Examination of Witnesses (Questions 494
- 499)
THURSDAY 6 DECEMBER 2001
SIR DAVID
RAMSBOTHAM AND
WILL HUTTON
Chairman
494. Can I welcome our two witnesses this morning
on behalf of the Committee. It is very good to have you along.
Sir David Ramsbotham, former Chief Inspector of Prisons, and Will
Hutton, the distinguished writer, economist, general man of affairs
and Chief Executive of the Industrial Society. We are trying to
clear our minds about issues concerning public sector, public
service ethos and associated matters and we thought you were the
people who were going to help us with this. Would either of you
like to say a word before we start, or shall we just have a go
at you?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) I am more prepared to be "have
a go at" than to be got at, so . . .
(Will Hutton) Fine. I have prepared some
answers around the questions 6 to 18.
495. You cannot give the game away like this!
(Will Hutton) For my oral viva, yes.
496. I think we should just start. Perhaps I
could start with you, Sir David. When we had Raymond Plant, Lord
Plant, in front of us a few weeks ago, we were reminded how he
had resigned as the Home Affairs spokesman for the Labour Party
at that time when we signed up to the idea of putting prisons
out to the private sector. He thought that would be inconsistent
with what the State was all about. I would be very interested
to know your view about that.
(Sir David Ramsbotham) It is a very pertinent question.
Of course when I came to the job of Chief Inspector in December
1995 as a total outsider, having never been involved in prisons
in my life, it was clear that there was, if you like, a sort of
moral debate about this; I mean, was it right or not to make a
profit out of locking people up as a result of a sentence awarded
by the courts which are a national institution. My job as Chief
Inspector was to monitor the treatment of prisoners and the conditions
in which they were held and report on them to Parliament and the
public through one of her Majesty's principal Secretaries of State;
in other words, the Home Secretary. Therefore, what I had to do,
when going to look at the private sector prisons, was to judge
how they looked after prisoners, not whether it was right or not
to be actually in the business of locking them up. What I found
when I went there was that actually the way that prisoners were
treated and the conditions in which they were held were a great
deal better in the private sector than they were in the public
sector for a variety of reasons. I do not know if it would help
if I went through them, but I think there were three very important
principles which I believe actually have resonance for the public
sector as well. The first is that every private sector prison
is run on a contract and therefore the public sector is in a position
to say precisely what is wanted in that prison. That does not
happen in the public sector. Public sector prisons are not told
precisely what is wanted of them, therefore it is very difficult
to judge whether or not they are succeeding in their aim. What
is their aim? This is also difficult to get at because it is not
precisely laid down, but I would say the aim of the criminal justice
system is to protect the public by preventing crime, and the prison
service aim is very simple, it is to help prisoners to lead useful
and law-abiding lives in prison and on release, keeping them secure
and also treating them with humanity while doing so. In other
words, it is all about re-offending. It is all about protecting
the public by preventing re-offending. Therefore what I am looking
at in prisons is the quality and the amount of work done with
prisoners in order to challenge the offending behaviour which
prompted them to commit the crime and also to put right any identified
deficiencies (education, work skills, social skills, medical problems,
substance abuse and so on) in order to help them to lead useful
and law-abiding lives. When I was judging the private sector on
that, on every count they came out better than the public sector.
For example, written in the contract of the private sector prisons
is the requirement to provide 30 hours purposeful activity per
prisoner per week—and it was purposeful. The private sector,
using its own initiative, was employing not only good education
instructors but good workshops and good workshop instructors,
on their own bat, going out into the market place and bringing
people in who were teaching skills which might get jobs on release
and so on in a way that the public sector was not doing. The contract
is hugely important. One of my concerns is that I think the contract
letting is one of the worst done bits of the whole operation:
the contracts are too loose and therefore there is room for manoeuvre
in them which there should not be. If they were tightened and
made more precise then I think you would get an even better result.
That is the first thing. The second thing is that built into all
the machinery are sanctions. If the private sector do not meet
the requirement laid down in the contract, then in fact sanctions
are imposed on them. How is this done? The prison service have
put into every private sector prison a contract compliance monitor.
