UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 66-ii (v)

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

HOME AFFAIRS committee

 

 

INQUIRY INTO THE REHABILITATION OF PRISONERS

 

 

Tuesday 16 March 2004

MR MICHAEL SPURR, MR PETER WRENCH and MR SIMON BODDIS

SIR JOHN PARKER, DR MARY HARRIS, MS SAMANTHA SHERRATT

Evidence heard in Public Questions 306 - 439

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 16 March 2004

Members present

Mr John Denham, in the Chair

Mr James Clappison

Mrs Claire Curtis-Thomas

Mr Gwyn Prosser

Bob Russell

Mr Marsha Singh

Mr John Taylor

David Winnick

________________

Memoranda submitted by HM Prison Service

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Michael Spurr, Director of Operations, Mr Peter Wrench, Director of Resettlement, and Mr Simon Boddis, Head of Regime Services, HM Prison Service, examined.

Q306 Chairman: Good afternoon, gentlemen. Thank you very much indeed for coming to the Committee. Just to explain we will have an opening fairly lengthy set of questions to the Prison Service representatives and then there will be a switching round and we will take our witnesses from Transco and from the Howard League. Mr Wrench, I wonder if you could introduce yourselves and your colleagues and we will get under way.

Mr Wrench: I am Peter Wrench and I am Director of Resettlement in the Prison Service. On my right is Michael Spurr who is Director of Operations in the Prison Service and on my left Simon Boddis who is the Head of our Regime Services Group which is responsible for prison industries.

Q307 Chairman: Thank you very much for coming in this afternoon. As you know, the Committee's inquiry is looking in particular at the role the prison regime can have in the rehabilitation of prisoners and this afternoon we are particularly interested in issues about the employment in prisons and the training of prisoners. As I understand it, just 13% of the current prison population is employed in prisons at the moment, just under 10,000 prisoners; is that correct?

Mr Wrench: About 10,000 places in our prison industry workshops or in contract workshops. There is other employment available in prisons, whether it is in catering, cleaning and so on, but 10,000 is the figure for workshops.

Q308 Chairman: And what would you say is the total number of prisoners then who are engaged in some paid work within the Prison Service?

Mr Wrench: The total for workshops, catering, land‑based activities, farms, horticulture, people who are in the resettlement estate and who might be going out to work, if you add all that together it is some 24,000.

Q309 Chairman: So that would be just over 30% of the prison population who would be engaged in what you would describe as work?

Mr Wrench: Yes.

Q310 Chairman: Would you say that that really reflects a sufficiently high priority for prison work if only a third of the prison population are engaged in working activities?

Mr Wrench: There may well be a need for more. I would say that alongside that there is education as a separate component of activity in prisons and at any one time we think something like 24,000 prisoners are doing some education. There is a limit to how much can be done particularly in local prisons where you have got a rapid turnover of people coming in and out of court and needing to talk to their lawyers and so on. I am certainly not complacent that we have got absolutely the right number yet.

Q311 Chairman: What percentage of the prison population do you think, in theory at least, could be usefully engaged in work in a way that would be of benefit to them as well as to the wider community and to the prison system?

Mr Wrench: I hesitate to put a figure on it. What we are not yet good enough at is analysing the characteristics of our population and deciding what interventions they need in what order at what time to give them the best possible chances. We have got a lot of systems coming in, OASys and other approaches to sentence management which will help us to do that better but I could not put my hand on heart now and give you a figure as to what the absolute need was.

Q312 Chairman: As you know, we have visited a number of prisons as part of our inquiry so far. As a personal observation I do not think we would have got the impression in any of them that providing work opportunities for prisoners was seen as a central and essential part of the prison regime. Does that surprise you?

Mr Wrench: It does not. I think prison industries have rather got left behind by other developments within the system and we have got a good opportunity now, following a review we did of industries last year and a reformulation of what the purpose of this activity is, to really get a better grip on it across the estate and to make sure that we are doing the best that we can, getting the most out of these activities right across the estate.

Q313 Chairman: You have talked about various assessment systems that are coming into place. What are you doing to try to meet what seems to be an increasing demand for new workplaces at a time when obviously we have got a record prison population?

Mr Wrench: As we are bringing new accommodation on stream we do obviously try to get regime activities in place to allow us to occupy the increased population, and Michael might want to say something about that, but we cannot always guarantee that we have got proportionate new workshop places as the population goes up.

Mr Spurr: I would add to that, if I may, that where we have had to increase capacity very quickly over the last few years, particular in category C establishments and medium security establishments and open prisons, we have not been able to build regime facilities alongside that but we have provided funding to expand the regime within the existing physical facilities that were there so that there has been regime provision but a lot of that has led to increases in areas such as education which is easier to increase because you can do some of that in a range of different places on the wing, attached to workshops, as well as in physical buildings. As we move towards building new house blocks and larger permanent capacity, there the aim is to link regime facility with that so we are building workshop spaces as well in a number of establishments where we have expanded.

Q314 Chairman: You say a number. There have been several new prisons built over the last few years either by the public sector or the private sector. Have they had built into them sufficient workshop capacity to provide paid employment for all the people who are going to be inmates?

Mr Spurr: The new prisons have all been private‑sector built PFI establishments. The expansion of public sector prisons has been of house blocks and where we have put substantial house blocks in at the size of 100 or more we have looked at what the regime provision need was in that establishment. In some there may have been workshops and in others there may have been things like a new education building which would allow you to use the old one for something else so we have looked at individual prisons and provided regime facilities to go alongside that, some of which would have been workshops.

Q315 Chairman: If I understood Mr Wrench's earlier answer correctly, when you take those decisions you do not have a given number or target of the number of workshop opportunities you ought to be providing as part of that expansion. It seems to be a bit more arbitrary than that.

Mr Spurr: Our aim is to have prisoners in purposeful activity in activities that primarily focus upon their offending behaviour, so we would look at each individual establishment and look at what the mix in terms of regime was in that establishment and it will vary from establishment to establishment. Work in that sense plays a critical part in that strategy but it is not the whole. Peter Wrench spoke about education. We have also got a range of other interventions such as offender behaviour work that I have mentioned that run alongside work, some of which you can dovetail. You can have prisoners at work in workshops and doing other things, which increasingly is what we are trying to do so that we have prisoners who are undertaking work also linked into education, prisoners who are undertaking offender behaviour programmes also doing something else such as work alongside. That is the broad strategy but each individual establishment is in a different position in terms of what its balance of regime provision is so we would need to look at each individual place to determine what the right level of increase would be and what type of increase that should be.

Q316 Chairman: To what extent does the variation from one establishment to another depend on the skills and interests of a particular prison governor in providing a certain mix of regimes rather than any central prison policy or any real assessment of individual prisoner needs?

Mr Spurr: Historically prisons have grown with a good deal of differentiation in what is provided and how a regime has been developed, which had a lot to do with how governors saw that establishment. Increasingly over recent years, with a much clearer strategy from the centre and much clearer line management with our managers and governors, it is not the case that governors determine entirely what is going to happen in an establishment. There is a much more strategic approach now in terms of both work and offender behaviour programmes. We are just going through a review of offender behaviour programmes on where they are located to ensure that they are in the right places to meet the needs of prisoners given the resources we have got. Some have developed in places because governors in the early days were very keen to do them and that was a good thing because it was innovative and got things moving, but we have got to look at where programmes are now placed to be able to match the needs as far as possible with the population. That is true equally with work. It is true to say that a lot has depended on a governor's commitment to particular types of work or workshop. I would say all governors want to see prisoners purposely employed. It is good for the establishment in terms of order and in terms of the regime generally but it is true that on occasion previously workshops changed because governors thought it would be better for their own individual regime for that workshop to change without a broader consideration of what impact that would have on services as a whole. We are much better following the Industries Review at tackling that now. That is one of the key areas within that review.

Q317 Chairman: You concluded in that Internal Review that the investment often required and the time for large organisations to react to changes in employment trends often means that opportunities come and go before the Prison Service can react. What have you done to ensure that the Prison Service is better able to take advantage of opportunities?

Mr Wrench: I think there are several strands to that. One is getting closer liaison links with outside industry and understanding how things are developing in the world outside prison, and there are specific proposals arising out of the industry review to strengthen our ability to learn from experience outside. However, the difficulty that we cannot always overcome and will not be able to, is the need for often significant investment to allow us to operate in a particular area of business. If we are going to need several hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of new machinery in order to operate in something where there is a gap in the market it will always be difficult given the general resource restraints we are under to respond quickly to that sort of thing.

Q318 Chairman: Is there a case for creating the more commercial or semi‑commercial or commercially-orientated not-for-profit arm which is actually there to develop the opportunities for prison work as opposed to having it managed either by prison governors or a body of civil servants at central level neither of whom may necessarily have the skills required to take advantage of these opportunities?

Mr Wrench: I can see the attractions of that approach but given the way that other developments are going within the system, the sort of move I was describing earlier towards a more cohesive approach to planning individuals' sentences and managing their way through it, to take out one block of regime activity and say this is handled separately without regard to those wider case‑related factors for individual prisoners would be going against the flow of what we are trying to do.

Q319 Chairman: So it would be better to lose those commercial opportunities than to have that sort of interruption to the way you want to manage the regime?

Mr Wrench: I think commercial opportunities are important, they play a part in making our balance sheet balance but the statement of purpose that ‑‑‑

Q320 Chairman: --- But they are not central to the rehabilitation of prisoners?

Mr Wrench: No, the statement of purpose that came out of the industries review was clear ‑ that the primary objective is to occupy prisoners purposefully and in doing that to maximise the beneficial effects for resettlement. Of course we have to take account of the economics of it but making the biggest profit is certainly not the aim we came out of the review with.

Q321 Chairman: But if it were thought to be the case that prisoners would benefit from having a work regime that was in some regards rather like the work regime that we want them to have outside, which is they get up, go to work, possibly pay tax and National Insurance, support their families through remittances and so on, you are going to need to require the creation of commercial work on a commercially viable basis to enable that to happen. You are not going to be able to do that through a taxpayer subsidy. It does rather sound as if that is going to be a very important part of the rehabilitative regime in your overall view.

Mr Wrench: I would not rule it out but there are other models for bridging the gap between the prisoners and community. You are taking evidence later from National Grid Transco, which is a good example of using the time in prison essentially for training and then getting people out into the community to do the actual work. That is another way of bridging the gap and effecting the transition.

Q322 Chairman: In relation to short‑term prisoners, which everyone recognises is a major challenge for the Prison Service, do you think that prison work, commercial prison work in particular, has any real value in relation to short‑term prisoners?

