TUESDAY 10 DECEMBER 2002

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Members present:

Mr Chris Mullin, in the Chair
Mr David Cameron
Mr James Clappison
Mrs Janet Dean
Bridget Prentice
Mr Gwyn Prosser
Bob Russell
Mr Marsha Singh
Miss Ann Widdecombe
David Winnick

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ANNE OWERS, CBE, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, examined.

Chairman

May I welcome Anne Owers, who is known to us more in her previous incarnation as Director of JUSTICE? I believe you have been 18 months in your present job, is that right?

(Ms Owers) Not quite; it feels like 18 months but it is a year and four months.

Chairman: I am sorry you are so distant from us. It is nothing personal, it is just the way the room is arranged.

David Winnick

You have been in your job 20 months. May I put to you a leading question? How have you found it so far?

(Ms Owers) I summed it up in my annual report which was published today as feeling rather like a year of two halves. When I came into the job there were some very interesting and hopeful moves in prison work: the injection of more resources; a different approach in terms of juveniles and also minimising the use of custody for juveniles; the hope that would be extended upwards to young adults; some interesting discussions about women's custody and alternatives to custody generally and alternative forms of custody. You also saw the Prison Service's focus on safer custody having an effect on suicides in prison, not least because of the emphasis on creating a safer environment generally rather than simply seeing it as a medical problem. One of the most encouraging things for my inspectorate was the welcome given to our report with the Probation Inspectorate on resettlement and seeing resettlement as core to what prisons should be doing and as a core part of public protection. The public will not in the long term be protected if people continue to re-offend. Also making some modest but much needed improvements in prison health care. There were some good signs. The latter half of the year for all of us has been dominated by the damaging effects of prison overcrowding. As I say in the annual report, that to me and to the inspectorate appears to be damaging some of the gains which have been made and prejudicing moves forward. As an inspectorate we have four tests of what we call a healthy prison: safety, respect, purposeful activity and resettlement. I am now seeing all of those being damaged or potentially damaged by the effects of overcrowding and that is very damaging to the system as a whole.

I shall not take you up on overcrowding because my colleagues will be asking you those questions and I would be called up, and rightly so, by the Chairman if I pursued that particular point. During the last 20 years there have in fact been four Chief Inspectors of Prisons outside the Prison Service. Do you feel that what has happened, certainly with your immediate predecessor, but perhaps it could also be argued with the Chief Inspector before him, the controversy which occurred, the fact, to put it mildly, certainly as far as the last Chief Inspector of Prisons was concerned, that there was apparently a stage when he was not even on speaking terms with the Home Secretary, makes your job that much more difficult?

(Ms Owers) I have always felt that I have to do my job in the way that I can, in the way that I best know. One of the things I inherited which is very helpful to the Prisons Inspectorate is that what goes on in prisons has been made and has continued to be a legitimate cause of concern for the public. Prisons are hidden away places, they are by definition closed environments and what my predecessors have done and did very successfully was to make sure that what went on in prisons was signalled to the general public and in very strong terms. Inheriting a tradition of robust independence, where by reporting honestly and robustly what goes on in prisons, the public know what is going on, you can also create space for change to happen. That is a very helpful inheritance and it is one which I have to build on in my own way.

Regardless of whether you find favour with the Home Office, you will pursue that way of carrying out your duties, regardless of what happened to your two predecessors.

(Ms Owers) It seems to me that this is a job you have to do by being sure that you are being objective and accurate, but also that you are being honest and reporting honestly and fearlessly what you find.

That is very reassuring. You are of course the Chief Inspector. Could you just inform the Committee about the inspectors who work with you and are responsible to you? How many inspectors do you have?

(Ms Owers) I have three core inspection teams, each of them composed of four people. Some of them have worked within the Prison Service, some of them have worked within social work, probation work or been members of boards of visitors. They are quite mixed teams. They are the core of our inspection, but they are also supported when they go into prisons by specialist inspectors. We have a specialist medical inspector, specialist inspectors on drugs and substance use and also now on race. Also when we go into prisons we go in with the Education Inspectorate. If it is a children's establishment, we go in with OFSTED, if it is an establishment for adults, we go in with the Adult Learning Inspectorate. That adds enormously to the professionalism with which we are able to look at education and training in prisons. That is the core of the inspection. We also have a research department which mostly does surveys of prisoners which we do before we go into prisons, which gives us an idea about what prisoners feel about their environment, which is a very important part of inspecting.

As far as your position is concerned, do you visit so many prisons in a given year, you yourself apart from the inspectors?

(Ms Owers) Assuming I am not away, I go to almost all our announced inspections, which are the long ones which last a full week.

They obviously know you are coming.

(Ms Owers) Yes.

What about unannounced ones?

(Ms Owers) I also go to the big unannounced ones. We do two kinds of unannounced inspections. Some are follow-up inspections where we are checking what has happened on the recommendations we made at the last inspection and those are just two- or three-day short inspections. Some are big ones of prisons where we have a concern or we want to look in detail and I also go to those.

Your last job was as chief executive of JUSTICE. Do you feel that such a background in human rights will be an asset in your current job?

(Ms Owers) It is certainly one of the bits of my background which has been very helpful to me. For me it has been very good to look at the practical implementation of some of the things which we talked about at JUSTICE when the Human Rights Act was coming into effect. I see the human rights agenda within prisons as being a preventive agenda, as being something which can alert those running prisons to areas of concern and areas of concern which feed very much into the Director General's agenda of decency and safety within prisons. It is part of that agenda. It is also part of the balancing act with human rights, when you are balancing the protection of the public and indeed the protection of others within prisons against individual human rights. It is putting it into practice.

Did you have any experience of going to prisons in your previous job or any job you held before that in JUSTICE?

(Ms Owers) Only very marginally; only in terms of legal visits. At JUSTICE in the early days we did miscarriage of justice casework, but that is a very different experience from drawing a set of keys and going around a prison talking to staff and prisoners.

There have been some human rights challenges to the powers of prison governors regarding sentences and also a challenge to the Home Secretary tariff setting. Do you believe there will be other areas of the Prison Service where there will be similar challenges?

(Ms Owers) There are certainly areas where I can see that challenges could arise. I have said in an interview I gave two or three months back that the more prisons become overcrowded and the more standards of safety and decency inevitably get impinged on in a way that prison staff themselves do not want, and the Director General certainly does not want, then the closer we become to areas which raise serious human rights concerns and that will depend upon the individual case. I can also see circumstances in which the issue of severely mentally ill people held in prisons, who are neither safe to themselves, to other prisoners or staff, will raise human rights concerns. Inevitably prison is an environment where one would always need to be alert to human rights issues and to be making clear areas where there were real dangers of breaches of human rights.

Would it be part of your responsibility to give the Director General of the Prison Service and the Home Secretary advice where in your view certain changes should be made in order to avoid such legal challenges?

(Ms Owers) There is certainly an alert role for an inspectorate, but we need to be careful not to stray into seeking to interpret legislation. When I am writing reports or looking at reports which have been written, I am always anxious to phrase it in terms of the possibility of raising issues under human rights. I agree with the tenor of your questions because one of the things which is always difficult for the Prison Service is to be proactive. It is essentially a reactive service and whereas, when we were preparing for the Human Rights Act, we saw for example the Police Service taking the issue very seriously from the beginning, getting advice, trying to make sure that as far as possible its practices and procedures, if necessary its legislative base, were aligned with the Human Rights Act, the Prison Service's reaction was more to wait and see. The more we can get a dialogue going, which can prevent things rather than ending up in litigation the better.

Your office is located within the Home Office, as I understand it. Is that correct?

(Ms Owers) Yes; for the next three days.

What has been the position up to now?

(Ms Owers) Up until now we have been located in the Home Office. On Monday we move to another location in Monck Street, next to Marsham Street, where we shall be sharing a building with the Probation Inspectorate, the Prisons Ombudsman and the Secretariat to the Board of Visitors.

Would the general feeling not be that this separation from the Home Office would be highly desirable? Was it your initiative?

(Ms Owers) It had already started. I am afraid I cannot claim the entire credit for that at all.

We can give the Home Office some credit at long last.

(Ms Owers) No, it was the four organisations concerned who had already started discussions. All of us feel that it provides better opportunities for co-operation between us, but also presentationally sends a good message.

Miss Widdecombe

On that last point, you presumably accept that your role is to report to the Home Secretary first and foremost on the state of conditions in the prisons for which he then answers.

(Ms Owers) Yes, I do.

So you are reporting to the Secretary of State for Home Affairs but you found some problem actually being in the Home Office. Given that the Prison Service is located over in Page Street and you were in the Home Office, what was the problem?

(Ms Owers) There clearly was no problem. It has never stopped prison inspectors being robust and independent. Presentationally, to prisoners for example, it looks very odd that they are addressing their letters to the Home Office. It is not something I felt was a major problem, but the new location provides the double benefit of organisations being able to act more co-operatively and also not to send inadvertently the wrong signal.

Do you think that in the past some of the issues which have arisen between Home Secretaries and your predecessors, though not with you, have actually been sometimes a consequence of failure to recognise that it is their duty to report to the Home Secretary, not their duty to report to the world about the Home Secretary?

