Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
28 OCTOBER 2003
MR DAVID
HATCH CBE JP AND
MS CHRISTINE
GLENN
Q80 Bob Russell: Your answer is somewhat
hesitant so we will not have any more Court of Appeal hearings,
will we?
Ms Glenn: We are still catching
up with the Stafford back log. Could I just give you some month
by month figures? Two years ago we dealt with 273 oral hearings
a year. This year in April we had 43, May 55, June 108, July 134,
August 122. So those are the sorts of levels of caseload that
we are dealing with at the moment.
Q81 Bob Russell: How many of those
were life sentence prisoners?
Ms Glenn: All of them. In that
sort of context we are striving to hear the cases within those
time frames. So far the lawyers have been understanding of the
predicament. We have communicated properly with them, we hope;
we have involved them in the difficulties and they face the same
difficulties because there is a fairly finite number of lawyers
who deal with these cases.
Q82 Bob Russell: So everybody is
striving to comply with the ruling.
Ms Glenn: Absolutely, yes. A hundred
and ten per cent.
Q83 Bob Russell: Moving on to judicial
reviews, I understand in the last year there were 59 applications
for judicial reviews of the Board's decisions. What issues have
arisen recently in the course of those reviews of the Board's
decisions? Will any of those reviews lead to a change in your
practice?
Ms Glenn: Fifty-two of those fifty-nine
cases have been decided and the Board lost two. One was lost on
a technicality because we dealt with a case that should have been
dealt with in Scotland because that is where the prisoner was.
The other one we lost is the one that you referred to, which is
the Noorkoiv case (the tariff case). Most of the other challenges
have been on the relevance of human rights legislation, particularly
Article 5 which is the right to a review of the detention. There
have been a number of challenges to the Board to try to bring
in Article 6 which would effectively give oral hearings for recall
cases. So far those challenges have not been successful and we
live in hope that that continues to be the case, but one can never
assume. The Board is moving towards being much more a tribunal
than a sort of executive body. The Human Rights Act has underlined
that. The only other challenge which meant that we changed our
practice was the Martin case which was heard. That was a case
where there was a procedural point. Everybody knows Mr Martin's
case, he was convicted of murder and the original panel had the
cases which related to the murder conviction; the murder conviction
had been quashed and a conviction for manslaughter replaced and
nobody had picked up that all of the correct reports were not
there. We were certainly responsible, as were others. We have
mentioned that those practices have been put right.
Q84 Bob Russell: That is a pretty
good success rate that you have had.
Ms Glenn: We try very hard to
get it right.
Q85 Bob Russell: Moving on to partnerships
with other Criminal Justice agencies, what percentage of parole
dossiers are submitted to the Board incomplete or late? What are
the reasons for this incomplete state of the dossiers or the delay
in supplying them?
Ms Glenn: Fewer than 1% are submitted
incomplete or late. It is an astonishingly good performance from
the Prison Service. Huge progress has been made from the Public
Accounts Committee time. It is monitored monthly in a joint meeting
with them. Basically the reasons are that the reports are not
ready in time.
Q86 Bob Russell: 99% are complete
and are on time.
Ms Glenn: Yes.
Q87 Bob Russell: Which is almost
perfection, so are you aiming for that other 1%?
Ms Glenn: It is not my aim; it
is in the hands of others. I think it is unrealistic to expect
anything more than that. It might even be unrealistic to expect
99% but if it is 95% plus, I would be happy with that.
Q88 Miss Widdecombe: Can you talk
to us a bit about multi-agency public protection panels, what
agencies are involved in them, what is the role of the Board and
also what safeguards you have in respect of confidentiality?
Ms Glenn: I referred to the case
earlier on where the person was not recalled to prison and went
on to rape again. We discovered that we were not able to get information
from the multi-agency panels because of the issues of confidentiality
and because we were not part of the process we were not given
information. Thank goodness the Ombudsman's recommendation was
that we should be part of that process and we now are. We get
the information well. We sat down and sorted out a protocol as
to how it would work with the Probation Service, the Prison Service
and the Home Office and that is now working well. We obviously
needed to train our members more about it and they have had a
bit of a training session. We have people who sit on multi-agency
public protection panels coming to the conference next week to
give presentations about it. So far as confidentiality is concerned,
we have been working with the Metropolitan Police in terms of
an informer's project and how to keep those sorts of issues confidential.