Mr Wrench: I think for the shortest periods in custody it is difficult to do more than occupy people in workshops, and the ability to get out of your cell and do something more purposeful than lying on your bunk and watching television is important for that group. Certainly in a number of locations there has been a useful bringing together of that sort of workshop activity with basic skills education. In a lot of establishments around the country we have got classrooms attached to workshops which can pull people out and in between industrial activity do some work on basic skills. So it can be part of a regime that works for short‑term prisoners but I am hesitant about claiming too much for what we can do through workshop activity alone for that group.

Q323 Chairman: When we have new regimes like Custody Plus, where people spend a period of time in prison and then a period of time closely supervised in the community, do you see any possibility that there could be a continuity between any employment opportunities people had when they were in prison or training opportunities they had when they were in prison and the sort of employment or training opportunities you might like them to have when they have been released?

Mr Wrench: We will have a much better opportunity under that new regime when we have got Custody Plus sentencing in, with supervision in the community after a period in custody and also with the new approach by the National Offender Management Service of a case manager seeing the case through from the time of sentence through custody into the community. We will have a much better ability to look at it as a cohesive whole and manage the transition.

Q324 Chairman: Even if that meant somebody returning to the same location that they had done work in as a prisoner when they have been released? I can see you have a seamless transition in terms of management of the offender. I suppose I am raising the possibility that if one were able to create a work opportunity for somebody who has not previously had a job during the period of time when they were in prison it might be highly desirable to find a way of enabling them to continue with that during the six months that they serve of their Custody Plus sentence after they are released.

Mr Wrench: Yes, I can certainly see the attractions of that. Let me emphasise, the shorter the period of custody the more difficult it is to achieve.

Q325 Bob Russell: Mr Wrench, moving on to prison workshops, the recent Internal Review of prison industries commissioned by the Prison Service estimates that prison industries expect to employ 9,808 prisoners, a very precise figure, in 298 workshops working an average of 25 hours per week for the period 2003‑04. Taking that into account, we have had witnesses agree that prison workshops provide an opportunity for giving prisoners the disciplines and skills needed to participate in real working life. There appears to be a conflict though between the prisons securing additional revenue through often menial labour and equipping prisoners with skills such as carpentry and plumbing to increase their chances of employment on release. Can it be resolved?

Mr Wrench: I am not sure that there necessarily is a conflict. There is a range of sorts of activities that happen in the workshops and some of them are pretty mundane, menial and not particularly demanding. I would go back to the point I made earlier, there is a role for that in occupying people who would otherwise not be doing anything with their time in prison. At the other end of the scale we have some considerably skilled jobs that are being done in prisons.

Q326 Bob Russell: What is the driving force here? Is it the financial justification for prison work? Does that always outweigh the rehabilitative justification?

Mr Wrench: No, but I think purposeful activity in itself is an important part of this process. If we were to say to ourselves we are only going to provide work places where there is a definable skilled component in it that is going to equip people for work outside we would be cutting back quite a lot on the volume of what we do at the moment and I think that would be to the detriment of the overall running of the prisons.

Q327 Bob Russell: If you are going to fill these 9,808 places at the end of the day what is the end product? Is it skills or is it to break even and make a profit?

Mr Wrench: I would say the overriding most important element is the provision of purposeful activity. Within that provision of purposeful activity we want to maximise the beneficial resettlement impact for individuals, but that contribution to an orderly, safe, humane regime is the single most important outcome, I think.

Q328 Bob Russell: Can we seriously accept though that the current system of prison workshops fosters the work ethic in prisoners participating in them?

Mr Wrench: I think some do but they are not all as good as they could be; certainly the ones I have been to have varied. I have been to some where there has been a real buzz of activity within the workshop where I have seen very good education going on alongside the work. I have been to some where people have seemed bored and listless and are sitting round chatting. So it is a mixture.

Q329 Bob Russell: So is it the prison management or is it the type of work that the prisoners are called upon to do which is the issue there? In other words, could a lousy job be made better by good management and vice versa?

Mr Wrench: I am sure there is always room for better management making even the most basic of activities more interesting.

Q330 Bob Russell: Your evidence is that good management can create the genuine work ethic?

Mr Wrench: I think it can help, yes. What we have got, again coming out of the industries review, is a new approach of trying to produce a weighted score card, if you like, for individual workshops to show what we are getting in terms of hours of activity and what we are getting in terms of resettlement opportunities, what the resource side of it is, and trying to come to a balanced view of whether it is worthwhile or not.

Q331 Bob Russell: If the existing constraints were not there how would you enhance prison work to create a more positive work experience for prisoners?

Mr Wrench: I would want to carry on the trends that I think have already become apparent over the last few years of a) that integration of education with work activity and b) the encouragement of more demanding and creative work where it is possible to do so.

Q332 Bob Russell: Mr Wrench, I have been given a list of the production workshops which is quite a roll call. At a time when the manufacturing base in this country is collapsing, it seems the Prison Service is bucking the trend. I have got down here engineering, woodwork, furniture, plastics, footwear, printing, textiles and clothing, concrete, catering, laundry. As from 1 April I understand that hard charging is to be piloted and three products have been selected ‑ sheets, towels and socks. Out of all that can you explain why sheets, towels and socks are to be the hard charging pilot?

Mr Wrench: Simon might want to come in and say a bit more about this but the important thing really - following a clear policy decision to move to hard charging generally in this area - was to get the ball rolling and test it out. These might seem like three odd products but they are three high-volume products and ones which will test the accounting systems.

Q333 Bob Russell: If anyone can solve the mystery of the single sock in the washing machine! What are the Prison Service's reasons for refocusing prison industry production on the internal market? Is over‑crowding a motivator or are prisoners' rehabilitative needs a consideration at all in this decision? What is the driving force behind the hard charging?

Mr Wrench: The driving force behind the hard charging is to try and make the internal market work properly by giving people a realisation and appreciation of what the true values of the product and activities involved are.

Q334 Bob Russell: But at the end of the day are you there to rehabilitate prisoners or to balance the books because that is what the accountants want?

Mr Wrench: We are there to run an orderly Prison Service and at the same time to try and rehabilitate prisoners.

Q335 Bob Russell: Finally, Chairman, how can the production workshop model be restructured, if indeed it can be, to generate revenue for the Prison Service, bearing in mind your last answer which said that the ultimate objective is the rehabilitation of prisoners so they return to society as good citizens.

Mr Wrench: As I said earlier, I would not want to make the generation of income the primary purpose of this.

Q336 Chairman: Can I just ask one question so that I am clear. Usually when markets are introduced to the public sector the idea is to reduce costs by, for example, reducing the number of people employed in a particular activity. If the outcome of hard charging in the internal market in the Prison Service is to reduce the number of people employed, for example in prison laundries, I can see that that helps you balance your books but that would presumably reduce the number of employment opportunities available for prisoners?

Mr Wrench: Not necessarily. The key thing for us is to reduce waste and I think there is quite a lot of waste within the system at the moment in terms of over‑ordering, over‑stocking, over-consumption and inefficiency in way that workshops are run. To make it a bit more business‑like and transparent where the costs and benefits are going should allow us to drive out some of that waste.

Mr Spurr: As we have been growing in terms of population then we are going to have to be more efficient to make use of the workshop spaces that we have got and to make use of the laundries that we have got. We are on occasions having to put laundry out to outside sources at the moment. That does not make sense. If the population continues to increase to any level that will become increasingly a problem for us so we have got to make good use of the facilities we have got. I certainly do not see it as leading to reduced employment places. I see better use of the employment places that we have got and better use of public money in terms of using them. Socks and sheets are actually ones that turn over an awful lot in prisons. Prisoners throw them out their windows, people do not take care of them for whatever reason. We need to reduce the amount of usage that we have got.

Q337 Mr Taylor: May I ask whether Contract Service Workshops offering low‑level menial work have a role in the Prison Service's rehabilitation or does this kind of low‑level menial work in the prison environment in fact work against the aim of fostering a worth ethic?

Mr Wrench: I would go back to earlier answers that I have given that I think it can make a contribution. It is not necessarily always the case that it does at the moment but I certainly do not think it is an activity without potential, put it that way

Mr Spurr: Could I give example that might be helpful. A contract workshop that is working very well ‑ and we have done this in a number of places - is where we have linked basic skills, accounting skills and numeracy skills to contract packing. So packing the little spoons and forks you get for airlines, for example, which is a common thing we do in contract work, people have to count out the number of spoons in large numbers and then they get put into individual packs. Where we are being innovative is to use education alongside that to say we can do numeracy work here alongside the menial work. The prisoner is getting paid for the work because it is contract work and we are getting some funding for that which gives them a better wage and they are learning something at the same time. We have to be innovative in those types of workshops and that is what we are attempting to do.

Q338 Mr Taylor: Thank you. May I ask about the £7 million operating loss arising from Contract Services Workshops. What changes need to be made to existing operations to make the Contract Services Workshops financially viable or do we have to be reconciled to this kind of loss?

Mr Wrench: Expressing it as a £7 million loss is perhaps a bit misleading. I said earlier that we want to get to a position where we were clearer about all the costs and benefits in this area of activity. What is important to remember is that that £7 million difference between the inputs and the outputs actually bought about five million hours of activity by inmates in these workshops. If you say that inmates' activity in those workshops cost just over a pound an hour then it is not a bad deal.

Q339 Mr Taylor: Mr Wrench, to be candid with you I am more comfortable with your answer than with my question. May I move it on a little bit further to ask you is the Prison Service's unwillingness to extend the number of vocational workshops purely based on financial constraints?

Mr Wrench: I do not know that we are unwilling to extend vocational training workshops. What we do want to do is see vocational training alongside the rest of education rather more than we have done in the past. As of this year the Offenders Learning and Skills Unit in the Department for Education and Skills has taken on the budget for vocational training and as we develop new arrangements for delivering education in prisons vocational training will be incorporated in the same way it is in the community these days.

Q340 Mr Taylor: Does the Prison Service have any long‑term plans to integrate vocational training into other facets of prison work, such as production workshops, to give prisoners the opportunity to gain recognised qualifications to help them to obtain employment when they are released?

Mr Wrench: Certainly, as I said in my last answer, we want that integration of vocational training with broader learning. We also want to maximise the opportunities of our production workshops for people to acquire skills.

Mr Boddis: Could I add to that. A lot of our workshops have classrooms attached to them and kitchens increasingly have classrooms attached to them for that very purpose.

Q341 Mr Taylor: Finally when will vocational training become a fully integrated part of the sentence planning process?

Mr Wrench: Sentence planning is a developing art, if I can put it that way, and things like the OASys computer system for offender assessment is being gradually rolled out across the estate and we will have it everywhere by the end of this calendar year. This is a continuing, developing process of being able get a complete integrated picture of all the elements of intervention we can make to help individual offenders.