(Ms Owers) I really would find it very difficult to comment on other people's reasons.

I thought you might.

(Ms Owers) All I can say is the way that I would do the job.

Miss Widdecombe: An observation phrased as a question is more acceptable than an observation which is just an observation.

Chairman

You referred in passing a moment ago to miscarriages of justice. You will be aware from your previous incarnation of the problem which arises when prisoners convicted of serious offences continue to deny their guilt and therefore end up serving in some cases a decade or so longer than those who admit their guilt and are released. Can you see any way of resolving that problem?

(Ms Owers) It is honestly not one to which I have given thought in my present job and not one which really arises much in my present job, except in relation to those who need individual counselling before they are prepared to go on group offending behaviour work where we feel very strongly that individual psychological counselling should be available to people. Otherwise, in the job I am doing now, it is not one which immediately comes to me.

I see that. In fact I suppose one way of relieving overcrowding would be to release the innocent, would it not?

(Ms Owers) Yes, but I would suggest that is a matter for the Parole Board and not for me.

Miss Widdecombe

On the human rights issue and the removal, or at any rate suspension, from prison governors of the right to take away days' remission, what effect do you perceive that to have had on discipline, on the assault rate, particularly on prisoners' behaviour as they are nearing the point of automatic release, as opposed to the early stages when they can still lose privileges? Have you made any assessment of its effect?

(Ms Owers) No, not as such. We certainly have not done any serious analysis of it, but we were around prisons while all this was happening. Initially, as you would expect, there was considerable concern among those running prisons and that was reflected in that there was also concern by prisoners and in some instances inevitably an attempt to get up against the system to see what happened. It felt a bit wobbly for a while. It settled down fairly quickly, in the same way as with young people on detention and training orders because there you cannot give added days. So prisons had already had to start at that level to manage prisoners without that. Now that the independent adjudicators are around, the serious offences - and they have to be to a degree of seriousness - will be dealt with in that way. There was an initial blip, but my feeling now, going round prisons, is not that it is something which is causing huge concern compared with other things which are hitting the prison system. It is an example of how, if it had been thought through in advance, the blip could have been avoided.

Mr Cameron

I just want to get a couple of figures straight to start with. Am I right in thinking that you did 64 reports last year, 62 of which were inspections of specific institutions and two thematic ones?

(Ms Owers) Not quite. We did 62 inspections and we issued 64 reports. Yes, actually, you are right; 62 were individual inspections.

Your total staff is 32.

(Ms Owers) Yes; that includes administrative and support staff of course.

Do you have enough money to do the job?

(Ms Owers) No, not really. We do not have enough resources to do the job as we should like to be able to do it. We can just about fulfil our commitment to the Home Secretary to get round each establishment once every five years and juvenile establishments every three for big inspections. As you can see from the number of inspections, it is a treadmill, it is hard work to do that. What we would like to do more of, is to use the information we get from those individual inspections in a more systematic way, to try to improve performance across the piece, to try to assist the Prison Service and the Home Secretary in driving up performance, but also increasingly to do more joined up work with other criminal justice inspectorates, specifically probation but also some of the other inspectorates. It is very difficult both to provide the kind of concentrated attention you need to look at prisons and know how they are operating and also to do the more general work.

What specifically, if you had more money, would you do?

(Ms Owers) We do thematic reviews already, but they are big pieces of work which take two to three years and take up quite a lot of time. I should like us to be able to do more mini thematics, looking quite quickly at a specific issue which is affecting prisons. Miss Widdecombe mentioned added days, there are other issues such as the way the detention and training orders are operating for juveniles, to be able, from the experience we have of particular kinds of establishments, women's, children's, training prisons, to pull out some general helpful conclusions which might assist the Prison Service. I should like to be able to do more of that.

I have only had time to skim your annual report because we only received it this morning, but there does not seem to be any mention of money at all and budgets and staff numbers and where the money goes.

(Ms Owers) It is strange. This is the first annual report I have produced. Apparently our budget has never been put in our annual report and that is why it is not there this year. I am going to have some discussions about whether we should have it in future years. The staff list is there.

It is quite difficult to say you need more money and what you would do with it if we cannot even see what you are spending at the moment.

(Ms Owers) I take the point.

The other thing is that you seem to be the only part of the public sector which has escaped the mania for key performance indicators and targets. I have had a flick through and I cannot find a single one.

(Ms Owers) One for us or one which we monitor?

For you. You are spending public money and everyone has to have a target. You have a mission statement, I am not surprised, a statement of purpose, but there are no targets or indicators.

(Ms Owers) Our targets are essentially what has been agreed with the Home Secretary and the Prison Service about the number of inspections and our target is to carry out around 30 full inspections and about 30 unannounced inspections every year and to make sure that we get around each of the 136 prison establishments for a full inspection every five years and in the middle for a shorter unannounced one. That is our core business.

That is not set out here. It does not say that here. Should the taxpayer not be told how many inspections you are meant to do every year and then measure and see whether you have done them?

(Ms Owers) We could certainly do that. I agree it would make it clearer.

I asked you what you would do with extra money and your answer was that these mini thematics looking at some policy issues. Would you like to go further than that and start to inspect the operation of the Prison Service itself?

(Ms Owers) There are areas of the Prison Service operation where it would be helpful if the inspectorate could look directly at service-wide issues. We can of course get to those by a side-wind indirectly in the sense that what goes on in an individual prison is not unconnected with the way that the Prison Service as a whole is operating, let alone the management of the prison. We cannot at the moment look directly at the service. However, the Home Secretary has indicated that if there are specific areas where he believes, or I am able to convince him, that we need to take a broader view in order to be able to report properly, then it would be possible to use his overriding powers in the statute, which allows him to ask me to inquire into anything to do with prisons, to be able to take that broader view. One of those issues which is coming up for the Prison Service and for us, which will come up undoubtedly over the next year, is race and the effects of the Race Relations Act as amended, which of course places duties directly on the service as well as on individual prisons and that may well be an area where we want to direct more widely.

Something which strikes most people when they visit prisons - I do not want to be too leading - is the Spanish practices of the Prison Officers' Association. Is that not a source of frustration for you that you are inspecting prisons, you want to see more education, more positive programmes, more work, more time out of cell? Is not not inspecting the operation of the Prison Officers' Association, like having the elephant on your doorstep and not looking at it?

(Ms Owers) I think we are pretty good in inspections at pointing out very strongly where we feel that the actions of the Prison Officers' Association as such are obstructive and preventing what is needed in prisons. There can be no doubt from my predecessors' reports and one or two of mine that we can point to that pretty directly.

Do you not really point at the effects rather than the cause? As far as I know, you have never done a thematic inquiry into the way that the Prison Officers' Association works. You tend to look at the effects of what happens, that is prisoners spend more time in cells.

(Ms Owers) That is true, but I am not entirely sure what a thematic inspection into the Prison Officers' Association as such would reveal. I am always open to suggestions about thematics. In a way we can perform a more useful function by doing precisely what you describe, which is highlighting those prisons - I must say these days they are rarer than they used to be - where the Prison Officers' Association is having a disruptive, a drag effect on what happens.

If there were one thing you could change with a magic wand in the operation of the Prison Service, what would it be?

(Ms Owers) There are many.

You are only allowed one.

(Ms Owers) I am only allowed one; I know. The magic wand would have to come accompanied by resources. One should not underestimate the work the Prison Service is doing and I would never ever want to do that. The way that it is managing this crisis in the system just now and the good work which can be done within prisons, protecting it and resourcing it to do that, is the critical issue and that means sometimes a different kind of establishment and it often means resources to do things differently. That is why one of the things I focus on in my annual report is resettlement which I feel ought to be the core business of the Prison Service, just as security has been hugely improved within the Prison Service and it is a great success story, prisoners need to focus on their agenda of preventing re-offending. I am sorry, that is not a magic bullet answer.

Miss Widdecombe

May I go back to the fact that you do not have specific targets and just try to examine the measurement of productivity in a slightly different way? You identify things which are wrong. Some of those things can be very immediately rectified because they refer to one practice and one prison where it is not resource driven but there is something wrong. That is fine. Other issues are very much larger, such as, for example, the level of purposeful activity in prisons. It seems to me that almost every inspection report I have ever read has commented, if not adversely somewhat chidingly, "room for improvement" and "could do better" on purposeful activity, with the exception obviously of Coldingley. This just goes on. There does not appear to be an end product which says "as a result of this, purposeful activity has now gone up". How do you measure the effectiveness of the reports? You are not there presumably just to produce reports, you are there for the reports to have effect. How do you measure that?

