Select Committee on Home Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)

MR JOHN GIEVE CB, MR MARTIN NAREY AND MR WILLIAM NYE

15 JULY 2003

  Q60  Miss Widdecombe: And what have you concluded?

  Mr Narey: It is still a possibility but we have concluded that the work is so unpredictable that it would be very difficult at the moment to arrive at a cost effective contract with the private sector. The private sector themselves are pretty stretched at the moment particularly on their escort services but it is a possibility for the future.

  Q61  Miss Widdecombe: It was precisely because escort duties were so unpredictable that you tried to contract it out, so you had order and predictability. Under my very nose I saw last week what happens when you get a sudden bed watch. I was in my local prison invited to look specifically at the workshops and the purposeful activity that afternoon, and there was one unexpected bed watch and the whole purposeful activity schedule fell apart—in other words, there was not any that afternoon. There was nothing for me to see because of one unexpected bed watch. Now, that says to me (1) purposeful activity is always the first casualty and, therefore, there is a continual disruption; (2) that you are operating on a very funny staff margin if you cannot manage with one unexpected bed watch; and (3) you could get rid of that unpredictability if you contracted it out.

  Mr Narey: We would have to pay for the contracting out—

  Q62  Miss Widdecombe: Of course.

  Mr Narey: What we have tried to do, which I think will be in the long term most successful, is as part of transferring the budget for health care from the Home Office to the Department of Health we transferred also the costs of bed watches. What I believe that will do is bring some value for money judgments into the decision whether or not a stay in hospital is necessary. At the moment one of the problems is that it is impossible to interfere with a clinical decision that a stay in hospital is necessary for a prisoner, but I suspect it is frequently the case that if the Primary Care Trust had to bear the costs of the escort, which are quite considerable, they would take those into account before determining a bed watch must take place. I think more can be done to reduce the stay that a prisoner typically has in hospital and get them back to be nursed in what are now much better clinical conditions in prisons.

  Q63  Miss Widdecombe: Staff margin?

  Mr Narey: I volunteer that is extremely tight, particularly any time from about the end of May until the end of August. We have driven down staff costs as part of our efficiency programme.

  Q64  Miss Widdecombe: Long term sickness?

  Mr Narey: Long term sickness, all sickness, is a grave problem to the Prison Service. The figures are far too high and we are only having limited success with driving the figures down. If we could significantly reduce sickness absence I think myself and the Director-General would be very comfortable about staffing levels in the Prison Service.

  Q65  Miss Widdecombe: How many workshops across the prison estate are self-financing?

  Mr Narey: Very few. I do not have a precise number.

  Q66  Miss Widdecombe: But there are some?

  Mr Narey: Yes.

  Q67  Miss Widdecombe: Are we trying to learn from those there are?

  Mr Narey: In part but over the last few years the emphasis has been much less on workshop activity and much less on preparing prisoners for work and making them employable. There are some workshops that can do that and some workshops where the prisoner will get a NVQ qualification, but a lot of workshops provide little more than occupational therapy and that is why they are closed first, so that we can protect other things.

  Q68  Miss Widdecombe: Why is there no will to expand self-financing workshops which are no strain on the taxpayer, no strain on anybody?

  Mr Narey: Because it is much more difficult to do than might be imagined and the Prison Service over a number of years has had its fingers burned trying to do so. Significantly we contracted out workshops at Coldingley to Wackenhut. They believed they could make a significant profit from running a commercial laundry service and a sign making process but they pulled out after 18 months—

  Q69  Miss Widdecombe: But there have been others that have been successful. In businesses across the country some go to the wall, some are successful, some struggle.

  Mr Narey: Some have been successful, although some of the successful ones we have had to haul back when we have had concerns from local MPs about the effect on the local community. In the north west of the country I can tell you that we have had huge success in preparing vegetables for sale in supermarkets but we have had to reduce that work because of concerns of Michael Jack MP about the effect on his constituents and the loss of jobs.

  Q70  Miss Widdecombe: Can I move on to safety and decency? You said and you have told us in writing that Wandsworth and Pentonville prisons offered "safe decent environments and met targets on purposeful activity". The Chief Inspector says that Wandsworth was "failing to meet basic standards of decency and activity" and that Pentonville was "unable to meet the tests of a `healthy prison'". Firstly, how worried are you about the state specifically of those two prisons? When do you expect them to have reached an acceptable standard of provision, and how many other prisons in the estate might qualify for that sort of comment that have not been reported on recently?