Mr Taylor: Chairman, could I ask one more question. Mr Wrench, this verges on being a bizarre question but it puzzles me and I think a wider audience might be interested in the answer to this. Not everybody who comes into custody in the Prison Service is a complete hopeless failure at everything. Some of these people come in, may I say, with some very considerable skills indeed, and I am not going to caricature this by saying there will be some expert locksmiths and lock crackers who come in but using that as a rather trivial example ‑‑‑ David Winnick: Or former ministers!

Q342 Mr Taylor: Being more serious for a moment, if my colleague will allow me, do you do anything to identify any of the inmates who really do have some skill that they might even be able to teach to others?

Mr Wrench: Absolutely, that is what we want to do and we do not want to assume that everybody needs basic skills training. We are looking to do assessments very early on in people's sentences and find out what their true level is. We rightly put emphasis on basic skills and driving up the skills of people who have got the biggest deficit when it comes to learning and skills, but at the same time we are trying to deal with the top end of the market too and increase the number of Open University courses that are available, for example, so we do not want to be completely blinkered and look only at basic skills.

Q343 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I feel reluctant to ask this because I feel I ought to know the answer but your title, Mr Wrench, is Head of Resettlement and you, Mr Spurr, Head of Operations, and yet some of the replies that you have given to us today would indicate a heavy operational interest. Could you just explain the terms of reference for your particular area of work and, Mr Spurr, if you could tell me at the same time so I might have some idea about the structure which you are supporting and after that I have got a question about short‑term prisoners.

Mr Wrench: Basically Michael is responsible for the operation of the prison establishments so he is the line manager of prison governors and the area managers, the operational line if you like, whereas I manage a number of teams who develop policy and provide support services in this area. Mine is a headquarters function, he is the head of the operational line.

Q344 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Okay, that explains that. Thank you very much for the comments that you have made in relation to training. I notice you said the number of people engaged in training and then we looked at the amount of time allocated per person and it sounds pretty good but could you tell me what is the optimum amount of time a person needs to be in prison to access that training package because I am particularly concerned about young offenders who are in for a relatively short period of time and may be there as a result of dropping out of education and therefore have significant educational requirements before in fact being able to access any work opportunities that may arise.

Mr Spurr: I would say that in terms of optimum time I do not think there is an optimum time in that respect. I would be reluctant to say how long you should imprison somebody for the length of time you would need to train them because I think it is the wrong way to look at it but if you were to look at it in that way you would have to look at individual need and it would vary with individuals depending on where they are coming from and depending on what their needs are when they come into custody. We do have with short‑term sentences a difficulty with the length of time prisoners are with us, particularly with young offenders, in what we do. What we are doing, which I think is right, is to focus on the key things that we can do in the time available. If it is very short then it will be very basic resettlement needs that we will be able to tackle.

Q345 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: What does that mean in English?

Mr Spurr: It means basic resettlement needs, it means working with them to ensure that they have got a house to go to when they go out, which is simple but absolutely critical if they are not going to go out to offend again, working with them if they have come in as a short‑term prisoners with employment to retain that employment, or working with them almost from the minute they come in on the potential for a job when they go out. If we have not got time to train them we work with them so that they have got something to go to. With youngsters if they are children under 18 it is not going to be a job we would look at what form of further education or what form of training they would go into on release, so we would be doing that very early. Alongside that are basic skills levels and we work from the very basic entry level up to level 2 basic skills which is about what a 14‑year‑old would achieve with level one in between and we can focus in very short periods on that entry level and do some very basic work with people coming in. It is difficult because each individual will be coming from a different starting point. There is not an optimum time for how long you would need somebody depending where they are starting from.

Q346 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Can I ask another question then: I have visited a significant number of prisons and I concur with a point made by my colleague earlier that there is a huge discrepancy between good practice in one and poor practice in another. How do you circulate good practice because you can have two prisons in the same town where one is an exemplar of good practice and there is lots of good stuff going on and next door really a disaster even though the facilities available may be better. The contrast is particularly acute between what the private sector has managed to achieve, I have to say, and what the public sector is struggling to achieve. Why that discrepancy and where is the evidence for distributing good practices and good procedures?

Mr Spurr: If I can answer that. We have got much better in recent years at looking at the differences between establishments and whether establishments are performing well or not. I have monthly bilaterals with each area manager and I go through each individual establishment's performance in detail looking at over 40 performance indicators and not just at those performance indicators but what lies behind them for each individual establishment every month. We assess establishments on a quarterly base and now publish those assessments indicating what standard of performance we believe establishments are at. We have a benchmarking programme which is looking to improve performance with establishments with three levels, identifying the best performing establishments which we designate as high performing establishments and performance testing the least well performing establishments where we require the establishment to meet standards which if they do meet them we will give them a service level agreement and if they do not meet those standards we will put them to market without a public sector bid. So that is at the other end. In the middle we have a performance improvement planning process for middle‑ranking establishments to improve their performance. All of that has been developed over recent years and that is ensuring we are spreading good practice because in terms of that benchmarking programme we are requiring area managers and governors to look at what the best are doing and bring their establishment up to that standard. That is the whole point of the programme. I would take issue with one thing. I do not think it is true that there is a wide disparity in everything between private and public sector. There are some things in which private sector establishments have done better than public sector.

Q347 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Like?

Mr Spurr: For example, their contracts require them to have a high level of time out of cell for prisoners and because they are meeting their contract requirements they do have a higher level of time out of cell in general for prisoners, but they are not necessarily meeting all of their targets in terms of purposeful activity and those establishments are all new establishments with therefore purpose‑built regime facilities and some of the public sector prisons that are comparable with those types of establishments will be delivering at the same level. There is obviously a distinct difference if you take a prison such as Brixton which has not got the space or the regime facilities we would want in that establishment, so we are having to do other things to be more innovative in the way I described earlier to make sure that we are giving proper, decent care to the prisoners who are there.

Q348 Mr Clappison: I do apologise for my late arrival and correct me if this has already been covered in your answer. Have you got any idea of what proportion of prisoners who are working are receiving some sort of training as part of their work?

Mr Wrench: I do not have a figure off the top of my head. We can certainly see if there are figures available and write with that.

Mr Clappison: That would be very helpful, thank you.

Q349 Mr Singh: With regard to the closure of a workshop, who would make that decision, is it the individual decision of a governor or is it some wider body that has a role in that?

Mr Wrench: This is something that is changing following our review of the industries. The traditional model has been the individual prison governor in consultation with his or her area manager taking that decision. What we have now agreed as a result of the review is that, except when there is an immediate operational need to close, these decisions are going to be considered by our Industries Management Board which includes people from Simon's group alongside representatives from the operational line.

Q350 Mr Singh: Why the change?

Mr Wrench: Because we want to look at the system as a whole and closing a workshop can have a significant impact on the internal market - supplies that are available to other prisons and so on - we want to make sure these decisions are taken in a properly considered and structured way.

Q351 Mr Singh: Do you think governors in the past were not taking these decisions in a properly structured way?

Mr Wrench: I think to be fair to them they did not have the information available in order to take a properly informed decision. What we are doing is providing the structures and the information and a system to allow that to happen.

Q352 Mr Singh: There are a variety of workshops in different prisons. How do you decide and who decides what type of workshop is suitable to the individual prison? What factors do you take into account?

Mr Wrench: I think again this is something that has not been done in a properly informed way in the past and people have made best guesses and best judgments on the basis of where they sit in an individual establishment or area. What we want to do now is draw in more contextual information about what contributions it can make to prison industries as a whole.

Q353 Mr Singh: One thing that surprised me in the briefing ‑ and I should not really have missed it and it is not really your fault - is that the Prisons Minister and Minister for Rural Affairs have agreed to scale down agricultural work. It is not your fault but I would take this opportunity to ask you the questions about it. This is of some surprise to me because I thought that agricultural work would have great rehabilitative value and will phasing this work out not knock our agenda in terms of rehabilitation?

Mr Wrench: I do not think it will because what we are doing is diverting effort that is currently going into field-scale agriculture into horticulture where we can get more training places and more activity places out of our effort and end up with people acquiring skills that are more relevant to the job market outside. If you look at the market outside for landscaping activities, the growth of garden centres, that side of it, there is rather more call for that than looking after dairy herds.

Q354 Mr Singh: That seems to make sense but following your logic then, why are you closing HMP Leyhill's thriving farm which apparently is commercially successful, has a busy café and regularly wins gold medals for its flowers at the Chelsea Flower Show? I heard your previous answer. Surely this is horticultural work of the best kind that you are supposed to be promoting?

Mr Wrench: Yes and we are boosting horticultural activity at Leyhill and increasing the number of prisoner places available within it.

Q355 Mr Singh: So why am I told it is due to be shut this year?

Mr Wrench: I do not understand that. I am not sure where that information has come from. Mr Singh: Chairman, we will have to look into it.

Q356 Chairman: We will follow that one up. So the farm is not shutting?

Mr Spurr: They have not got a livestock farm at Leyhill anyway. I was at Leyhill only on Thursday talking to the governor about that. I do not think they are doing the Chelsea Flower Show this year but not because they are closing but because they are devoting themselves to other things and plan to do it in two years' time. We are expanding the amount of work there in terms of horticulture. We are continuing to run a tractor workshop there. The farm shop and visitors' centre at Leyhill are actually being expanded so we can have more prisoners involved in learning to retail, if you like. So I am not sure where that information has come from. The governor and area manager are content with what we are doing in terms of Leyhill. We are certainly not looking to ‑‑‑

Mr Singh: I am certainly pleased to hear your answer and I do not know why we are at cross‑purposes on this one.

Mrs Curtis-Thomas: It is the Daily Telegraph, that good fount of all knowledge!

Q357 Bob Russell: Very briefly, are you involved in any way in the non‑military side of the programme at the military corrective training centre in Colchester, the workshops and the training programmes there?

Mr Wrench: No, we are not.

Q358 Bob Russell: Are you aware of the work that they do?

Mr Wrench: I am not, I am afraid.

Bob Russell: I recommend that you perhaps might like to see because they have a very flourishing and comprehensive training regime on the non‑military side.

Q359 Chairman: Just before I bring Mr Prosser in, can I ask one question about the strategy for workshops and employment opportunities. Two things. When we were at the Aylesbury Young Offenders' Institution some frustration was expressed that there does not seem to be any systematic attempt to match the training opportunities that are on offer within the Prison Service to the nature of the job opportunities that are likely to be open outside of prison or indeed to match the type of work that is available in prison to outside employment, and your breakdown of the type of employment and training opportunities tends to back that up. What liaison is there between the Prison Service and the Learning and Skills Councils which are meant to be informing the whole of the government system about strategic labour market needs?