(Ms Owers) There are different kinds of measures, are there not? There are those where you can have an immediate effect, a fairly small thing, the prison did not realise it was happening, you turn up and tell them, they do something about it. There is also, I would suggest, the larger version of that which is an establishment which as a whole is not performing, is failing where the culture is wrong, where things are not going right and where as a result of probably more than one bad inspection report, but perhaps just one, focus is put on that establishment and it is assisted to turn itself round. Those are the immediate hits or the fairly immediate hits you can get. In other areas - and I suspect it is true of most inspectorates and most public services they inspect - what you will often find is an incremental effect, that is that an individual report, collection of reports, will not necessarily immediately lead to ten per cent more purposeful activity in prisons. However, the fact that we are going in, and particularly when we are going in with the Adult Learning Inspectorate, looking at skills, looking not at work as something which is designed to make income from the prison but work which is designed to make the prisoner more employable, the focus on that over and over again is certainly driving prisons in that direction and where choices are to be made is pressing those choices to be made in that kind of direction. The amount of purposeful activity in prisons has increased and certainly was increasing until overcrowding hit and that is starting to affect even training prisons. In those areas you look over time at the incremental effect. One very small example I could give is in education where my predecessor in various reports over many years talked about the effect of focusing on one particular level of skills, level 2, which is the employability level, which quite rightly is where the Prison Service wants people to get to, but in fact they turn up in prison so far beyond that, that if you are just providing that, they are never going to get there. It was in evidence to this Committee that I read the Director General first saying that they were now going to make the targets much more flexible and have lower targets for those people who needed it. It is that kind of slow incremental work which you are often working for as an inspectorate.

Chairman

How do you decide which prison you are going to inspect? Is there just a rota which you follow?

(Ms Owers) It is a combination. In terms of the five years, it is more or less a rota, because that is what we have said, although we do change the rota if we have gone into an establishment and we are clear that we need to go back sooner on a full announced basis than we otherwise would have done. It is not entirely fixed for the next five years where we shall be. We do not give prisons more than about six months' advance notice when they are on our announced list. In terms of the unannounced ones, the short ones, it is largely follow-up. We try to get back within 18 months to two and a half years of the main inspection. The unannounced ones, which are very important to us, are based on what we are hearing, intelligence we are getting or establishments where we know there have been problems and we want to go back and check what is happening.

Why does Blantyre House not feature on the list?

(Ms Owers) I think it is on our list, is it not?

I have annex 1 in front of me.

(Ms Owers) We certainly did not inspect it last year, no.

Or the year before?

(Ms Owers) Sorry, before my time. I think we did inspect it the year before, but I would not like that to be on the record.

Do you recall the controversy over Blantyre House?

(Ms Owers) Indeed yes.

So it is an obvious candidate for a follow-up, is it not?

(Ms Owers) It may well be.

Mr Singh

When my colleague asked you about your one wish I thought you might have answered the resolution of the overcrowding in prisons.

(Ms Owers) Indeed I should have; it is the obvious one.

The population has gone up over 24,000 in the last ten years and over 6,000 in the last two years. How is the prison estate coping with these increases?

(Ms Owers) It is coping. You are absolutely right, I was thinking in a line of questioning and clearly anyone's one wish in prisons now would be for prisoner numbers to decrease to the level which would be right and where prisons could do their proper job. Thank you for reminding me of that; not that I need much reminding. In answer to your question, I would say that prisons are coping. They are good at coping, they are good at crisis management and they are managing a very, very difficult crisis, but they are managing it with some difficulty and I set out in the annual report those particular areas of difficulty and the way in which it is affecting all of our healthy prison tests. It is undoubtedly true that most prisons are not as safe as they were and you see that in the rates of suicide and self-harm which are going up. That is not just because of the numbers, it is because of the "churn" of population, it is because of the movement in and out of prison reception, sometimes 100 a day moving in and out. It is not possible for reception and induction staff to assess people's risk to themselves or risk to others properly when they are looking at those kinds of movements. Prisoners are locked up for longer and that also increases the likelihood of suicide and self harm and disturbances are much more likely to happen in prisons now, so they are not so safe. They are also not so decent. The Director General and I talk a lot in reports about two people sharing a cell with a shared toilet with no screen, where everything happens. They eat, they sit on the toilet, one of them may sit on the toilet to eat. Those are not conditions which the Prison Service wants to provide or that prisoners need. That is the case. Also, in terms of the other test, purposeful activity and resettlement, which I see as key to preventing re-offending and to public protection in the longer term, you see prison's ability to do that being compromised. Resettlement obviously consists of getting people on the right programmes they need, the right training courses but also, crucially, making links with the outside world to which they will be released, most of them in very short order, most of them within a year. The Prison Service's capacity to do that, to have prisoners in the right place, for the right course, with the right resettlement links and resettlement is still very much a developing area within the Prison Service which needs to be developed a lot further, that is greatly compromised by overcrowding. In a way, going over the last six months or so, the effects of overcrowding are a bit like an oil slick. At first you saw its effect very acutely, very damagingly on the local prisons which are the pressure valves of the system and who receive people from court and who are struggling with these large numbers of people going in and out. What I am now seeing in training prisons, which are supposed to be the workhorses of the system, supposed to be the places where prisoners get the purpose and the skills and the training they need, is that they are also now being affected. In one training prison I was in recently, prisoners are now spending an average of only six or seven weeks there because they are overspilling from London, or else prisoners are being sent to a training prison, not because they are suitable for the courses that training prison offers, but because there is nowhere else to put them. So they are both disruptive to the course or activity which is supposed to be happening, but also nothing is happening for them. It is something which is having long-term effects. Against that I would not want to underestimate the good work which is still going on in prisons and the extent to which the Prison Service staff are struggling to cope and doing their best in those circumstances. It is a much more difficult job to do.

What are the effects on the morale of prison staff, prisoners and the effect of all this movement into inappropriate prisons or prisons far away from families? What is the effect on the links with the family of what is going on now?

(Ms Owers) The effects on all of those are visible and palpable now within the system. The effect on prisoners is obvious and the effect on prisoners' feelings of safety, security and their ability to do positive work is evident at all kinds of levels. The effect on prison staff too. One of the most disturbing things is that prison staff who want to do a good job, who want to be more than turnkeys, are finding it increasingly difficult to do that and are talking about leaving. They are frustrated at not being able to do a good job and there is and has been a lot of good work going on in prisons. As far as links with families are concerned, clearly those are disrupted. The number of prison visits is going down and it is connected with the distance from home many people are. One of the many individual incidents which has been told to me over the last year or so was of the prison officer who was running the juvenile part of Feltham, who was rung up by a mother whose son had just been moved to Castington. Castington is a long way away from Middlesex; it is almost in Scotland. He had the task of telling her where her son now was. Those kinds of moves are happening all the time and disrupting those essential links with families.

Extra resources have been put in, a couple of new prisons. Are they on line, already open? Private prisons, I think.

(Ms Owers) Do you mean resources to deal with overcrowding specifically?

Yes.

(Ms Owers) Yes, there are two kinds of quick build units going up in prisons. One of them can be built very quickly but it is very insecure because it is basically a Nissan hut, it is basically a hut in which you can put 20 or so prisoners who obviously need to be low security risks because they are not going to be in cells. Then there are slightly more sophisticated versions of that which are cellular accommodation and they are going up quite quickly. There is new money coming in, but it is not enough and it is not quick enough in the sense that if you get one of the Nissan hut type of establishments, you will not have any additional capital money. So you may have a bit of extra money for revenue, but you may not have any workshops or whatever for people to go to. Even with the other kind of building, if you get some kind of capital money, you have to recruit staff, you have to recruit teachers, you have to recruit people who can deliver purposeful activity, if you are going to do anything other than operate a containment operation. It is easy enough to put the physical buildings up: it is much less easy to provide the necessary regimes which will provide purposeful activity.

Are these Nissan huts intended to be temporary or will they turn out to be a permanent feature?

(Ms Owers) I have no idea. I suspect that they may be with us for a very long time.

How many prisoners are accommodated in police cells at the moment?

(Ms Owers) The latest figures I saw were around 230, but I am not sure where we stand as of today.

A report published yesterday with projections of long-term trends in the prison population gives four predictions, the lowest of which by June 2009 is that the prison population will be 91,400, the highest in June 2009 being 109,600. Everything has a breaking point. Where is the breaking point in our Prison Service?

(Ms Owers) I should hate to have to make that prediction. Predicting prison population figures is hard enough, predicting precisely where the breaking point is, I would hesitate to do. Certainly at present the system has no headroom at all. There is no contingency space available in our prisons at all. As I have already said, prisoners are being overcrowded in the facilities there are and you cannot put things up quickly enough to accommodate the capacity which is needed.

Can I interpret that as meaning we are extremely close to breaking point?

(Ms Owers) We are extremely close to a position where there is simply no more space, where you cannot shoehorn in any more people, no matter how hard you try and where the prisons I inspect are very fragile places in terms of prisoners' expectations, prison staff's needs and expectations and the running of a proper system. That is as far as I can say. I should hate to predict further. There is no stretch left in the system.

You did refer to the Director General of the Prison Service's comments that 20 per cent of the prison population now share a cell meant for one, meaning that strangers need to eat together and defecate in front of one another in the same cell. If you were still the head of JUSTICE, what would your comments be on this feature of our prison system in the 21^st century?

(Ms Owers) They would be the same as they are as Chief Inspector of Prisons, that these are degrading conditions in which we should not be keeping people. I saw one prison cell in one inspection where the conditions which the Director General described obtained. The two people sharing a cell were one man with a permanent catheter and another young man who was cutting up his arms. They were literally in that cell for 22 to 23 hours a day on many days. Those are things I highlight in my reports, those are things which are degrading conditions to keep people in.

