I hate things like
Chaucer teams which I understand are there for the purpose of
investigating alleged corruption amongst members of your own staff.
I hate it, frankly.
279. Have you heard of any others similar to
that around the country?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) No, none anywhere. If you are
going to build a relationship between staff and prisoners which
is based on trust, unless you have a relationship of trust within
the staff themselves, that is going to be very difficult to maintain.
Having something like Chaucer suggests to me that there is not
mutual trust between the person who set it up and the people who
are on the receiving end, and I do not like it but that is very
personal. One of the concerns that I have expressed ever since
I have been in this job is that the Prison Service does too much
internal, self-regulation inquiry of its own kind, some of which
takes a very long time to see the light of day. That is not to
say I think their inquiries are incompetent or anything like that,
but I am instinctively uneasy about only having self-regulation,
and I think it is something which encourages mistrust about it
amongst the general public and others.
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