Mr Wrench: It is a growing liaison. The existing contracts for education in prisons are due to end and the DfES are planning to move to a new system which integrates what happens in prisons much more closely with what is happening in the community, and in that the Learning and Skills Councils will have a critical role to play. So we are developing our relationships with them very much and also developing our relationships with Jobcentre Plus (who now provide surgeries in prisons and we have an integrated system for arranging for people to plug into the New Deal and other schemes when they go out) and also with economic planners at the Government Offices of the Regions. What we want to do is ensure we talk to all those agencies who have got an understanding and knowledge of the economic situation and how the labour market is developing so that we can properly modify our resettlement strategies to take account of that.

Q360 Bob Russell: That sounds fine as a general statement of principle. What is the product of that likely to be in terms of your ability to change the mix of training that is on offer or the work opportunities that are on offer in a demonstrable way? Will you, for example, be publishing a skills plan from the Prison Service showing what sort of skill needs you expect to meet or develop amongst inmates over the next two to five years so that we can see that you have set those objectives and you have been able to change those arrangements to meet those patterns of skills?

Mr Wrench: I think that will be an increasing part of regional resettlement strategies as they are developed. At the moment the situation is patchy around the country and some regions have done very well in getting multi‑agency approaches together. What we want to do is encourage everybody to come up to standard. Alongside the other developments that we have been talking about, the development of the new National Offender Management Service in particular over the next two or three years should mean we have a much clearer picture in that area than we have at the moment. The one caveat I would enter is our ability to shift what we are doing in workshops quickly because often you would need capital investment of the sort that we would not necessarily have available to make fundamental changes in the direction of what we are doing.

Chairman: That is a good point to go to Mr Prosser.

Q361 Mr Prosser: I want to ask you a few questions about new initiatives and future initiatives. Firstly, can you tell us something about the benefits that you see of the merger of prison work and rehabilitation services under the auspices of the National Offender Management Service, NOMS?

Mr Wrench: I think that the real prize there is to have a case manager looking at an offender right the way through his or her career from sentence through to the end of supervision in the community. I think that will certainly encourage provision within prisons to become more responsive both to the needs of individual offenders and to the circumstances they are going to be returning to in the community.

Q362 Mr Prosser: How are prisoners at present assessed for vocational training and for workshop placements?

Mr Wrench: As part of our sentence planning and sentence management process, assessments are done of their skills levels early on in their sentence. Increasingly as we roll out the OASys offender assessment system previous employment and skills are part of what is drawn out from an individual at the start of the sentence by filling in the OASys form. It is, as I described it earlier, a developing area of activity but we are getting better and more systematic about doing this early on in people's sentences.

Q363 Mr Prosser: How far away would you say we are from having vocational training and prison work as an integral part of the sentence planning process? We have touched on it before but how far away are we from that?

Mr Wrench: As I said earlier, we will have OASys throughout the Prison Service by the end of this calendar year. It should by then be properly joined up electronically with the probation side of it. We are not yet resourced to do OASys for every offender. It will initially only apply to those doing over 12 months. As I think I said earlier, two or three years down the track we should have a lot better joining up than we have got at the moment.

Q364 Mr Prosser: To what extent do you take into consideration a prisoner's attitude to work what the prisoner thinks he will be best learning or being retrained for? Do you actually consider the aspirations and their plans and their ambitions at all in the assessments?

Mr Wrench: Yes, and the OASys section on skills employment is not simply a record of what people have done, but also explores their attitudes to work.

Q365 Chairman: So the young offender who said to a number of us at Aylesbury, "I do not know why you are training me to be a cook. I don't want to be a cook. No‑one will employ me as a cook. If you train me as a plasterer or a decorator or plumber I could get a job when I leave here", when will that young person get an opportunity to train in the trade they have identified that will enable them to get a job?

Mr Wrench: I do not think we will ever be able to guarantee that. There is a difference between taking account of an offender's wishes and always being able to meet an offender's wishes in circumstances where you have got limited provision.

Q366 Mr Prosser: On the same theme, Chairman, we also met a young asylum seeker who is doing the much sought after Toyota retraining course, and which we were very impressed with and he said that he was very pleased to be doing it but he would be deported at the end of his sentence and we just wondered whether that is the best use of such a course.

Mr Wrench: I obviously do not know about the individual case but I sympathise with your attitude that if we have got limited numbers places that are aimed to improve the prospects of people returning to the community in the UK then we are probably better off filling those places with people who are returning to the community in the UK.

Q367 Chairman: You have just given to my earlier question a very straightforward and honest answer but in reality would the Prison Service not be doing a great deal better if it was to identify for offenders the type of skills that would genuinely give them a chance of getting a job when they go out? If you are really saying it is unrealistic to expect the Prison Service to be able to match the inmates' potential abilities with the jobs that are outside what are we trying to achieve through the training opportunities that exist in prison? Is this not a huge missed opportunity to get people into work possibly for the first time ever in their lives?

Mr Wrench: I did not mean to be too pessimistic in what I said, but I think it is always important to recognise the pressures the system is under and the limited capacity we have got to get individuals in the right place at the right time to receive particular sorts of training simply because of the juggling act that Michael and his colleagues are constantly doing just to cope with the population. Of course we would like to do better in the area that you are suggesting. I was merely saying it was difficult.

Q368 Chairman: So it is the over‑crowding and general churning of prisoners that is the big obstacle to this.

Mr Wrench: I think it is a certainly a major obstacle.

Mr Spurr: I think it is a key obstacle. I do not think we should lose sight of wanting to have the right set of training opportunities to meet the needs of prisoners, and we should do that, and then we have got a job of trying to make sure the right prisoners are in the right training opportunities, ie, the individual that you spoke of. I would argue very strongly that there is a lot of good evidence why we have focused on catering and service-type industries because for a lot of young men particularly if they are going to go into work immediately on release putting them into a service‑type industry not as a cook necessarily but in a range of fast food-type delivery (and I do not just mean the big chains) the reality is there is work in those areas and we have had some good success in placing people into jobs. You have got to work with the expectations of the individuals. It might be that a plumbing course was entirely right for that individual and there might have been a range of reasons why it was not possible to deliver it for him. I would want to expand to make sure that we have got the training courses that are best able to meet the needs of individuals, but individual courses take a length of time. A plumbing course would take four to six months. We would not have that for every individual prisoner. It might be because we are not able to do that, although that would be what a prisoner would want to do, but it might still be worth doing some basic health hygiene catering work with that individual to fit them for something when they go out, even if we are not able to do the best, and that is where we have got to try and square the circle and sort out that logistical difficulty.

Q369 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: My experience of young offenders' institutes confirms what some of my colleagues have said today, which is that it is a very mixed picture, with lots of disappointing stories and not many heart‑lifting stories because of the issue of churn which I think has been under‑estimated here and which seems to be a serious problem, and also the length of time that an individual will spend in prison which can be as little as six months giving you very little time to do anything at all. I do not think we should pretend that does not happen. We should say it does happen and therefore it limits the choices and the opportunities of working with that individual. On a more practical note, one of the benefits of the NOMS is to have continuity between prison and the Probation Service, so the point that you have just made on the plastering course or any Learning and Skills Council approved course where you have got qualifications and endorsed vocational experience out of the end of your experience is an opportunity. What are you doing now, given that you have got this fantastic new opportunity, to take people on short‑term sentences but give them a real opportunity by hanging on to them from prison into the Probation Service and delivering the type of course that they say they need to work in the sort of areas that they want to work in in the longer term and which will produce a return for them?

Mr Wrench: An important part of this I think is the work that the Department for Education and Skills is doing to encourage education providers to do more unit‑based course work so that if people are in prison for a very short time they could at least clock up the first couple of units on a course and pick that up in the community. It is not straightforward because colleges and other providers in the community are still geared to pick people up at the start of term rather than next Tuesday when they are being released from prison. That is something that we are actively working on and want to do more of. The more we can establish continuity in what is happening for an offender, not just in education but in other support areas through from custody into the community, the stronger we will be.

Q370 David Winnick: I want to ask you some questions on the working day, but of course it is against the background, is it not, where the Prison Service is under the greatest pressure presumably, more than any other time?

Mr Wrench: Yes.

Mr Spurr: Yes.

Q371 David Winnick: Just remind me, I may have been out and the Chairman may have asked you this question, of the number of prisoners currently?

Mr Spurr: 75,080 this morning.

Q372 David Winnick: That is the highest it has ever been?

Mr Spurr: It is, yes, today.

Q373 David Winnick: It was recommended in the Internal Review Report, as you will obviously know, that the working day for prisoners be increased. Is there any possibility of that recommendation coming to fruition shortly?

Mr Wrench: I think it will vary from establishment to establishment but given the population figures that we are facing, it would be more beneficial for the system as a whole to allow more prisoners to access places rather than for individual prisoners to work a longer day.

Mr Spurr: I think I would endorse that and say the primary aim for me at the minute is to provide the majority of prisoners with something constructive to do each day, avoiding (which is the risk when the population is rising) more and more prisoners with nothing to do in their cells. I would rather have more individuals attending some form of work than the working day being lengthened for those individuals who were in work. It is not necessarily mutually exclusive because you can lengthen the working day and have two shifts as a potential option, which is the sort of thing we would look to do, but that is against the backdrop of a rising population and inevitably because of that resources are tighter in terms of the whole range of things we are having to do to manage that.

Q374 David Winnick: It would be a desirable objective, would it not, to extend the working day and have an arrangement, again as the recommendation said, as in the outside world whereby time would be given off for various functions, to go to the gym or what have you, in other words, as far as it is possible to duplicate the situation which arises in work outside prison?

Mr Wrench: Yes.

Q375 David Winnick: And we are quite a long way from there, are we not, to be quite frank?

Mr Wrench: Certainly and I think it would been unlikely we would ever get there in a local prison but for some of our category C training prisons it is a more reasonable aspiration.

Mr Boddis: Could I add to that, at Ranby for example, we work night shifts now in some of the industry workshops so the day is extended so the workshop is run 24 hours a day. So it is possible and we have to learn from those experiences how we can translate that to other establishments where it is possible.

Q376 David Winnick: The whole objective presumably in a situation where the Prison Service was not under such tremendous pressure, as earlier questions pointed out, is to get the work ethic established so far as is possible. For some prisoners it would be a hopeless task and we would be living in a fantasy world to believe otherwise but for many presumably there is a possibility that having lived a very different type of life outside, the Prison Service may be able to undertake effectively such rehabilitation. If the system were under less pressure, do you think one would be reasonable to assume that the majority of prisoners could be rehabilitated along the lines that I have said?