David Winnick

I do not know whether you wish to comment or not, I leave it to you, but where such degrading and inhumane conditions exist in prisons, two to a cell, where they use the toilet and are seen by each other in so doing, would there not be a challenge through the Human Rights Act?

(Ms Owers) I think there might well be in certain circumstances. It is the kind of thing as a whole where you would struggle - this is my view and it would need to go before a court. If you looked at it as a phenomenon as a whole it might not reach the very high threshold you would need to have a breach of article 3, which as you know is an absolute right and therefore has a very high threshold to it. It is certainly my view that there would be individual circumstances where that happens, which might constitute a case under the Human Rights Act and the Prison Service is alert to that and what is more, even if it were not, it is something the Prison Service would not want to be engaged in.

Recognising the difficulties, after all the Director General and his staff are not responsible for what the courts decide, rightly or wrongly they have to cope with the situation as it is, would not one of the first priorities that you would see be to end what can only be described, in the words I have used, and you as well, as I understand it, as the degrading and inhumane way in which prisoners are held in their cells in such conditions?

(Ms Owers) It is certainly a very high priority indeed. It is a priority by itself, because we need as a society to provide safe and decent conditions, particularly in our prisons. It is also about giving prisoners a model of something which is positive and something which can motivate them and they can work through. Yes, on both levels it is hugely important.

It should be one of the first priorities of the Prison Service and indeed the Home Secretary himself to end this.

(Ms Owers) Yes, indeed, that and focusing on resettlement would be the two. There is also the whole issue of safety too which is very important, both safety in terms of suicide and self harm, but also safety in terms of a generally safe environment.

Miss Widdecombe

May I just press you a little on measures to relieve overcrowding? You have rightly identified that they fall into two categories: there are those you can do now, prison ships, Nissan huts, that sort of thing; there are those for the longer term. May I just press you on the first category? Is it your view, if you like to phrase it that way, that the emergency measures which are now being put in place will not actually be adequate for much longer?

(Ms Owers) My understanding is that they will be full pretty quickly. I could not give you a direct answer on when. They are filling as they are building.

So the emergency measures now being put in place are not adequate.

(Ms Owers) It depends. We are looking at "adequate" on two levels, are we not? Adequate in the sense of simply providing spaces for people to be put, or adequate in terms of providing the kind of prison environment.

Let us stick with the first definition at the moment: because it is an emergency. Let us stick to the first definition.

(Ms Owers) I would need to look back at that. I could not give you a direct answer on when and how much they will be filled. What I can say is that what I am saying is that I am going round prisons where they are being put up and as soon as they are put up they are being filled. You would probably need to ask the Director General or his deputy what that programme was and when it would be full.

Or even the Home Secretary.

(Ms Owers) Or even the Home Secretary. My understanding is that even with those emergency provisions in place the system is going to have a House Full notice up pretty soon.

Bridget Prentice

You described there some examples as being degrading but obviously also dangerous. I do not know whether you have seen the article in The Independent today, which is headlined, "Jail chiefs will show prisoners how to kill themselves". It may be just in order to grab our attention, which it clearly has done, but the Director General is going to launch a programme of showing people posters on how easy it is to commit suicide in prison in the hope that this will frighten them, presumably encourage them to seek other help, whatever. How do you think, given that you have this thread through everything you have said today about the pressure which overcrowding itself has brought on the service, health care and prevention of self harm and suicide can be improved?

(Ms Owers) I should first want to point to the very helpful work which has been done by the safer custody group within the Prison Service - again I can take no personal credit for this at all - much of it based on thematic reviews which this inspectorate did into suicide and self-harm in prisons. One of the things which has come out of that and one of the things which as an inspectorate we encourage prisons to do and we check whether they are doing it, is that safety and protection against suicide and self harm in prisons means looking at the whole environment. So it means looking at the mental health needs of those who come into prisons, the substance use needs of those who come into prisons and the safe detoxification, things like bullying and other forms of violence and assault within prisons, as well as people's own state, so that you need to create a safer environment and all those features need to be part of it. It needs to start by having the time, the space and the skills to assess people's vulnerability when they are coming into prison. We know from the work that the safer custody group has done and we know from our own inspections that most people who kill themselves in prison do so within the first month of imprisonment, not immediately necessarily, not within the first 24 to 48 hours, but within that relatively early period. That is when support systems need to be there and that is when prison staff need to have the time and the space and the skills to be able to support people coming into prisons. The link with mental health is of course very strong. The proportion of people coming into prisons with both chronic and acute mental health problems is extremely high. That is an issue which has always been of great concern to my inspectorate and where we have done a lot of work.

Can we stick with the mental health issue for the moment? You have identified that there are people who are identifiably more at risk than others and the assessment is crucial. You have already said that because of the overcrowding and the pressure at the time people arrive in prison there just is not the opportunity to do those assessments. You also raise in your report that people with severe mental illnesses are being housed inappropriately in prison. Are any things being done at the moment to change that? Do you see any light at the end of a very dark tunnel?

(Ms Owers) There is a light but it is a glimmer. If you are looking at prison health care broadly, what we are seeing as an inspectorate is an improvement in primary care within prisons. That is very much linked to better contacts, better links with the health service generally, with the bringing in of things like clinical governance, health improvement plans and now much greater links with local primary care trusts and to an extent local mental health trusts and funding for prison health care and the management of it is to be taken over by the Department of Health from April next year. In primary health care, you can see improvements. Where we are much more concerned is in patient health care and particularly the care of those who are severely mentally ill. As the report says, a few years back our then medical inspector - he no longer is - who is a consultant forensic psychiatrist with considerable experience, did a survey of those in a number of prisons we inspected, prison inpatient departments, of those he believed ought to be in acute NHS psychiatric care. At that point he was identifying about one third of those in inpatient beds who were inappropriately located. We did the same exercise last year in four local prisons and the percentage which came out then was 41 per cent. So it is not visibly improving. There are now better links very often. There are prisons I go to now which have established very good links with local mental hospitals, semi secure and secure and they are managing to get those transfers made, but they do take a lot of time and of course if those people proved to be particularly disruptive in the mental hospitals to which they are sent, they are liable to be returned to prison. That is an acute issue for prisons and you see those prisoners being shuttled between segregation units and health care centres, a danger to themselves, to staff and to other prisoners in no particular order. What you are also very aware of is the chronic mental health needs of a much larger proportion of the prison population, of people who would find it difficult to exist outside some kind of structured framework and end up in prison, often with mental health problems which are caused or aggravated by substance use. It runs across. It seems to me that the absence of proper sheltered accommodation rather than secure accommodation, a proper framework for such people within the community, means that they end up inappropriately in prisons.

Is the fact that it takes a long time a bureaucratic and administrative problem rather than a consequence of the unavailability of places?

(Ms Owers) It is both. There are not enough places and it often takes a lot of time to get the processes moving. It seems to me the bureaucracy has improved but the number of spaces has not visibly risen. There is a particular problem for young people where there is very little by way of secure psychiatric accommodation.

I want to come back to drugs and substance abuse in a moment. You mentioned the fact that the funding is being moved to the Department of Health as from next year. In your report you seem to welcome that. Are you not afraid that the Prison Service will become the Cinderella of the huge monolith that is the health service?

(Ms Owers) Yes. We welcome it with reservations. We welcome it because it has a chance of spreading equivalence and standards of care and the same kind of expectations, but we are very alert to precisely the problem which you raise which is that for hard pressed health services, local health trusts and so on, the pressure on them will be from outside prison rather than those inside prison and it will remain the task of this inspectorate to have to keep on promoting and monitoring the health care needs of those within prisons. I do not think our job is going to get any easier necessarily but it gives us a different arena in which to move.

So you will have to take on another Secretary of State as well.

(Ms Owers) Yes; indeed. We already have indirectly at least to report to the Secretary of State at the Department for Education and Skills because that is now providing the ring-fenced money for prison education through the prisoners' learning and support unit. Increasingly one of the issues for the inspectorate is that because prisons are entire worlds and entire communities we are not just operating within criminal justice and indeed prisons will not work if they only operate within criminal justice. We need a whole range of support services around.

One more thing on the move to the Department of Health and the fact that you have mentioned that in some instances a very good relationship has been developed with primary care trusts. Are you concerned that there may be some primary trusts in areas where there are prisons who will be quite reluctant to take on the prison population as well and will resist that quite a lot?

(Ms Owers) Indeed and we find it is very variable. It is the same in a way as we find with area child protection committees and their local prison. A minority are very good, others really do not want to go anywhere near the prison because they know the extent of need there. Most primary care trusts are approaching the task with a certain degree of trepidation, but also positively. There are certainly some where prisons have had huge difficulties in trying to make positive links.

Finally, may I turn to the misuse of drugs and substance abuse generally? You will know from our report that we made a number of quite strong recommendations about the treatment of prisoners who are drug abusers and that experts found detoxification appeared not to be necessarily the best method. Are you satisfied that in the government's updated drugs strategy there will be adequate provision within prisons for heroin abusers for example and the care they need both within prison and the follow-up?