They call them "the controller". I thought originally
it was "Comptroller", having a financial responsibility.
It is not. It is controller because the prison service thought
that if the director of the private sector prison failed, then
the controller would take control and push him out—actually
rather silly because the directors of public sector prisons are
all people who have succeeded in governing and that is why they
have been employed, whereas the controller tends to be an administrator
and not really somebody who could run a prison. But that is a
minor point. The fact is that there is a compliance monitor and
sanctions are imposed. For example, I mention 30 hours' purposeful
activity. If that is not achieved by the private sector, they
risk being fined or losing part of their remuneration. If you
look at the public sector—and only recently last month they
published figures of the purposeful activity hours per prisoner—they
were even down to 11 hours in Brixton and Belmarsh. No sanctions
against them. And yet what about the aim? Is the aim really to
protect the public by preventing crime? Is 11 hours really good
enough for the public sector? I am all for the sanction element,
for driving up performance. The third thing in the private sector
is that, like the public sector, they are subject to both inspection
by the inspector on a regular basis on exactly the same rules
as the public sector—so it is a similar process, there is
no difference—and in addition, like very other prison, they
have a board of visitors who are their own self-appointed, if
you like, watchdogs, who report to the Home Secretary every year
in writing. So all the checks and balances are in there. Taken
against that, when I looked at what they were actually doing and
how they were doing it, it was actually a lot better than the
public sector, not least in the way they treated prisoners. I
reported accordingly to the Home Affairs Select Committee when
they were doing a study of the private sector in 1996, saying,
"If you are judging this on the outcomes, it is better."
The Home Affairs Select Committee supported that in their report,
and I think it was one of the factors that led Mr Straw to review
some of the contracts for private sector prisons very soon after
he took office, much to the surprise, I think, of people who had
looked at it from the moral issue rather than the outcomes. I
am sorry, that is rather a long answer, but I hope it is helpful.
497. That is extremely helpful. That has set
us off in the direction we want to go. I want in a second to ask
Will Hutton to come in on this, but I want to be clear what we
are saying. You are telling us that you came along as someone
who had never given a thought to prisons, had never given a thought
to whether the public sector or the private sector was better
at doing this or that, and you discovered in coming to this public
service that the private sector on the whole did better, for the
reasons you have described. Again can I play back to you what
Raymond Plant said to us. He had a very strong argument against
the contract culture which you are celebrating now. His argument
was that contracts only take you so far: they define an area of
activity but they do not actually capture a sense of generalised
public service. I think what is interesting about what you are
saying is that in practice it produces a better outcome. We have
had trade union leaders sitting here in recent weeks before us,
telling us about what the public service ethos is: "Going
the extra mile," they have called it. "Doing acts of
kindness." All this kind of stuff. You are saying that really
is baloney, are you not?
(Sir David Ramsbotham) No, what I am saying is that
I believe the contract—because it is a document which actually
specifies what is expected of the organisation and actually spells
out, what it is that they are required to deliver, and it is then
measured by independent outsiders such as the Chief Inspector
or whoever, so it is subject to that—is in fact a very useful
tool. I believe that in fact the prison service are applying it
in the same sort of way. They do not call it a contract so much
as a service level agreement between the Headquarters and the
prison which lays down what is expected. I believe that if all
the public sector prisons were directed in exactly the same way,
with a very clearly laid down list of requirements on them, it
would make the running of the prisons (a) easier and (b) better.
498. There is no reason why the public sector
could not operate in the way you suggest.
(Sir David Ramsbotham) None at all.
499. Suitably reformed.
(Sir David Ramsbotham) And that was actually proved
in Manchester Prison, which won a market test and then had to
be run in this way. The performance in Manchester improved enormously
and one of the fascinating things—and this is a sort of
by the by—was that the Prison Officers Association, who
could well have been expected to be totally opposed to this, were
wholly involved in the contract. They felt they owned it because
of course it was their performance that was going to determine
whether or not the contract was renewed and therefore their jobs
were secure.
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