Mr Wrench: I am optimistic about what we are capable of doing given the resources to do it, but I think we have to be constantly aware of the multiple needs that an awful lot of our clients have got. If you go to some of our local prisons and they tell you that upwards of 80% of their intake are hard drug users, for example, that begins to put a scale on the sort of problems that we are up against. Yes, work can make an important contribution to changing people but we need to do it in a way that also tackles the other issues that are there for them and that are likely to drag them back into reoffending

Q377 David Winnick: We will be hearing evidence later from the Howard League but, as you know, they take the view and they are trying, as we will hear later, to put forward schemes in prison whereby prisoners would be paid a fair working wage and not what is the situation now where they are paid £2.50 and £4 per week? Is that not the current situation?

Mr Wrench: £2.50 is the minimum for unemployed prisoners, £4 is the minimum for employed ones.

Q378 David Winnick: What do you say to a system which has been advocated over the years by prison reformers that you have a proper working arrangement, you pay a fair wage, and deductions are made for maintenance and food and so on? Do you think that is Utopia? Be frank.

Mr Wrench: I can see the attractions of that system. What we would need to do is firstly find a workable way of doing that and of administering the system and, secondly, we would need the resources to set it up, and given the sorts of constraints there are on the Prison Service's budgets at the moment, I am afraid raising wages is not the biggest priority.

Q379 David Winnick: Mr Wrench, would it be unfair if I said you are not actually bursting with enthusiasm at the idea?

Mr Wrench: I am actually very attracted to it. I am just pointing to the difficulties of getting from where we are now to that vision.

Q380 David Winnick: Would the Howard League's proposals, which I repeat will be dealt with later in this session, have your support?

Mr Wrench: Certainly. Their ideas and the system they are proposing and developing for The Mount, for example, we are very willing to co‑operate with them on that.

Q381 David Winnick: Is that a genuine wish to co‑operate or is it just for members of the Home Affairs Committee to put it on the record?

Mr Wrench: We would genuinely like to see it succeed.

Q382 David Winnick: A genuine wish to co‑operate?

Mr Wrench: A genuine wish to see it succeed.

David Winnick: We will hear from the Howard League in due course later today whether that has come about.

Q383 Chairman: What is the biggest obstacle to moving on a much larger scale to the type of regime that Mr Winnick has just annunciated? Is it resources or just the fact you would have to deal with the commercial world in terms of providing commercial services on a scale that is massively different to the level of contraction you do at the moment and the Prison Service, possibly for very good reasons, is ill‑equipped to do that?

Mr Wrench: You would not necessarily have to engage with the commercial world. You could in theory simply pay all activity in prisons at the commercial‑style rates and then take money back off people for board and lodgings, tax them, and so on, but it would be a huge bureaucratic exercise to put that in operation and it would need a very significant up‑front resource investment which I do not think we would get.

Q384 Chairman: What assessment has actually been made of the rehabilitation benefits or otherwise of getting prisoners into a regular working week of taking deductions that they can pay to support their families, of paying tax and National Insurance and those other experiences of normal life which most people take for granted but which many of your prisoners may never have enjoyed?

Mr Wrench: I do not know that there has ever been an experiment that would allow us to draw those conclusions. What we have got experience of, of course, is our resettlement estate and prisoners going out to work from there doing real jobs for real money. I think that is a system that works extremely well. We have got about 1,500 prisoners out at any one time.

Q385 David Winnick: Resettlement prisons have been quite successful, have they not? We saw one where there had been some difficulties which you will know about. In those circumstances the prisoners would go out during the working day and come back to a hostel or whatever?

Mr Wrench: That is right.

Mr Spurr: We have about 1,500 prisoners engaged in that type of resettlement work. If I might add about the whole prison regime, we have tried looking at industrial prisons such as Coldingley which I think you are aware of and Featherstone in previous times, and where we have attempted to run a work ethic type prison, and that was the whole of the regime, that has worked for a period but increasingly, as the level of vulnerability that prisoners bring into prison has increased, we have recognised that we have to offer a broader regime. At Coldingley people used to go to that prison to work eight to five, with holidays, with time off so they were working very much on an industrial basis. However, to do that there was little education, visits were in an evening, which is okay, but increasingly the prisoners we are having to work with have got health problems and drug problems which we need to take them out for. We need to recognise that there are education issues and we were ending up selecting prisoners to go to work in an industrial environment who in one sense were our better prisoners because they were able to work in that industrial environment because we had to keep that production workshop operating. We were not addressing the needs of the broader population so a place like Coldingley has had to develop. We are still doing primarily industrial work but there is now much more education during the day and there are opportunities for drug work during the day. The way that we are seeing regimes develop I would like to see work (if we had the resources and the ability in the workshops) so that we could fill a day for all prisoners preferable so they could go to an activity each day and work would be a part of it, but I do not think it will ever be the whole part of it because I think the needs of our population are much broader.

Q386 David Winnick: As far as resettlement prisons are concerned, are you limited by the space or the fact that in your view in the Prison Service there are not enough prisoners who could be relied on to do that type of work and not escape?

Mr Spurr: We have got scope to increase the capacity and the number of resettlement places. What we have to obviously balance is the risk assessment for allowing prisoners to go and work full time in the community.

Q387 David Winnick: Of course, but are you saying you could not have more than 1,500?

Mr Spurr: I am not saying that. I am saying that we can increase the number. We have not set a limit as to how many places. I would look at any application from a prison that wanted to set up a resettlement unit along with people from Peter's area. We have got an obvious limit in the number of prisoners we feel are suitable at any one time to go into the community and we have got to look at a whole range of things, protection of public confidence and a belief they are going to use that opportunity properly and not abuse that trust, and that is an issue we have got to keep under review.

Q388 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Two small questions. Have the statistics been produced that look at the amount of capital investment you would need to produce training facilities that you believe would match the demand that currently arises in prisons, demand that is as yet unmet? Have you carried out that exercise?

Mr Spurr: I would be surprised if there had not at some point been a strategic exercise to look at what the gap was from our strategic planning department but I do not have those figures. I would indicate it would still be a significant gap in terms of workshop space or regime facility space across the whole estate, not least, as I gave an example earlier, because in some establishments the actual space on site makes it very difficult to provide physical facilities which is why we have been looking at other areas such as doing much more work with prisoners on wings, which you can do if you are dealing with drug treatment or you are dealing with education when you have not got the physical space.

Mr Wrench: Perhaps we could check and see if there are any figures.

Q389 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: It would be a very useful figure for us to see. We have just heard about an industrial prison that is working eight to five and you then went on to say that (and we recognise) you have prisoners sent to that prison who could not fit into that regime. We hear in other prisons about a population of people who could work who are frustrated in that aim because the greater population of the prisons really demands the attention of the Prison Service and therefore this group of available workers are rather thwarted because they are dominated by this other group. So why not say we have facilities that can take this type of prisoner and it must be exclusively this prisoner because, quite frankly, we are going to become a jack‑of‑all‑trades and master of none if we keep on trying to accommodate a mixed population rather than concentrating populations of specific prisoners in specific prisons and specific areas and gearing up significantly to help those prisoners in those areas rather than sharing them around?

Mr Spurr: We are doing that. If I was not clear, my apologies. Coldingley is still predominantly a production industrial establishment, but when it was first operating as that it had nothing else in terms of regime other than workshop‑type work, that was its sole regime. I worked there in the 1980s and it did not even have education, except for education and recreational evening classes. The reality is that the number of prisoners that would fit into that regime now that do not have some other need is relatively small, so although it is still industrial we have had to build in a range of other things. When you have got 80% of your prisoners coming into custody with a drug problem it is difficult to say we will only send those who have not got a drug problem to a place like Coldingley. It would be wrong to neglect them. We are specialising. I mentioned earlier about the review of where we are delivering offender behaviour programmes. That is to see in the broadest sense where we have drug treatment programmes whether we have focused those right and, increasingly, we are looking towards putting short drug treatment programmes into local prisons for the prisoners who come through very quickly and we can still do things with them there positively, and then having the longer programmes in training prisons where we can take convicted prisoners. So that is what we are looking at and focusing on - the particular emphasis that each establishment would have.

Q390 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. Can I ask a last couple of points before we invite the other witnesses to join us. What contribution would you say that prison work makes to the success or otherwise of the Custody to Work initiative? It is possibly the Government's biggest commitment to getting people into work. I wondered really whether what goes on in prison work and prison workshops is central to that or rather peripheral compared with the education training activities you have been talking about.

Mr Wrench: The key thing about Custody to Work and the various forms of activity that are funded under that programme is bridging the gap between prison and the community and getting the links in place. I think there is an important element that is provided by work in prisons and we can look at what we do in our workshops and what skills people can acquire there and see whether we can bring back learning from the community and adapt what we do inside, but I suppose it is not the single biggest element.

Q391 Chairman: What proportion of released prisoners do successfully go into work each year?

Mr Spurr: Around 30% was the outcome from this survey a year ago. We are about to launch a survey this year on the level this year.

Q392 Chairman: When we were on one of our visits to the Isle of Sheppey we got the impression that within that 30% figure of people going into work or education, you were counting people who had just had one interview with somebody from the Employment Service. Were we right or was that wrong?

Mr Spurr: No, the 30% is the people into work or education that we have taken from properly conducted surveys now over three years. Where people are confusing it is with our key performance indicator, which makes an allowance for people directly into work from the survey in that sense but also incentivises establishments to help prisoners to go to Fresh Start job interviews on release. The overall key performance indicator is a combination of prisoners into work and the number of prisoners who go for interviews on Fresh Start; the 30 per figure is actually into work or education.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. Could we take a short break, and I believe Mr Wrench is staying with us, and invite Sir John Parker and Dr Mary Harris to join us. Mr Boddis and Mr Spurr, thank you very much indeed.

The Committee suspended from 3.51pm to 4.06 pm for a division in the House.

Memoranda submitted by National Grid Transco Foundation

and Howard League for Penal Reform

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Sir John Parker, Chairman, National Grid Transco, Dr Mary Harris, Director, National Grid Transco Foundation; Ms Samantha Sherratt, Real Work Project Director, Howard League for Penal Reform; and Mr Peter Wrench, Director of Resettlement, HM Prison Service, examined.

 

Chairman: Welcome, Sir John, Dr Harris, thank you both for joining us, and Ms Sherratt, thank you very much indeed. Can we move on and ask you a few questions. Bob?

Q393 Bob Russell: Sir John and Dr Harris, can I first of all express my appreciation for what Transco has been doing since 1998, I believe. It is an excellent project by all accounts and to an extent the Government wishes to extend it and indeed other partners want to come in. As I say, I want to place on record my personal appreciation for that and I hope others follow on. Could you give us an update on the roll out of the Transco model and indeed list perhaps some of the key industries which are now training prisoners with a view to employing them on release?