(Ms Owers) This is not something I have looked at in detail, so I shall not try to comment on the detail of that, if you do not mind, although I should be perfectly happy to write to you afterwards, having looked at all the relevant documents. On a broad level, I think what we see as an inspectorate is that you are right that detoxification of itself is not sufficient and indeed in some prisons - we recently did a report on Styal women's prison in Cheshire - it is not even available at that level. We come across different qualities or presences and absences of detoxification in prison which we comment on. We also come across different qualities of drug rehabilitation programmes in prison. The critical issue which always comes to you when you look at tackling drug use within prisons is how critically it depends on what happens outside. No matter what a prison does and no matter how well it did it, I would not be sure that prisons would be given the resources to do it well enough, particularly - I am sorry to come back to my one club golf - the more people there are in prison the more resources will be stretched thinly. I would not be confident that prisons would have the resources they need to do whatever it is they are doing. Whatever it is they do is only going to be as successful as what follows and the ability of people to find treatment and support after they leave prison is critical. I should certainly be happy to write to you in more detail about the questions you raise when I have had chance to think about that a little more.

Bob Russell

May I pursue the question of suicides in prison? The death rate has increased. We read every three or four days now that there is a suicide in a prison. What have you done since you became Chief Inspector of Prisons to impress upon the Prison Service the need to instal more safe cells, particularly for young male remand prisoners? Have you had any success in persuading the Prison Service to do that?

(Ms Owers) The provision of safe cells is something we always look for and we always look at. More of them are being provided partly as a result of our inspections and what we say.

Is that one of the recommendations you make?

(Ms Owers) It is a recommendation we make in individual reports quite often.

Chairman

Going back to overcrowding for a moment, are there people in prisons, besides those with mental health problems, who should not be there in your view? Are there any categories of people we are imprisoning we should not really be imprisoning and for whom other sentences would be appropriate?

(Ms Owers) I should be reluctant to go through by category, but I do think that we need to look more creatively at alternatives to prison particularly for non-violent offenders who would otherwise go there for short periods. It is well known. I am repeating what has been said by many others. Short sentences do not provide an opportunity to do much constructive work with people and therefore they are disruptive by definition without much possibility of being constructive. It seems to me that we need to provide alternatives and some of those alternatives will certainly be a better, more robust use of community sentencing. It also seems to me that for some of the people we have been talking about whose lives are chaotic and who may have serious problems relating to mental health and substances, it would be more appropriate and would enormously help prison overcrowding to have a kind of intermediate estate, hostel type accommodation, in which people who were not violent, but who essentially needed treatment, could be held. That would be particularly appropriate for many women in custody who are by and large not violent offenders and two thirds of whom are primary carers of children under 16 and who are very often held at long distances from their home and their family. Those were some of the alternatives which were being looked at a little earlier.

Mr Clappison

As you have observed, the majority of women in prison are there for non-violent offences and are less likely to re-offend on release. Notwithstanding that, the female prison population has been expanding even more rapidly than the men's. Do you have any reflections on this and how well do you think the system is coping with it?

(Ms Owers) It is not coping very well with it. Although the actual numbers themselves are small, the rise has been great and the effect of such a rise is more acute within a small estate. So women are more likely to be held a considerable distance from their homes, drug intervention programmes are not always available, it is having a very damaging effect. That was what gave rise to the comments I just made to the Chairman about looking particularly at that estate and whether there are better ways of dealing with the issue.

May I also ask you about the families, which is a very, very important subject? Can more be done to keep mothers in contact with their families when they are serving sentences?

(Ms Owers) Yes, there is. I suppose you would look at three layers of that. First of all, there is the opportunity for mothers to be with their babies, the mother and baby units that we have. There you have a cut-off point and you have a cut-off point because you are looking at the interests of the child as well as the interests of the mother. That is a small part of the population. The second is, where women are in prison - where people are in prison, but for women with dependent children this is particularly important - encouraging, facilitating visits. I inspect far too many prisons which do not have proper visitor centres, which have blocked lines where people cannot get through when they are trying to organise visits, in practice making it more difficult for families to visit regularly. Equally I have come across some which have really made a huge effort in that way and you can tell the difference: they simply get more visits and they get more people coming. It is possible to do it and we know how to do it. My third layer would be about a much more permeable system, for women in particular who did not need to be incarcerated in prisons and for whom regular family contact would be much easier if they were held in the kind of environment that the Prison Reform Trust talked about a couple of years ago. Also the government itself when it did a review of women offenders was looking at these smaller semi-secure custodial units.

I take it from that answer that you feel that whilst there is good practice in some areas, there is more which could be done across the prison estate to give better visiting facilities, better opportunities for visiting mothers in prison.

(Ms Owers) Visiting people in prison. Many more opportunities. You will see from the report that we quote some good stories as well as some horror stories but there are too many bad facilities and too many facilities where in practice it puts barriers in the way of people visiting rather than facilitating that.

One of the things which is happening is that men's prisons are being converted to women's prisons. How well adjusted are they to women prisoners and how is this process being managed?

(Ms Owers) It is happening far too quickly, is the answer, much more quickly than people in the establishments or people in the Prison Service would want. Like everything else which is going on now, it is a crisis measure designed to alleviate a crisis and the crisis first emerged very strongly in the women's estate with the result that establishments flipped over from looking after men to looking after women in fairly short order. It is quite a different task, as indeed it is a different task to look after juveniles and young people in prisons. There simply was not enough time to prepare properly for that.

You are saying that needs to be thought out very carefully.

(Ms Owers) It does and it is about trying to be ahead of the game and trying to prevent where possible rather than what is happening at the moment which is simply reaction.

Miss Widdecombe

You said in the earlier part of your evidence that one of the things you wanted to see was a greater concentration on skills and less on work which brings an income for prisons. May I put it to you that one of the reasons why we have so few prison workshops comparative to the population which they serve is that overwhelmingly they are not self-financing, they do not pay for themselves, they represent a burden on the taxpayer and therefore they are competing with all the other resource needs. At the same time, there is a very large proportion of people in Her Majesty's prisons who have no idea what a structured lifestyle is. They do not know what an ordinary working day is; never seen it. If you put those two needs together and you have more self-financing workshops and more people in them doing a complete day rather than the bits and pieces which we tend to get at the moment, would you not see that as a step forward?

(Ms Owers) It is certainly better for people to be out of their cells doing something. In local prisons in particular, where you have prisoners for relatively short periods, it is very difficult to make sure that everything they do is attached to the acquisition of a skill. I see the argument about providing a structured working day, but I can also see the argument which says that if what you are then offering people is extremely boring and repetitive work, they may get the view that work is boring and repetitive and not something to be continued with. What ideally you need to be doing is providing people with skills which will make them employable in a modern workforce which is largely requiring people with skills. Where it is possible to provide those skills, the Prison Service should try to do that. That is the way prisons and prison workshops are going. As an example I give you the young offender institution at Reading which now has a link with Transco where young men are being trained to be plumbers. The need for plumbers is very great and the opportunities for them to work outside are very great. You can create links with industry. It does not necessarily need always to fall upon the budget of the Prison Service.

I really did do a double take when you said if you have prisoners doing boring repetitive work you will get them thinking work is boring and repetitive. Half the law-abiding population probably find their work exactly that. I would not see that as any argument against it. Secondly, let me put this to you. The choice in reality is not between learning a skill and doing a repetitive job all day. The choice is between being locked up in a cell and then being told a couple of years later to go and lead an industrious life, which is cloud cuckoo land, or actually getting into the habit of possibly uncongenial but regular, demanding work.

(Ms Owers) Yes, but if that work can be combined with the acquisition of the skills which prisoners manifestly do not have when they come into prison, that must be better, it seems to me. If you are looking at a situation which we look at where around 70 per cent of the people who are assessed in prisons are below the levels of literacy and numeracy which are generally at the employability level. It seems to me that tackling that as part of the activities which prisoners are doing and one of the ways in which prisons can do so creatively is in the context of work, sometimes quite repetitive work, but where you can, under cover of work, teach people some of the literacy and numeracy skills they spent their lives avoiding and you can do it more successfully in a workshop very often than you can if you sit people down in a classroom where they do not particularly want to be. The move towards skills base within prisons is a helpful one. I agree that sometimes you will have no choice other than just to provide something which gets people out of cells. Even there it is interesting to look at the creative ways in which some prisons are doing it. Some of that activity is very short-lived; a couple of hours in an afternoon rather than what you describe as a working day. I was very impressed recently when I went to Leeds prison that they had struggled with the idea of how in a local prison you could provide something which looked like a structured working day for a fairly transient population and what they had done was go to the local comprehensive school and asked how they managed to provide a timetable for 1,600 kids in a comprehensive school, to which the answer was that they designed the timetable around the kids, not the kids around the timetable. What they have done in Leeds is to develop a proper four-day working week in which prisoners spend four days working from eight until four or something like that and the fifth day is their rest day when they can see their probation officer, have visits, do things like that. They have creatively structured a real working day. One of the other consequences of that is that the pressure then to have association out of cell, which demands quite a lot of staffing, is less there, because when people have worked a full working day they quite often just want to sit and watch television. There are many more creative ways in which prisons can do it. The development of skills and training is certainly one of them.