  Mr Narey: Wandsworth and Pentonville specifically are worries both to myself and the new Director-General. Wandsworth particularly has been struggling to retain staff. Retaining staff in London prisons has been a grave difficulty now for the best part of two years although there has been some improvement to that, and clearly Wandsworth is one of those prisons which is significantly overcrowded and the Inspector's recommendations were that we should reduce overcrowding. The problem is the Director-General would have to overcrowd somewhere else. But the Chief Inspector did also say about Wandsworth that some of the culture improvements witnessed two years ago had been maintained, and she was very complimentary about suicide and self-harm procedures, about improvements to health care, about what was being done on industrial relations, and was particularly complimentary about what was being done on the drugs front, both detoxification and treatment. But we do need more staff, we are working on that as fast as we can, and as we get more staff and reprofile the shift systems—and that is happening right now—I think the amount of time out of cell for prisoners in Wandsworth will increase.

  Q71  Miss Widdecombe: Finally, what is the suicide rate at the moment?

  Mr Narey: The numbers are very high at the moment. In this current year there have been 54.

  Q72  Miss Widdecombe: And we are only halfway through the year.

  Mr Narey: Yes. That is up until Friday. A little more than that.

  Q73  Miss Widdecombe: If it stayed at that level, and it is a statistical hypothesis, you would end up with over 100 suicides.

  Mr Narey: In the financial year just finished we had 105 suicides.

  Q74  Mr Clappison: Does it tend to go up if the prisons are overcrowded?

  Mr Narey: Yes, because it does become more and more difficult for staff to identify and protect the vulnerable and the proportion of people coming into our care who have previously tried to take their own lives is frightening—20% of men, 40% of women. But it is not a direct correlation. For example, in the last few months as the population has reached record heights the number of suicides has tailed off a little but I am not claiming that we have turned a corner. I thought we had cracked suicides three or four years ago when they fell to the lowest level for many years. We have been doing exactly the same things but they have started to climb again most alarmingly.

  Q75  Miss Widdecombe: Yes. Six years ago it was running at about 60 a year; it is now up to 105 a year.

  Mr Narey: It climbed to 92 in 1999 and then in 2001 we got it back down to 70 again and at that point, measured as a proportion of the population, it was at its lowest figure since 1993, but then it has exploded since.

  Q76  Miss Widdecombe: I am not trying to make counsels of perfection but if it was 60 when the prison population was, give or take a few hundred, 60,000 and the prison population is now just over 70,000 but you have 105 suicides, that is quite a sharp increase.

  Mr Narey: I accept entirely that the rate has increased very worryingly despite myself and the ministers for whom I have worked making it absolutely clear there is no greater priority, and we have poured money into this. We have spent millions and millions of pounds providing more single cells, providing suicide co-ordinators in every local prison, I have incredible support from the Samaritans—of whom I cannot speak too highly, and still the number of deaths has continued to climb.

  Q77  Chairman: Going back to what you said about the immediate prospects for the prison population, I think you said you expected there to be some fall because of the introduction of changes to the home detention curfew early release scheme. Two or three days ago it was reported that the prison service was very close to needing to use police cells because of overcrowding. Are you able to tell us that there is no danger of that happening over the next three months because of the impact of the early release scheme?

  Mr Narey: There is a possibility that in some areas of the country, and the north west is hard pressed, there may be a very small use of police cells but the population has fallen for the last two days and I would expect it to continue to fall and I would be very surprised if this side of autumn we had to use police cells in any significant number.

  Q78  Chairman: But there may be some use?

  Mr Narey: There may be partial use in some areas of the country where it is simply impossible to move prisoners quickly enough to where there are spare beds.

  Q79  Miss Widdecombe: One other point: is it true that you are now issuing targets to Cat C trainers in respect of prisoners who must be reclassified as Cat Ds?

  Mr Narey: No. It is not true that we are issuing targets. We are encouraging Cat C prisoners to reclassify as Cat Ds and not to hold on to prisoners who are working—


 
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