Sir John Parker: Thank you very much for inviting us. We are very pleased to come to the Committee today. When I hear the figure of 75,000 prisoners I recognise that what we are trying to do is a small drop in the ocean but hopefully it is in the right direction. We are mainly working with young offenders although a few mature prisoners have come into our network. We have been working in National Grid Transco and its predecessor companies on building this model and the model basically has the principle of identifying a business need, ie expressed as a job vacancy or job needs, then with the help of the Prison Service we have built up a screening process to identify those inmates with the right aptitude for work. We then take them through a relevant training period so they emerge with NVQ‑type qualifications and any other bolt‑on skills that they need for the job in question. Above all, it is underpinned by a guaranteed job if they pass right through. We have been able to offer that guaranteed job working with our supply chain and I think that is a very, very important dimension to this. If I take the first scheme that Dr Harris was involved in designing, it was actually forklift truck training schemes. That was working with Reading, for instance, and the M4 corridor was clearly a place where one could see massive warehouses and there was an overheated jobs market and a great shortage, we discovered in doing the research, of forklift truck drivers. We had the same vacancies in our organisation so we were able then to identify this market need, set up the training facility at Reading, and to date 104 young people have actually got jobs as or were put into jobs as forklift truck drivers.

Q394 Bob Russell: So there was an economic justification and it is not just the company's feelgood factor?

Sir John Parker: Absolutely. We describe it as a business need being satisfied. We then moved on to look with our supply chain at the fact ‑ and I apologise in advance for this, Chairman, that we will be digging up the roads for the next 30 years - that in agreement with the Health and Safety Executive we will be replacing all metallic mains within 30 metres of buildings to plastic. 50% of the network today is plastic but we have got to complete the other in the interests of safety, which is paramount in our business. We have identified that 30‑year workload with our contractors which is a significant volume of work per annum so this underpins their confidence to say to us, "Those boys that you train we will guarantee a job" because they have this forward visibility of workload with us. That is a very, very important dimension. Either we will give them a job or more likely our supply chain. That is training them as gas pipeline layers.

Q395 Bob Russell: There are two linked questions. Regarding expansion of the project are there any concerns and have you had any pitfalls you have had to overcome in order to implement the programme you have brought in already?

Sir John Parker: I think this would be a good place for Dr Harris to come in because she has been absolutely at the sharp end of this. Given that we have had to take boys out of prison and bus them from Reading Jail, for example, as one of the jails, to our Slough training centre (and then in fact they are released into the public) and clearly we have had to work very, very closely with the Home Office and prison authorities to work out a system to allow all of this to happen. It does not happen in 24 hours. So we have worked very closely and had tremendous co‑operation, I have to say, from the Prison Service and from the Home Office to allow this to take place. We have had a very steep learning curve, I think it is fair to say, together, and without that joint co‑operation the projects we have done to date would not succeed and the projects we are engaged in now, and more importantly the idea of multiplying it out, would not succeed. I think now we have got a proven, tested model between us. Clearly consistent improvement has to be the theme where both the service and ourselves have to work to refine what we are doing and overcome some obstacles. Mary, you are at the front end of this. What have been the big pitfalls for you?

Dr Harris: We have gone from one prison and this year we are in four prisons and we are using the four prisons as hub prisons where we do our training and then we will be feeding into during this next year 11 other prisons which will act as feeder prisons, and I think you have got the information on who are hubs and who are feeder prisons. We have done a full sectoral analysis to find out where we have got the job needs around the country and what we want to do is to make sure the feeder prisons where the prisoners will be going back to are the prisons where the jobs are. We want to concentrate our training at a smaller number of prisons. We will have up to 20 prisons feeding into those training prisons. There are a number of challenges in doing this. Most of the challenges are to do with the mechanisms rather than the underlying philosophy. Obviously one of the agenda items we talked to just a little while ago is the key performance indicators. The key performance indicator is if you have a resettled prisoner going out of your prisoner that goes towards your key performance indicator target. If we are having feeder and hub prisons, obviously the hub prison which the prisoner will be leaving from will have the key performance indicator target against that hub prison. What we need to do is to make sure that the feeder prison has some benefit from that, otherwise I think we will have difficulty having enough feedstock coming through from the 20 feeder prisons to our hub prisons.

Q396 Bob Russell: Is there a numerical limit, other than the 70,000 prisoners, as to how many you think would benefit from a scheme such as this?

Dr Harris: We have been doing some research ‑ and Sir John has got the figures ‑ looking at the realistic numbers we can achieve because we do not want to promise what we cannot deliver and if we look at what we have done, 26 this year, we would anticipate it is going to be 110 by the end of 2005 and we are saying 220 per annum onwards for gas. That figure is pretty realistic in that we have got the vacancies. The thing about this is it is industry‑led guaranteed jobs. The other sectors are water, engineering, energy and logistics and for each of those other four sectors, it took four months to do a proper sectoral analysis of where the job needs were. Looking at those other four sectors we are anticipating between 200 and 250 per annum for each of each of those other sectors, so I think this programme from about 2006 can deliver about 1,100 to 1,300 guaranteed jobs a year.

Q397 Bob Russell: A year?

Sir John Parker: That is the target. You asked a supplementary which is an important one, to give you an idea of who is coming in now because having proved the model in our own vineyard on two projects, forklifts and gas pipes, the idea now is to get the multiplier across the other sectors. Dr Harris has mentioned the four sectors that are active with us now and we have built those up through a marketing effort direct to the FTSE 200 chairmen and chief executives and we have now got 50 companies that have signed up with us. I am sure not all of them will come completely good in meeting our targets but others, I think, have a good potential to surpass them.

Q398 Bob Russell: The two of you answered that the key challenge for the future are going to be the managed expansion and ensuring that the jobs are there.

Sir John Parker: Correct.

Q399 Bob Russell: It has been a success story all the way through, it would appear. You have not answered my earlier questions, were there any pitfalls?

Sir John Parker: There are many I am sure. There were a lot of things to iron out.

Dr Harris: It is an iterative process. It is not something where we said, "Right, this is what we are going to do," and it became successful.

Q400 Bob Russell: Would they be teething problems rather than significant, major points of difficulty?

Dr Harris: Both internal and external. Both making sure internally that guaranteeing the job and the person coming into the job is being accepted. It has been a learning process inside.

Sir John Parker: I would say that some of the negatives have actually turned into positives. Some of the negatives were within our own house. Some of our managers who were suddenly getting these young lads into their sites for training said, "We do not want these types of chaps around here. There is plenty of copper cable et cetera lying around." We had enormous scepticism from some managers where in actual fact they have been won over and have become real champions. This is another very important dimension of this. It is not just about training young offenders, it is actually about giving them support and mentoring, and it is amazing the things that you have to do for them. When they actually come into employment - and it is very interesting to hear some of our contractors talk about this - with Mary's help and the prisons' help often we have to go out and find them digs. Often they have not got a driving licence and there are travel-to-work problems for them and so on. All these things have to be resolved and some of them have very little infrastructure support from home life to enable them to do it.

Q401 Bob Russell: Have you seen any conflict between your company's agenda and the rehabilitation agenda of the Prison Service? Has there been any conflict?

Dr Harris: We have had a learning process together. The time scales in industry are very strict, you get there at 7 o'clock, you start your job at 7.30 and you work until you are needed because if you are repairing or replacing gas mains you do it until it is done. Our learning process is such that a prison is much more like a hospital, it looks after the whole person, so that will be night staff and day staff. Our prisoners have to get up and out the door at 7 o'clock in the morning because they need to leave to be able to get to work for 8 o'clock, it is mechanistic. It is making sure that there is a consistency of the ROTL process, so if you have somebody who is being ROTL‑ed in our feeder prison they can be accepted by the help prison and there is consistency across.

Sir John Parker: Does everybody know what ROTL is?

Dr Harris: Released on Temporary Licence. It is the mechanistic approach, how are we going to make this work?

Q402 Bob Russell: I have an all-embracing question and you may not wish to answer all of it, how would you describe your experience of working with the Prison Service? What are the keys benefits of the project for your company and for the Prison Service itself?

Sir John Parker: If I start with the benefits for the company, I think we are fulfilling a job need because we would have to train someone or have to recruit someone or our supply chain would have to recruit someone. That is the first point. The business need is being satisfied in any event. Secondly, we have found that there are tremendous benefits from getting some of your own people locked in to work with these young lads.

Q403 Bob Russell: Not literally.

Sir John Parker: No, no - we talked about locksmiths earlier. To get them really bound in with them and support them. It generates a lot of interest and enthusiasm which I think is of benefit in the organisation. Frankly I think young people, young graduates coming into the organisation, some of them who support Mary in her administration and project management of this, get a big thrill out of this as well. They see it as an important dimension of a big company's life. There was another point you made.

Q404 Bob Russell: Describe your experience of work in the Prison Service, it is a new dimension I suspect?

Sir John Parker: Yes. I have not been in a prison before so to go and visit a prison is a very interesting experience itself. My contacts have been mainly with the Governor in Reading. I must say I have had tremendous co‑operation and contact with ministers, and so on. Mary has had much wider contact and she must speak for herself.

Dr Harris: I think there is a great willingness now, which has been a learning process over the last four or so years, between us as industry and the Prison Service. There is still some shock when the governors find out exactly what they are taking on board. Industry necessarily has to be quite selfish in saying, "this is what the course is, they have to do the course, they have to complete it, they have to be there at certain times". I think there is a genuine willingness to accommodate this selfishness which industry necessarily has to have to ensure the qualification. The most important thing is that job afterwards and the fact that it is industry‑led. This is not training that they are doing, they are doing it because they are going to end up being able to go from being a criminal to a tax payer. That is the reason why they want to do it, they want to be able to support themselves, if you can guarantee them a job that is going to be providing them £14,000 or £16,000 a year and they are going to be able to support themselves that is a high motivation. Working with the Prison Service and the Prison Service being able to use that as an exemplar within the prison I think they found it useful for themselves.

Q405 Bob Russell: I would like to thank you both for a very encouraging session.

Sir John Parker: Thank you very much.

Q406 Chairman: Do I have the figures correct, including the new industries that you are bringing into this we are talk about 1,200 or 1,250 prisoners a year. What is the challenge or what is the solution if you wanted to do the next scaling up? You are just about to multiply Transco's initiative by five, if we then wanted to go from 1,200 to 6,000 a year, so that it is making a really big impact in terms of the overall objectives of the Prison Service, what would you have to do to replicate it again on a much bigger scale?