I am not going to ask you about overcrowding because we have probably been round the course, but it obviously is not helping at the moment. Can we pass on to what happens when you come out of prison? Since the publication of your review, Through the Prison Gate, how satisfied have you been with the way the resettlement agenda is being carried forward? Can you also comment in conjunction with that on the problems you see arising from prisoners serving intermittent sentences? I am sorry it will be a lengthy answer but it is a very wide based question just to give you as much range as you like. Can you also comment on the impact of Custody Plus as you see it?

(Ms Owers) Let me deal with the here and now first. Resettlement. We always recognised that resettlement was going to be a challenge for the Prison Service because, as we described it in our report, and the probation inspectorate described it, it is not something which happens in the two weeks before you are released, it is something which starts at reception where your long-term needs, both within the prison system and outside it, are identified and your sentence is constructed in order for those needs to be met. If those needs include addressing a drugs issue, if it includes addressing another form of offending behaviour, if it includes acquiring some of the education and training you need to get you up to the employability level, or if it includes attention to any debts you may be accumulating outside prison or housing or employment needs, all those things are identified up front and during your prison sentence you can do those things which the prison can offer and afterwards the rest can be picked up outside. That was always going to be challenging for the Prison Service. I do not want to go on too much about overcrowding but it is clear that overcrowding has made that a much more difficult challenge because the opportunities for assessment at the front end, when you have so many people coming in are fewer, the chances that people will be held in an area to which they will return, where links with local probation, local housing, local employment are fewer, the chances of someone being able to get on the right course in the right prison and stay on it for the duration of the course are fewer. Overcrowding has not helped, but I still think that even if you put overcrowding to one side, the Prison Service is not yet geared up and resourced to resettlement as a core activity in the same way that it quite rightly is to security. Prisons now do security very well and they are constantly being checked on it; they are resourced to do it. I found some extremely good resettlement projects in prisons I have been in, but they are partly funded by the European Social Fund or some local initiative, often provided by the voluntary sector. They are often pilot projects which then run into the rocks when the funding stops or they depend upon a particularly innovative, creative management team which has developed extremely good links in its area, as you see for example in Preston and Bristol. It is not in my view yet a core part of what the Prison Service is resourced to do and able to provide and the links with probation too. Probation itself is obviously under huge pressure and those links are not nearly so strong as they should be. The short-term prisoners I have been talking about, those who are sentenced for a year or less, will not get any probation support once they are out of prison and they do not necessarily need to have a sentence plan within prison. There has been some acceptance of the idea that resettlement is important. Many prisons want to be able to do resettlement better. I see prison officers who will say when they are doing resettlement work that it is the most interesting work they have done in 25 years in the Prison Service, it feels very positive, it feels very good, but it is not yet a core part and the strategic part of prisons in general. I find it difficult to predict exactly what will happen in terms of the proposed new sentences, except to say that I am clear that they will not work unless resources can be provided which are not currently there, principally in the Probation Service, to provide the "Plus" bit of Custody Plus and to provide the support and intermittent custody, but also within the Prison Service to allow proper case management to happen and proper sentence planning. Unless those resources are put in and are put in very strongly, the principles on which they are based, which is that that separation between prison and the community is not so absolute as it is at the moment, will not be put into practice.

Mr Singh

I understand the part about resources but could you just help me on custody? In practice how would it work? If we have a prison system which is full, over full, the jails are full 24 hours a day, often multiply occupied, how could we organise a system where it will pump in and out of prisons? Is it feasible?

(Ms Owers) It would be extraordinarily difficult to manage. It is difficult enough trying to get prisoners into the right prison to do the right course at the moment. It would be very difficult to manage.

Mrs Dean

The Chairman of the Youth Justice Board told the Committee that 18- to 20-year-olds benefited very little from short custodial sentences. You also seem to recognise that from what you said earlier. Is short sentencing a particular problem with young offenders?

(Ms Owers) I would say that it is a problem with all offenders. For young offenders, it is just as disruptive as it is for anyone else, for women and adults. One of my particular concerns is that for young adults, the 18 to 20 age group which the Chairman of the Youth Justice Board was concerned about, the resources to deal with them within prisons, whether they are there for short or long periods simply are not there and prisons are not able to provide the kind of environment which we know is needed for this particularly prolific and persistent group of offenders.

Should they be accommodated elsewhere or can they be accommodated in the prison system but with similar programmes to the under-18s?

(Ms Owers) In some circumstances they could be dealt with outside prisons, in the circumstances I was describing earlier to the Chairman about looking at alternatives to custody. There will certainly be 18s to 20s who need to be in a custodial environment and the arguments for them are slightly different from the arguments for under-18s who are children in international and domestic law. My concern is that wherever they are held we need to put in the resources which will offer them an opportunity to change their lifestyles, to acquire skills, to be influenced positively. As I have said in the annual report, for anybody, but particularly for young people, prison is not a neutral experience. If it does not offer positive gains, it will offer negative opportunities for bonding in the wrong kind of way and acquiring skills which society would be much better of if people did not acquire.

Should we be moving further towards secure training centres or local secure units?

(Ms Owers) Those are used at present only for under-18s. There is a very live argument about whether for those who are under 18 and particularly for those under 16 those are the only environments in which we should have children and young people. The argument changes slightly for over-18s but I certainly think the principles of a secure training college and the principles on which we now operate for under-18s, which is that the sentence should be focused on training, education and the prevention of re-offending, it should not be a sentence which ends up being primarily about containment. Those are arguments which apply with equal force to the 18s to 20s.

How much change will have to be made within the Prison Service to make it compliant with the provisions of the Children Act, following the judicial decision?

(Ms Owers) The concern we have as an inspectorate when we inspect under-18 juvenile establishments is usually with establishments which are holding these very difficult and damaged children in large units without staff who are specifically trained in dealing with the problems of adolescents and recognising the limits of adolescent behaviour, intervening at the right time. Those are the establishments which have caused us most concern. Where 60 young men are held together on the same unit it is very difficult safely to have them socialising, it is very difficult to provide an environment which feels safe and one in which staff can positively engage with those young men to provide a different kind of role model from the one they may be accustomed to and providing those kinds of opportunities and those kinds of environments is crucial. It was clear from the case and it is clear from our inspections that the Prison Service is committed to the principles of the Children Act and we have seen environments in which those principles are translated into practice in prison settings and those tend to be small, focused environments in which young people and staff can interact in a positive way. We have also seen establishments, and it is clear from my inspection reports and those of my predecessor, where those principles are not translated into practice and where what you get is an environment which is unsafe for specific children held there or which is a frightening and unsafe environment generally. My own view is that the principles of the Children Act need to be translated into some kind of enforceable bottom line, some kind of regulation. Secure training centres and local authority secure units are governed by regulation. The Children Act applies to them but the direct bite is the regulations which set out the kind of environment which will prevent children from risk of significant harm. It seems to me that if the Prison Service is to hold children, then it too needs some kind of bottom line which can protect it from having to hold children in environments which are not safe.

Mr Clappison

Would I be right in interpreting your answers as vindicating that you believe local authority secure accommodation and secure training centres are more suitable forms of accommodation for 15- and 16-year-olds than other parts of the prison estate?

(Ms Owers) At present they can be. I have seen parts of the prison estate which are dealing very well with 16-year-olds and upwards in small dedicated units with trained staff. I think that the resources available to local authority secure units and secure training centres are hugely greater than those made available to the Prison Service. We do education inspections of every juvenile establishment every year, although we only do full inspections every three years. We produced an annual report of our first round of education inspections where we highlighted some deficiencies in the education which was then being provided under Youth Justice Board contracts. Those deficiencies were not very surprising when we also found out that the average spend per child in a Prison Service establishment for education was £1,800 a year and the average spend in a local authority secure unit or secure training centre was £1,600 a year. When you are looking at those differences in resourcing, which mean you can provide the environment I was talking about, small units, well staffed, well resourced, those are the kind of environments in which you can not only guard against significant harm - that is the bottom line, is it not? The top line, the thing we are aiming at, is to provide positive environments where those children who have often come from extremely disruptive lives outside prison can be given a positive environment and positive change.

Last week the Chairman of the Youth Justice Board told us that the Board try to assess 15- and 16-year-olds as vulnerable and non-vulnerable and try to send the vulnerable ones to secure training centres or local authority secure accommodation. He also went on to tell us that notwithstanding that, the pressures were such that at the moment some vulnerable 15- and 16-year-old young people were being sent to Prison Service accommodation. Do you have concerns about that?

(Ms Owers) Yes, very great concerns about it. There are more 15- and 16-year-olds coming into prisons now due to the pressure on local authority secure units and secure training centres. So there are more in general, but among those there are more which are vulnerable and yes, I am very concerned, for the reasons I have just said, that I would not want to make an absolute distinction, but as presently constituted, and in the establishments we now have, many Prison Service establishments are not safe environments for vulnerable children, some of whom have the kinds of mental illnesses I was describing earlier.