Again, we have a working confidentiality protocol and we will
be looking to see what else we need to do to tighten it up.
Q89 Miss Widdecombe: Can we move
on to the role of the work done with prisoners in prisons: the
education, the training and the offending behaviour courses. Where
you have somebody who comes from a prison where those facilities
are either very poor or virtually non-existent, how far do you
take that into account?
Ms Glenn: One of the frustrations
is that the courses and the progress in the prison system is not
co-ordinated with the parole process. You will remember that,
I am sure. I do not know if it is any better, but it certainly
does not work as well as it should. You have seen that we refer
to that in the response that we give to your invitation to comment
on the inquiry. There is information in the Report on the outcome
of the audit of the accredited Prison Service courses. The audit
only talks about how many courses and where they are delivered.
Very often prisoners are not in the right prison to do the courses
that they need to do and it is a matter of frustration and sometimes
they are transferred out.
Q90 Miss Widdecombe: When you have
highly overcrowded prison state—as we have at the moment—that
is actually exacerbated because people cannot be moved to appropriate
prisons where the courses are available.
Mr Hatch: Absolutely.
Q91 Miss Widdecombe: Is it your view
that if more investment were actually made into education and
rehabilitation, we would probably have an increase in the number
of early paroles, and associated with that there would also be
savings?
Ms Glenn: That must be right because
the two big factors in terms of rehabilitation are education and
employment so that has to follow.
Q92 Miss Widdecombe: Quite apart
from what is available in prisons, there is also what is available
when the prisoners come out. Very often they are on very good
courses in prisons but then the gates are opened, they are out
there and they have to cope without the help and information that
has been provided. Can you tell us a bit about the Board's view
on that?
Mr Hatch: What is essential first
of all is to make sure that there is a release plan that gives
them somewhere to go. Too many prisoners come out with nowhere
to go and so a lot of the work that has been done inside is quickly
lost because they are trying to find a living, and if they cannot
find a living they come back into prison again.
Q93 Miss Widdecombe: Do you have
an input into those release plans other than just assessing them?
Mr Hatch: Yes, we do. If the release
plan is not good we will say that it is not good enough. We actually
need the Probation Service to provide a hostel for this fellow
in this particular area otherwise we cannot release him. We do
add those sorts of condition which the Probation Service then
try to help us with to make sure that the decision can go through.
Q94 Miss Widdecombe: How great is
the instance, in your experience, of people who would be releaseable
if appropriate provision had been made for them but who are not
released and remain in prison because such provision is not made?
Mr Hatch: I would say that an
inadequate release plan is one of the most common causes for us
to turn down parole, apart from people believing that the offender
is violent and will cause difficulty. The release plan is absolutely
essential—as we talked earlier about earlier—in protecting
the victims.
Q95 Mrs Dean: Turning to the Parole
Board members and the appointments process which you touched on
earlier. You mentioned that you now advertise more widely in the
ethnic press. What other concrete actions has the Board taken
to ensure that its membership is reflective of the wider community
both in terms of gender and ethnicity and also social status?
Mr Hatch: I think the advertisements
that are put out by the Prison Service now are in more papers
than they used to be. They are also in the ethnic press. We also
appeal to those other specialist areas that we need to have as
members. That is the first thing we do. We then try to make sure
through the assessment centre that we have picked some good people
and then we interview them. Hopefully we interview them properly
and then, as I have described, we train them and appraise them.
That should give us a balanced Board. I think if you look at the
back of our Annual Report and read the background to the 120 members
you will find it is a pretty good spread, particularly among the
independents. Clearly we have some difficulties in the gender
split because we have 33 judges on the Board and there are not
that many female judges to be honest with you. We do have two
who have applied and they are with us. We do have a problem, as
Chris said earlier, about ethnicity. This may be that not enough
people are coming forward; we are certainly not turning them down
but we are putting a little working party together to try to see
whether we can crack this problem because we need to do better
in ethnicity. I think we are doing quite well on gender.