Sir John Parker: I would have to find another three or four Mary Harris' to start with. I think there is a safe speed for the convoy here, we are targeting 1,100 of a population of 75,000, principally it is young offenders, although some adult prisoners have come into the system we are targeting. When you apply the filter on those that are suitable to come in, those that have the right aptitude, those that are screened by the prison to be suitable for release on temporary licence, and so on, then naturally the 11,000 is automatically going to shrink to some other number at any rate. The other very important mathematical fact is that the re‑offending rate is somewhere round 70%, this is really fuelling this growth in the 1,100 population to start with. If you can reduce that you can get some control over the top line number here. What we have tried to do in this roll‑out from one prison to four plus ten or 11 feeders is that by '06 we are saying that between gas and forklift, which is largely within our own supply chains, there will be about 300 per annum. The balance of say 200 coming from each of these other sectors, if they can build up at the rate that we are targeting, would be another 800 which brings you to the 1,100. We think that is realistic and it should be realistic relative to the screened numbers as well. You could clearly, I think, take that up to a higher number but my view would be that we have got to get these other companies confident that they will genuinely satisfy a job need by going through and using the model that we have used but injecting into that the particular training qualifications that they want their future employees to have.

Q407 Chairman: It would be fair to say the limited capacity is as much the number of suitable young offenders at any one time as the number of private sector employers who are able to do what you have done?

Sir John Parker: There is that dimension. I think there is also the fact, and we have made it very clear to the companies that we have marketed to and got signed up, this is something that they have to devote that extra effort to, this is not like taking a trainee off the street as an apprentice, training them and leaving them to their own devices. They have to put in that extra managerial and mentoring help to make it a sure thing. If you do that then the re‑offending rate drops significantly.

Q408 David Winnick: Mr Wrench, this is quite impressive, is it not? Were you surprised by how successful it has been?

Mr Wrench: We have been extremely pleased by the success so far. I think the points that have just come out about getting the number of young offenders who are going to be suitable for these schemes as it goes to scale is going to be critical. Already with the relatively small numbers so far, Sir John has brought out the need for management input and mentoring. I think from the discussion we had earlier this afternoon about the multiple needs that a lot of our clients have it is going to be quite tricky to maintain the quality control and maintain the level of confidence there has been so far as it goes to scale. We very much want to give it as much encouragement and as fair a wind as we can.

Q409 David Winnick: I can see the benefits, you will tell me otherwise, overall to the Prison Service, are there any negative aspects as far as the Service is concerned?

Mr Wrench: As things stand, not that I am aware of. Clearly there is quite a contrast between what has been provided and made available to the 26 graduates of this scheme so far and the generality of the population. I suppose there may be some envious looks cast in the direction of people who have got on to the scheme but that is something which would be overcome as numbers increase.

Q410 David Winnick: The re-offending rate I see is some 7% as far as those involved in the scheme is concerned, that is quite remarkable, is it not?

Mr Wrench: The only caveat I would put there are for a proper comparison with the overall offending rates the general figures are based on a two year reconviction period. We are not there yet in those terms. Secondly, this group have been very rigorously selected. In saying that I do not want to in any way undermine what has been a considerable achievement and a very important step forward.

David Winnick: Thank you very much.

Q411 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Sir John I have to congratulate you on this absolutely fantastic scheme and also to congratulate you for employing such a fantastic ambassador like Dr Mary Harris, who grabbed hold of me three years ago and said, "you must come and see what we are doing in Reading". Mary and I are both engineers and passionately wedded to finding more engineers from wherever they may come. I think you have done an absolutely fantastic job. The only source of encouragement and optimism that I have felt when I was going into prison is the sort of environment which greeted me when I went to Reading, and that is a tremendous tribute to a private company. You mentioned earlier on, and I think it is crucial issue in terms of the success of these schemes, the role of mentoring. The NOMS Service starts to lift the barricades between prison and rehabilitation and I guess you would be very supportive of that, where do you think the benefit of the NOMS Service helps you? Does mentoring reflect what you hope you might see in the NOMS Programme?

Dr Harris: Our mentoring is almost fostering. When they first come out you stand there instead of family to a large extent. If they do not have somewhere to live you find them somewhere to live, if they do not have a driving licence there has to be a driving licence, some of them do not have their birth certificates so they cannot get a bank account. It is almost as though there time horizons are very short, they have been in prison, they are looking at a 35 minute time horizon, we are looking at four or five months. Something can go desperately wrong for them, they are late for work and they do not know what to do, you pick them up and make sure they realise as long as they ring us and tell us they are not going to be in trouble. If a probation officer wants to see them at 2 o'clock in the afternoon and we have them digging a hole and mending a gas pipe, we say, "do not worry we will ring the Probation Service and make sure they can see you at 7 o'clock at night". With the joining up of the Prison Service and the NOMS having that sort of continuous training and inter-jobs, what we have been doing, there must be a way you can take somebody who is in prison who wants to be a plasterer or wants to be a service engineer who can start the training in prison and then take them through to the outside world at the same time as giving them the support they need to be able to reconstruct their life. The idea of having a NOMS system where the probation and the support system is actually starting from the start of their sentence is a little how we perceived this would work if you start with looking at their needs and then take them through to getting them into a job and making sure they are supported in that job.

Q412 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: What is the unit cost per rehabilitated prisoner?

Dr Harris: For us?

Q413 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Yes.

Dr Harris: To get them through the gas engineering course it is about £2,500.

Sir John Parker: £2,500 - £3,000.

Q414 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Is that just the training or does that include the mentoring?

Sir John Parker: We are not charging the mentoring into that.

Q415 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: If you did charge, if it was a holistic service, end‑to‑end charge what does it cost you per unit person?

Dr Harris: We have one mentor for every six men coming out. That mentor would be needed very much at the beginning. The chaps will gradually walk away from us after four or five months, their need decreases. I suppose we are talking about perhaps in total £4,000 including the mentoring.

Q416 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: What do you get back? What does that save you as a company?

Sir John Parker: We could put other people through exactly the same training scheme and it would cost us about the same amount of money I guess but we would not have the mentoring dimension. To be very frank we do not look at that as a real on‑cost, it is part of our contribution to society.

Q417 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: True philanthropy then, thriving and well ‑‑‑

Dr Harris: Selfish.

Q418 Mr Taylor: Claire has just trespassed on a point which was occupying my mind, is there anything in this for you apart from knowing that you are making a valuable contribution to society and receiving the admiration of the Home Affairs Select Committee? I would almost feel reassured if you were able to tell us there was something else in it for you.

Sir John Parker: I cannot imagine, through the Chairman, that there is anything more gratifying than to have the gratitude of this Committee. To be serious ---

Q419 Mr Taylor: I would rather you were.

Sir John Parker: --- with you, I think there are a lot of benefits to us because we started a dialogue. I was concerned about ensuring that our contractors were working as safely as our own people four or five years ago. I sat down with our contractors over dinner and I gave them a beating up. I said, "I will meet you in six months' time and you report to me all of the improvements which you have introduced to make the safety targets which we want to see in our business". This led to quite a close dialogue with them and through those get‑togethers we actually told them about this project which we were planning, we told them about the forklift truck drivers and some signed up for that. Then we told them we had this vision of training gas pipeline people to satisfy their labour needs as well as ours and we made them all sign up before they left the room. That actually built a very strong bridge with our contractors which I think is quite important in the size of the organisation and the volume of work that we have going on everyday on our roads round the country. Secondly, our people, as I said earlier, have got quite a thrill out of working with these young people despite earlier concerns. Thirdly, our young graduates see us acting as a responsible contributor and that is attractive to them.

Mr Taylor: Good.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. Sir John and Dr Harris I know you have another meeting to go to so please feel free to go now. Thank you very much for coming. We will now move on to the Howard League.

Q420 Mr Prosser: Ms Sherratt, the Committee has been full of compliments for the Transco scheme, before I ask you about your initiative do you have a view on the Transco project?

Ms Sherratt: Yes. Can I just start by thanking the Committee for inviting the Howard league to give evidence today. We very much welcome the chance to contribute again to this whole issue of rehabilitation. Yes, we have had good correspondence and good conversations, with Mary Harris particularly, and we were very pleased she spoke at a conference of ours only a couple of weeks ago. There are many lessons which can be learned by individual prisons and by other companies and that is why the Howard League is very pleased to see the whole initiative wound out even further.

Q421 Mr Prosser: Returning to the Real Work Project, we have had a little glimpse behind the curtain from various exchanges, do you want to give us your view of the benefits of that scheme in comparison with what exists now?

Ms Sherratt: I think the underlying philosophy behind the Howard League's Real Work Project is to help prisoners re-engage with society once they leave prison. We would like the prisoners who take part in our business to spend their time usefully and we want to show them work can be productive, lucrative and life‑enhancing and we want to instil the work ethic. Many of the workshops currently operating in prisons do not do that, they pay so poorly, the skills needed are so few that at the end of the day a lot of prisoners are left with the impression that crime pays better, it is certainly more interesting and more rewarding. We want to counteract that, we want to set up a demonstration business that shows that work can be important and can be an integral part of people's lives, as work is to you and I. We also want them to develop their work‑related skills and tie that in with gaining qualifications as well. Out of that we hope this is going to be a great opportunity we can offer 11 prisoners at a time. It is not an opportunity for nothing, we will expect prisoners to do a fair day's work for a fair day's reward. Out of the fair wage we hope to pay they will have the same deductions that you and I face, they will have to pay tax and National Insurance, they will have to meet any payments required of them by the court, they will have to pay child support, save for their release, hopefully contribute towards their family's upkeep, make a donation towards Victim Support, which I think is incredibly important for winning the hearts and minds of the public but it is also very much in line with the Social Exclusion Report's recommendations. Whilst we cannot currently charge prisoners bread and board, although I understand that is being challenged today, we feel that there is scope for prisoners to make a contribution towards the prison, towards making the prison experience constructive. We are not asking them to literally put money they have earned into the pot that will then make the cell door or pay for the cell door which incarcerates them. It may be that they make a contribution towards a positive programme that will get more families involved in prison life.

Q422 Mr Prosser: Can you tell us a little bit about the difficulties and the barriers you have had setting it up, have you had lots of co‑operation from everyone, what about the Prison Service?