So it can be difficult to say who is vulnerable and who is not vulnerable when they are going into custody, sometimes for the first time.

(Ms Owers) Indeed they can become vulnerable if they are held in the wrong environment.

You were talking about the benefits for younger people of having a structured lifestyle and giving them something to do. Is there a distinction there between youngsters who are held on remand and those who have already been sentenced? Are you satisfied that those who are held on remand, that is before sentencing, are subject to a sufficiently structured regime which is giving them training. You may be aware that what very often happens with youngsters in that situation is that they are held on remand for a certain length of time and then when they come to court, the court decides they have had this experience of custody, that is sufficient custodial punishment and then gives them a non-custodial punishment. Are you satisfied that what happens on remand is sufficiently satisfactory?

(Ms Owers) No. I can expand on the no, if you like.

Yes; please do.

(Ms Owers) It is very helpful that there are guidelines, effectively there are contractual agreements between the Youth Justice Board and the Prison Service about what regime must be provided. There are no similar guidelines for children held on remand. Of course there was always the assumption, indeed it was more than an assumption, it was legislation, that remanded children under 16 would not be held in prison at all. That was part of one of the many Criminal Justice Acts; I cannot remember now which but one which was never enacted. The Youth Justice Board has also been very clear that it would rather that children on remand and indeed girls were not held in prison establishments at all. That has led to a bit of a Nelsonian attitude towards both girls and remand prisoners. They should not be there and therefore there is almost an assumption that they are not there, but they are. Both those groups are groups of children about which the inspectorate has particular concerns because their needs are not being met.

Chairman

Immigration detention next, which I think also comes within your bailiwick now, does it not?

(Ms Owers) Yes, it does.

Mr Prosser

How would you say accommodation for asylum seekers and illegal immigrants compares with accommodation within the general prison estate?

(Ms Owers) I am in some difficulty answering these questions. I need to put in a proviso at the beginning because we have not yet finally signed off and we have not published our initial reports into the five detention centres which have been opened during this year; we are doing two more later on. Until we have finally agreed the texts of those and presented them to the Home Secretary, if you do not mind, I shall speak in quite general terms about the kind of things we are looking for and the kind of things we are finding. Our approach to immigration detention centres and in inspecting them is that it is clear that the people in them are not being held for any form of punishment, deterrence or anything else that the prison system might have as part of its raison d'être. They are being held simply in order to be able to remove them when and if that becomes the right thing to do. It should be an environment in which within the limits of needing to provide a secure perimeter and also a secure environment for the people themselves being held, there should be as much freedom and as much responsibility as possible. That is the approach we are looking at when we are inspecting those detention centres. That said, we are looking at the same criteria we would use in a Prison Service environment, we are looking to see whether the people there are held in security and in safety. Security in that environment means also regular information about what is happening to you, because of the indeterminateness of immigration detention as opposed to most people in prison, not all. The entire indeterminateness of it and what will happen at the end is obviously a major source of anxiety to people there - they are treated with respect by all the services which come into contact with them - that they can do something purposeful and useful while they are there and that they are prepared properly for whatever is going to happen to them at the end. They are differently calibrated but we are using the same kind of tests.

On the issue of having some purposeful activity, I do not know whether Dover is amongst the five you visited -

(Ms Owers) No, it is not, because it has only just re-opened.

I visited the Dover centre on Friday and the very first asylum seeker I talked to told me about his case, as you would expect him to, then asked whether I could transfer him to a prison rather than the detention centre. His reason behind that was that there is no facility or ability for the service to engage inmates in even the ordinary day-to-day activities of cleaning and cooking and serving and those general catering facilities. It is quite clear to me that there was a longing that they would do that. This issue of boredom is even more exaggerated and I was given a picture of people lying on their beds until midday or the middle of the afternoon or later; no structure whatsoever. We have evidence of five attempted, some of them serious attempts, suicides within that centre which is very newly set up. Could you reflect on those matters? What are your comments about those matters?

(Ms Owers) Without pre-empting the conclusions which we come to in our report, the issue of work and purposeful activity is one which has been made to us in every detention centre we have been in. It used to be the case that detainees used to be engaged in work and they are not any longer and there are various legal and procedural reasons for that which we are not trying to get to the bottom of. It is an issue we shall be raising very strongly in our reports, because it leads to people who are in any case very anxious and stressed, having nothing to do. It can lead to unsafe conditions within the centres but it can also lead to people becoming so depressed that they harm themselves. It is one you can expect to see addressed in some detail when we publish our report, which I think will be just the other side of Christmas.

I look forward to that. In terms of their access to legal advice and access to visitors, I take the reservation that it is your early impression though not anything you have concluded on What is our feeling about their ability to access legal advice and the amount of time they are given for prison visit access which has been criticised recently?

(Ms Owers) I think what you will find in the report is that the amount of time varies quite considerably between the different centres. I hope that one of the things we might do is to pull up best practice and make those which have fairly restricted visiting open it up a bit. That goes to my first point about these being people for whom the minimum amount of restriction necessary to make sure they are in a secure place and in safety should be in place. The issues about legal advice are partly about access, but they are partly about the availability of competent legal advice. That is an issue I have dealt with in previous jobs as well as in this one and it is one which is coming over loud and clear in terms of immigration detainees, about their need for reliable, competent legal advice, indeed advice from the immigration authorities about the progress of their case, just saying where their case is. Those are issues which are coming over very strongly.

How acceptable would you say in terms of your first impressions is accommodation in detention centres which receive families, women and children?

(Ms Owers) I am struggling to remember precisely the details of family accommodation. May I leave that one over until we have had a chance to publish the reports?

I want to ask you about detention for people held under the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill. Do you inspect the accommodation provided for detainees under these arrangements?

(Ms Owers) They are part of prisons so yes, we do. Indeed we looked in Belmarsh at the conditions and treatment of those held and also at Woodhill where others were held.

What were your impressions of that accommodation?

(Ms Owers) That was in the very early days. One of the things we found at Belmarsh was that although in fact those detainees had been assessed in Prison Service standards as standard risk, they were being held in very secure accommodation. They were being held in the special secure wing at Belmarsh. They were then later transferred from there. In Woodhill, they were always held in ordinary Category A accommodation. There were also issues around access to religious services, access to lawyers and in particular, not unlike immigration detainees, the insecurity, the fact that people do not know what is going on with them, can either create or add to psychological conditions, psychiatric conditions which people will already have and we were very concerned about the level of care available.

Was your feeling that they had adequate access to support and advice and legal alternatives?

(Ms Owers) At the beginning no, but following our visit and also the visit of the European Committee against Torture, I understand that things have moved on. I have not recently been back to inspect, but we shall be.

Bob Russell

I understand that privately run prisons come under your general remit as well.

(Ms Owers) Yes.

Can you remind us how many private prisons we have now?

(Ms Owers) The answer is that I do not know; seven or eight, I think. I would be guessing.

Chairman

Will you let us know if that is not right?

(Ms Owers) Yes, I certainly shall let you know. I just do not have it in my head.

Bob Russell

How do standards in privately run prisons compare with those run by the Prison Service? Is there an advantage having these private prisons as well?

(Ms Owers) I should be very reluctant to make general statements about private prisons versus public sector prisons on the lines of four legs good, two legs bad. I have inspected three private prisons in the time I have been Chief Inspector. One has received a good inspection report, the other two reports still have not been released, but one will be bad and one will be average.

These are early days. You have been in post just over a year and two months. Surely you could give a general view. When you walk through the doors, can you tell whether it is a private prison or one run by the Prison Service? Do they have flowers in the entrance hall? Is there something obvious which makes it different?

(Ms Owers) Yes, I can make some general comments. I am not sure they would be quite as stark as that. Many private prisons are fairly newly built, so what you find when you walk in is not an old Victorian local prison with a very unprepossessing entrance but a more modern build. When Brixton, one of the archetypal small Victorian local prisons, was put up, the private sector did not want to tender for it because those are difficult buildings to run. It seems to me in my visits and inspections of private prisons, that they have shown some advantages, some different ways of doing things. You have found quite often in private prisons a can-do culture, an ability to think differently, to think more flexibly. The reason why I am being hesitant about direct comparison is that I have also found that now in Prison Service establishments, some of those which have gone back to the Prison Service, but some Prison Service establishments too which are looking at things in that more flexible light. The downside of a can-do culture can be that the staff are less experienced in recognising some of the risks or that you get initiative overload; there are many initiatives going on but you need to ground them. The other thing obviously is that private prisons provide an alternative and they have provided a way for the Prison Service to say to prisons which are stuck in negative cultures that there is an alternative and if they cannot turn the culture round then this is the alternative that there will be.

Do you think that the Prison Officers' Association hold less sway in the private prisons than they do in the Prison Service prisons?

(Ms Owers) I would not make that as a universal comment. I have been in plenty of public sector prisons where the Prison Officers' Association is part of the landscape and is co-operating with management in running a perfectly decent prison. Certainly there have been places, and Feltham was one, Reading another, where the threat of changes being made has concentrated minds wonderfully.