Ms Glenn: Before we went into
the advertising campaign the consultants did some research about
the right places to advertise and so on. We had a debriefing session
at the end of the process because we were very unhappy that we
had not ended up with the sort of diversity in the new members
that we wanted. As a result of that we went out to all the regional
meetings with our members to ask for ideas on how to improve this
for the future. A lot of ideas came up. As David said, we have
put together a little working group to look at this, drawing in
some of our Board membership to help us to do so. That is an area
which is really important. One of the myths is that the Parole
Board is middle class, white and male and we really want to try
to explode that.
Q96 Mrs Dean: Are you confident that
the increased training for new and existing members is ensuring
consistency and objectivity of approach?
Ms Glenn: Last year we commissioned
an independent training needs analysis so that we had a specialist
to review the training, to review the way it was delivering what
was needed. We have a Training and Development Committee. The
appraisal process also feeds into that. What we are trying to
do is to pull it all together and also to learn from the reviews.
The other thing that we are just about to start is a newsletter
to the members on learning points in the judicial review cases.
Sometimes there may be things that need to be told to people quite
quickly. We send them the results of the judicial reviews as a
little potted picture, but maybe there needs to be something a
bit more detailed.
Mr Hatch: Can I just return to
the ethnicity question for a second? When we do the interview—which
is competence based—the things that we are looking at are
clearly analysis for risk assessment, judgment and decision making,
written and oral communication, planning and organising, working
with others; the last one is equal opportunities knowledge and
human rights. That, quite often, is the area where people are
deficient and might lose out. People are not good in that area.
Q97 Mrs Dean: Is sufficient training
given to the Board's administrative and support staff?
Ms Glenn: Again we had a training
needs analysis on that as well. At the moment we are going through
the re-accreditation process for Investors in People and we are
hopefully going to be re-accredited in the early part of next
year. As you know, that process looks very carefully at the training
and development of the staff and how it fits in with the business.
That is something we give great attention to.
Q98 Mrs Dean: Could you tell us how
the Board's new appraisal system will operate in practice?
Ms Glenn: It is operating. We
are nearly a year in. People are appraised twice. All the members
except the judges are appraised on the work in their paper panels
and the reasons that they write. The judges are appraised on how
they deal with the oral hearings and how they chair the oral hearings.
The only difference there is because that is the sort of balance
of the work that they do and we thought it important that they
be appraised on the majority or that. They are appraised by two
different appraisers and all of our appraisers were trained by
an expert trainer. May I say that that appraisal training included
some diversity training as well so that we tried to ensure that
those aspects were properly dealt with. The appraisals will feed
in any learning points to the Training and Development Committee.
We also have a permanent member who is responsible for the appraisal
process.
Mr Hatch: It is a vital tool not
only for consistency—as your question indicated—but
also I have to recommend to the minister who might be right to
re-appoint should they apply. In the past, without an appraisal—unless
I wandered around watching 120 members permanently at work—I
would have to make my own judgment about that. I am now in a position
to say to the minister that this is what the appraisals say, and
these are their fellow members making views about how they have
done their reasons and how they have conducted themselves on the
panel.
Q99 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Going back
to the question of ethnicity, last week we all saw the programme
involving police officers and evidently during their interview
process they were also asked about their predisposition to different
ethnic groups. What was acknowledged was that they were not asked
particularly direct questions about how they felt about black
people, what their relationship was with different people from
different communities. In your selection process is there a directness
of questions which makes you feel confident that you do understand
the predisposition of the person in front of you to the different
groups that you are likely to meet in prison?
Mr Hatch: Yes, there is. In the
last round of interviews that role was played by an independent
assessor and not by myself or one of my specialists. We had two
independent assessors and one of them chose that role, to ask
those very direct questions. That also fed into whether they had
an understanding of human rights and equal opportunities.
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