Conclusions and recommendations
1. The Home Office and the Prison Service
should promote greater co-operation and exchange of good practice
between publicly and privately managed prisons.
Prisoners held in PFI prisons feel that they are shown greater
respect and are treated better than prisoners in public prisons.
But the relative inexperience of staff in PFI prisons can compromise
security through staff being conditioned by some prisoners to
'turn a blind eye'. Public prisons could import good practice
on the treatment of prisoners from PFI prisons, and PFI prison
staff could benefit from joint training on security issues with
their more experienced counterparts in the public sector.
2. The Home Office and Prison Service should
expand staff exchanges during the next two years. The
interchange of staff between privately managed and publicly managed
prisons is a way to broaden perspectives and gain an appreciation
of different working methods. Such interchanges have been encouraged
at senior management levels but not at more junior grades, where
day to day contact with prisoners is much greater.
3. In awarding contracts or negotiating Service
Level Agreements there should be as much emphasis on the sustained
delivery of an acceptable service as there is on contract price.
The Prison Service had to put in its own management team at Ashfield
Young Offenders Institution for five months in 2002. There was
a high level of staff turnover, and the contractor was unable
to recruit staff to meet indicative staffing levels set out in
the contract. Staffing levels at recent PFI prisons and two public
sector prisons now managed under Service Level Agreements have
also given cause for concern.
4. The Prison Service should not shy away
from terminating prison contracts. The
contractor was in breach of contractual obligations at Ashfield,
but the Prison Service chose not to terminate the contract. Although
the contractor suffered substantial financial penalties, there
were also knock-on costs to the public sector as young offenders
had to be moved to other, already overcrowded, institutions.
5. Some PFI prison Controllers have become
too close to the contractor, whilst others have been over stringent
and adversarial. PFI prisons are monitored
on a day-to-day basis by Controllers, whose job it is to assess
the prison's performance against the contract. There needs to
be greater consistency in how Controllers approach their role,
supported by improved training and clear career progression.
6. The monitoring and recording of performance
data is at present less reliable in the public sector than in
the PFI sector. The Prison Service should
examine the feasibility of introducing within the next year a
performance data monitoring function, similar to the Controller
function in PFI prisons, throughout publicly managed prisons.
The cost of such an initiative could be reduced by making such
monitors responsible for a number of prisons within a geographical
area.
7. The number of performance measures should
be reduced and made more consistent between the public and private
sectors. Public prisons have to report
regularly on up to 48 Key Performance Targets and 61 Prison Service
Standards and privately managed prisons have to report on a further
30 to 40 contract measures. Prisons, both publicly managed and
privately managed, are overburdened with performance measures,
making the monitoring of performance and prioritisation between
targets difficult. The large number of measures does not lead
to any better understanding of individual prison performance.
8. There are inconsistencies between the
performance measures and targets used for different prisons. For
example, in areas such as purposeful activity for prisoners, PFI
prisons are set higher targets than public prisons. The performance
of some public prisons in providing purposeful activity for prisoners
needs to improve significantly if they are to make progress in
helping to reduce the rate of re-offending. Targets in public
prisons should be brought in line with those used in the private
sector.
The use of Service Level Agreements should be
extended to all prisons found to be
performing unsatisfactorily. Service Level Agreements specifying
the standard of performance expected in return for a fixed budget
have been used successfully to encourage better performance in
public prisons that have been failing to meet required standards.
However, at present, only four failing prisons have been identified
for this approach. The development of the Weighted Scorecard ranking
of prisons should make it simpler to identify prisons where intervention
is needed.
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