Does the POA operate in that area now?

(Ms Owers) Yes, it does now. It used not to, but it does now.

What do you think the Prison Service has learned from the private sector experience and is there evidence of best practice feeding across the whole sector? I got the impression from your last comment that the answer is probably yes, but could you give me any specific examples?

(Ms Owers) Yes, there is. In terms of flexibility of approach, doing things differently, something about the realistic staffing levels which you need to run a prison safely and securely - and you need to look very carefully to make sure you are not running too close to the line - that it is possible with smaller numbers of staff than traditionally have been there in prisons to have not only an environment which is safe, which it must be, but also an environment in which prison staff are not talking to each other but talking to prisoners. Sometimes if you have too many staff on a landing what you find is that the conversations, the interactions are going on between staff and not between staff and prisoners. It has done some re-thinking in all of that. As the private sector runs on, what the private sector will need to look at and what the Prison Service which contracts will need to look at is whether the contracts are sufficiently flexible to meet the changing needs of the Prison Service. The advantage of having a contractual arrangement and the advantage for prisoners and the prison is that it is made very clear what you must provide and that you will be paid to provide it. If, for example, the Prison Service wants a private prison to carry out an effective risk assessment for cell sharing, which is now part of what the Prison Service requires, you will have to negotiate and it will come with a cost, because it will cost something to do. Those things are up front and it means that the tasks a prison has to carry out are very clearly identified. The concern I am simply voicing at the moment is that those contracts are obviously set when prisons are being required to do a certain task. As expectations of the Prison Service move on, for example the new focus on resettlement, or the notion that it is perhaps not the number of hours you spend out of your cell as such, but what you do with those hours and how purposeful and how useful things can be done, then contracts may be hitting targets which are old targets rather than the direction in which the Prison Service is moving and that will be a task to renegotiate.

Do you think the private prison sector has a more than passing interest in the growth of the prison population?

(Ms Owers) With private prisons the concern is always that it is a business and that as a business it needs expanding. At present in our prison system you cannot see the private sector expanding, indeed to some extent it has been shrinking because it has lost a couple of contracts which it had. It would be of great concern if there were a critical mass which were privately run.

Putting to one side the moral argument of whether it is right for private firms to make a profit out of prisoners the state has said should be incarcerated, would you like to see more of the prison estate put into the private sector?

(Ms Owers) I should like to see good prisons run well. The private sector prisons have taught the public sector some things which have been very valuable. I do not really have a view other than that I think there would be a legitimate concern if too much of our prison estate were run by the private sector, for the reasons you describe. The regimes and what is provided must be absolutely under the control of the Prison Service and therefore of the government. That is the only proper way in which to run a prison system. If ever there were a leaning towards a stack-'em-high and sell-'em-cheap way then that is something this inspectorate would be very, very robust about, you can be sure.

Miss Widdecombe

You talked about negotiations. One of the big advantages, I would say, of a private prison is that if they fail to deliver to the specifications they are penalised, there is a financial penalty. In every private prison there is a Home Office controller and if they are not delivering the contract, if they fail on the purposeful activity or whatever it may be, there is a financial penalty; there is, if you like, a disciplinary mechanism for failure in the system. That does not exist in the public sector. Indeed if you look at what has happened to Blakenhurst - and I should like you to comment on this if you feel able to - the private sector lost the bid, the public sector won it. They have actually not delivered on certain parts of the specification but there is no penalty. Could there be some equivalent way of holding public sector prisons to account?

(Ms Owers) I think there is. Service level agreements provide one way of doing that. A purchaser/provider arrangement would provide another. The trouble with those if they are properly enforced on both sides is that they can be quite costly. Not only does the prison get penalised if it fails to meet its targets, as you rightly say, but if the prison is going to be required to do something else or do it differently or do it better, then it will be entitled to ask for more money for doing so, rather than simply be expected to absorb it along with everything else. The answer to your question is yes, it can be done and I would see that there could be advantages in doing it. There are costs on both sides. Your question leads me back to what I was trying to say in answer earlier. We need to be very careful about simply measuring quantity. What I have seen happening in a couple of private prisons recently is yes, they can be very heavily penalised because, for example, they are not getting prisoners out of their cells enough. What they might say is yes, but if they were able to provide focused work and a focused work day for their prisoners, time out of cell would matter less, but that is what is in the contract, so that is what they have to provide. It seems to me that the contracts themselves have to be flexible enough to reflect quality as well as quantity.

If you could have 136 prisons working as well as Blakenhurst but they all happen to be in the private sector, would you really object?

(Ms Owers) I need to think about that. I would worry. What we need to get is our prison system working better. The public sector prisons I have seen are capable of working better and very often very much want to work better. The issue is to get them to work better.

That is not quite what I asked you.

(Ms Owers) No.

Chairman

I see Ashfield is on your list of inspected prisons, but that does not mean the Ashfield Young Offenders' Centre does it?

(Ms Owers) Yes, it does.

They were managed by Premier Custodial Services.

(Ms Owers) That is true.

At the time of the inspection.

(Ms Owers) At the time of the inspection they were actually being directly run by the Prison Service.

Because?

(Ms Owers) Because the Director General had taken over direct control.

Why?

(Ms Owers) Because he thought it was not a safe and secure environment.

Premier Custodial Services were not providing it.

(Ms Owers) That was the Director General's view. That was why he took over direct control for a time. It has now been handed back to Premier.

Have you inspected it since it has gone back into Premier's hands?

(Ms Owers) No. We inspected it at that time and the report is due out very soon.

That is quite a long time, is it not, the gap before publication, in which there has been a change of regime?

(Ms Owers) We inspected in June, that is right. Summer holidays intervened. We have now, as you will be able to see from my annual report, negotiated a new protocol with the Prison Service about production and publication of reports which, if it all works, should get us to publication within four months of the end of an inspection. The problem is that it is not in our hands.

Mr Cameron

It is in your hands. You do the inspection and then you have to produce the report. If you are trying to do too many inspections and as a result are not producing a report, that is your fault.

(Ms Owers) The production of a report is entirely down to us and that is, as you say, a question of management and resources. Up until now the decision on when to publish the report has not been ours.

Chairman

Whose has that been?

(Ms Owers) That has followed a letter from the Director General of the Prison Service to the Home Secretary saying he is content for the report to be published.

What is there to stop the Director General dragging his feet?

(Ms Owers) There have been gaps and delays certainly while messages have gone to and from. What I have now agreed in the new protocol is that at the point we produce the draft report I will set a date for publication, which will normally be about eight weeks later, which gives the Prison Service the chance to comment on any factual inaccuracies they believe there to be, us the chance to respond and the report to get into the public domain. The date for publication will be set by us and it will be very clear.

Presumably there are attempts by the Prison Service to get the reports revised and that takes some time, does it?

(Ms Owers) Sometimes there can be a reasonably lengthy exchange of correspondence, but quite often it is simply adrift; it has been sorted out but no-one is responsible, no-one under the old protocol. There were no time lines under the old protocol between the report being agreed and it being published and there was no clear definition of who was responsible and who decided. Under the new protocol it is quite clear.

Am I right in thinking that children's detention centres do not come under you? Is that the Social Services Inspectorate or is that you as well?

(Ms Owers) We do children's prisons, but not secure training centres and local authority secure units.

What is Hassockfield near Consett?

(Ms Owers) Not one of mine.

What do you say to the suggestion that the private sector sometimes cherry-picks the best governors from the state sector in order to win the contracts?

(Ms Owers) To be honest it is not something which has come my way at all. The idea that the private sector is very careful about which sites it will operate in certainly has, but I have been less aware of the cherry-picking of governors, certainly in my time.

In relation to Ashfield, for example, which we were talking about a moment ago, when Premier lost the contract - I may have this wrong and no doubt somebody will correct me if I have - they took on a very successful governor from Swansea prison, the state sector, won back the contract and as a result Premier's gain is Swansea's loss, is the suggestion.

(Ms Owers) Yes, I suppose that is true, but while you have private prisons they will always be in competition for governors. It is almost inevitable, is it not?

David Winnick

Reverting to my first questions at the beginning of our session, do you feel in carrying out your duties, and bearing in mind what has happened before you took up your appointment, that this Committee can play any part in assisting you?

(Ms Owers) Undoubtedly. This Committee's interest in and monitoring of what goes on in prisons is essential. On the issues of accountability and responsibility in my role, I report to the Home Secretary but I place my annual report before parliament and I see parliament as being the right place where these issues of policy which affect the work I do are properly debated. I am always very reluctant to comment on matters of policy because I feel that it is more appropriate for me to comment as trenchantly as I can on the consequences of that policy as I see it operating in prisons. If that does not inform a proper debate in this place, and I see this Committee having a key role in being able to deal with that, then those proper debates will not happen.

David Winnick: I asked the question because I myself - not necessarily my colleagues - have a sense of guilt that we did not give sufficient support to your immediate predecessor. Whether it would have been of any help at the end of the day is another matter. Perhaps we will learn the lesson from that.

Chairman: You have been extremely helpful. Thank you very much for coming. We look forward to seeing you again in the future. The session is closed.