Ms Sherratt: It has been a very interesting experience ‑ that sounded rather negative ‑ it is an ambitious business proposal which we have and what we needed was a very "can do" governor who was prepared to look outside established practice. We did speak to several prisons before we settled on The Mount. I wish Paul Whelan, the Governor, and Doug Harvey the Industrial Manager were here because they have been very accommodating and very open to our ideas. Some of the opposition, not necessarily opposition, some of the barriers we could not cross with some of the other prison was the whole issue of paying the minimum wage. One governor said to me "you cannot pay people more than the cooks" and that was the end of the conversation because there was no way passed that. Another prison was opposed to the Howard League bringing in its own management, they wanted the person running the workshops to be Prison Service internal and the Howard League is very keen this enterprise should be run as any business on the outside would be with our own manager who we employ. There were the issues which have already been raised earlier, such as the short working hours, it ranges from an average of 25 hours a week and I noticed Dartmoor only manages four hours. If we are going to operate as a business we needed a prison where we could operate a full working week. Issues of storage, getting things in and out of the prison, those are all the day‑to‑day difficulties that we were facing with some of the other prisons and which The Mount was more able to accommodate or to overcome. At Prison Service Headquarters Wayne Cook has been terribly helpful in terms of giving guidance on running a print workshop. Other industrial managers such as Sandra Dingle who has now left Swaleside have been invaluable in giving advice on actually working within prison.

Q423 Mr Prosser: Does it mean a lot more work for the Prison Service? What is in it for the Prison Service?

Ms Sherratt: Certainly we hope that there will be something in it for the Governor at The Mount as we will help him meet some of his key performance indicators, we will keep 11 prisoners occupied, we hope to take them through related training. I am not expecting to turn out 11 printers at the end of it. They also get the opportunity to take part in small business skills, training, for example, the experience of working in a small, socially‑minded business is desperately important to us as well. We hope the broader implications of the business will be that it is a demonstration initiative we can then use as a model for other people to follow. I have a vision for another member of staff, a fair work adviser who will talk in a consultancy fashion to companies who are not sure about how to get involved in prison work or if they are involved they do not know what they should be doing about it. I was talking to several leading retailers recently as part of an ethical trading initiative meeting and several of them just found that they had prison labour in their supply chain and they did not know what to do about it, they did not know whether to pull out quickly or whether to get more involved. They did not know if they should be more involved directly with what happened in the prison. They were not comfortable with the fact that they were finding their suppliers were using prison labour without the connection being there with the company. One retailer almost bit my hand off when I said "I will take round a prison and show you how it can work". There is huge scope for taking the lessons which the Howard League is going to be learning, which we are already using, we did a feasibility study which we have been able to use to make recommendations for other companies who would like to get involved in prison work. The initiative we are doing is much more than just our print firm.

Q424 Mr Prosser: Are you talking about looking for other companies to come and see your scheme or looking for another Transco?

Ms Sherratt: The Howard League would like to see many more companies getting involved in prison work in the workshops. There are some wonderful training schemes going on of which Transco is a shining example and there is lots of educational work going on, particularly in developing basic skills. What sometimes gets lost in the process is the actual work experience that people get in prison. Some prisoners are in there for a long time and if all they have when they come out is three years' experience of counting ten screws into a packet and then stapling the top for 15 hours a week it is not exactly going to set them up for success in getting a job on the outside.

Q425 Mr Prosser: You have talked about the possible conflict between these salaries that full‑time workers within the regime are earning and what prisoners might earn, and if I may play devil's advocate for a moment, what would you say to some of my constituents who would complain that people in their own community outside of prison, law abiding people, are hard pressed to find meaningful employment or any employment in some areas and just across the prison wall people are being spoon fed ‑ other people's words ‑ into training and new skills and new jobs.

Ms Sherratt: At the end of the day you have to look at what the outcome of such an initiative will be. We hope that by providing them with opportunities to take qualifications and to get work experience that at the end of the day they will not commit further crime when they leave prison. Most people been a victim of crime of some sort and it is a level at which you can try and get through the importance of rehabilitation. Most people would rather know somebody coming out of prison will stay on the straight and narrow.

Q426 Mr Prosser: You have talked about the need to bring in new private companies, what about the role of the voluntary sector in these matters, do they have an important role in the future?

Ms Sherratt: Definitely. The voluntary sector has always been innovative and has always been brave and is willing to try new things. I think that certainly the Howard League believe that the voluntary sector does have a role to play in encouraging new thinking. The Howard League also believe it is much more about encouraging social enterprise and encouraging businesses to come into prison. There is plenty of scope for everybody's involvement, not just the voluntary sector, it may just take the voluntary sector to spur it along.

Q427 Mr Singh: Is this the first work project which the Howard League has been involved with in terms of prison?

Ms Sherratt: We have hands‑on experience of projects in prison. We ran what was called the Trouble-shooter Project in Feltham where we employed a barrister who did casework with the boys in the prison. He worked with about 800 boys. That project was then taken over by the Children's Society and funded by the Youth Justice Board and that has now been rolled out nationally. That is a good example of the Howard League setting up an innovative project which gets taken broader and then adopted nationally. We do not have hands‑on experience of working in an industry in a prison and we recognise that. We have been working with people in the print world and with people in the business and political world to make sure that we are getting all of the best advice we can, this ranges from working with a production manager in a single print firm in the community to actually talking to Sir John Egan at the CBI to see what the ramifications could be for business as a whole.

Q428 Mr Singh: Do you see this particular project as ground breaking for the Howard League and the Prison Service?

Ms Sherratt: Yes. It is not something that we are undertaking lightly. I have this rather huge business plan on which we have taken lots of advice. It is not something we are going to take lightly and foolishly.

Q429 Mr Singh: How will the print industry itself react? You did say that you were going to pay fair wages. I do not know what a fair wage is, could you be undercutting other parts of the private printing industry in the wages you pay?

Ms Sherratt: When I say a fair wage I am talking about the minimum wage. The Howard League will not be able to match the exact salary that people are getting on the outside and I think what would be deeply unpopular as well. What businesses have to realise and the Howard League has realised is that working in prisons is not a cheap option and prisoners should not be seen as cheap labour. There are on‑costs just as you would have on the outside. The Mount will be charging me for the space I will be using, they will be charging us for the electricity and the security aspects as well. Running an industry in a prison is not a cheap option, it does have its expenses as well.

Q430 Mr Singh: You could still undercut other printing firms?

Ms Sherratt: The Howard League has been doing a cost analysis of the sort of work we would be doing and our aim is to be competitive. To be honest having looked at the business plan I cannot undercut everybody, I would love to have a go but I cannot undercut everybody. The prices we are charging are very comparable with some in the voluntary sector.

Q431 Mr Singh: You said in an earlier reply you were looking for a "can do" governor ‑ and you obviously found one ‑ were there parts of the Prison Service or governors who did not want to know at all?

Ms Sherratt: They did not want to know. I am pleased they could see the merits of the Howard League proposal but they could not necessarily see past some of the barriers I mentioned such as the whole issue of the full working week or paying a higher wage, that is why we did not settle on some of the other prisons but ended up in The Mount.

Q432 Mr Singh: Have you found any clash of values between yourselves, the voluntary sector, your own philosophy and the philosophy of the Prison Service?

Ms Sherratt: I do not think we would in that the Prison Service want to see people going through a rehabilitation process that is successful and so does the Howard League, and both parties would see that good work experience is one of those ways of doing it. I do not see any potential conflict.

Q433 Mr Singh: Has the Prison Service always been happy to work with the voluntary sector or is this a relatively new thing in terms of the co‑operation that you are receiving?

Ms Sherratt: Yes. In terms of hands‑on projects this is quite new for the Howard League, very much of our work in the past has been policy based. I am not sure I can comment apart from the project that I mentioned, the Trouble-shooter Project, and we have had an advisory project in one of the girls' prisons as well, very hands‑on. The ethos behind it is the same for the Prison Service as they are for us. I know there is an awful lot of voluntary sector organisations involved in prisons and they can be the catalyst for lots of very exciting things and can also plug the gaps there are in the Prison Service at the moment.

Mr Singh: Can I wish you well.

Q434 David Winnick: When the 11 are paid would the deductions be made accordingly along the lines we know about. How would that be calculated? Do I take it the Prison Service will give the sums involved for accommodation, meals and the rest of it, is that how it is worked out?

Ms Sherratt: Everything will be administered by the Howard League, we will do our own payroll. What we cannot have are prisoners with more disposable cash than other prisoners. I know that has been a concern of some of the governors we have spoken to.

Q435 David Winnick: You are doing the deducting, I understand all that, on an equal basis, and that will be done on information given by the Prison Service?

Ms Sherratt: We will not be deducting board and lodgings, we cannot legally do that. What we will be doing is asking the prisoners to make a contribution, because we cannot force them, towards something which will make the prison experience more constructive. We cannot ask them to pay board and lodgings but we can ask that they contribute to something like a family day, something the Prison Service itself would not necessarily be able to fund but will benefit more than just the prisoner themselves.

Q436 David Winnick: In the early days there is a scheme which obviously has our full support and hopefully the Prison Service as well but you do not have a situation whereby they get a wage and then there are deductions accordingly, that will be in the future, not now as I understand what you are saying?

Ms Sherratt: We can do the deductions such as tax and National Insurance and we would love to see them save for pensions as well. Legally we cannot charge them board and lodgings as much as it would be a useful tool for the Howard League to charge for board and lodgings because it would be very popular with the public as prisoners paying their way, but legally we cannot do that at the moment.

Q437 David Winnick: Presumably in the future you would have that if it was possible to arrange or is that simply not possible?

Ms Sherratt: At the moment it is not possible although I understand that the whole board and lodgings ruling is being challenged today so tomorrow we may have a different answer.

Q438 David Winnick: If any of the prisoners say no to the voluntary contribution there is not much you can do, is there?

Ms Sherratt: No, there is not. Prisoners will be very much encouraged as part of their contract to have the deductions that we are asking, we cannot force them but the Howard League foresee that most will comply because of the other benefits they will receive from the project.

David Winnick: I am sure that will be the position.

Q439 Chairman: Mr Wrench, one final question, obviously it was not possible for the Howard League to set up an initiative like this in just any prison, are you taking any initiatives within the Prison Service to change the culture so that more prison governors would have the outlook or the frame of mind that would make it easier for voluntary sector organisations to put this sort of thing on.

Mr Wrench: I think the culture is generally changing. I have only been doing my present job for 12 months but my sense is that we are getting a lot better at partnership working and a lot more open to creative ideas that involve all sorts of people, whether it is the voluntary sector employers or other groups coming into prisons and working with us. I think the culture is changing. I am very glad that The Mount seems to be a comfortable fit with what the Howard League want to do. I would defend other governors who might not have found it so comfortable, they have got establishments to run and they have to think about the impact of making provision for 11 prisoners against what they are doing for all of their other inmates. I am pleased it seems to be working in The Mount and I look forward to seeing the results.

Chairman: Can I thank you all very much indeed. Sorry it has been a lengthy afternoon because of the vote. Thank you very much indeed.