UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC iv-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

THE REHABILITATION OF PRISONERS

 

Tuesday 2 December 2003

MR P WHEATLEY, MR P WRENCH, MS E WALLIS and MR B CATON

Evidence heard in Public Questions 225 - 305

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 2 December 2003

Members present

Mr John Denham, in the Chair

Mr James Clappison

Mrs Janet Dean

Bob Russell

David Winnick

________________

Memoranda submitted by HM Prison Service and the Prison Officers' Association

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MR PHIL WHEATLEY, Director General and MR PETER WRENCH, Director of Resettlement, HM Prison Service; MS EITHNE WALLIS, Director General, the National Probation Service; and MR BRIAN CATON, General Secretary, the Prison Officers' Association, examined.

Q225 Chairman: Good morning. Thank you very much indeed for attending this morning. Perhaps I could just ask each of you, for the record, to introduce yourselves and give your positions.

Mr Wheatley: Phil Wheatley, Director General of the public sector Prison Service.

Mr Wrench: Peter Wrench, Director of Resettlement in the Prison Service.

Ms Wallis: Eithne Wallis, Director General of the National Probation Service for England and Wales.

Mr Caton: Brian Caton, the General Secretary of the Prison Officers' Association in the United Kingdom.

Q226 Chairman: Welcome this morning. Obviously with four witnesses we have to get a balance between getting through the questions and hearing all of your evidence. Obviously if there are particular differences in emphasis between you perhaps more than one of you could answer the question, otherwise if we could concentrate on one person answering the questions. I would like to start by asking about your assessment of how well the Prison Service is doing at the moment. You have a statutory obligation to ensure that "the purpose of the training and treatment of convicted prisoners shall be to encourage and assist them to lead a good and useful life". How well you think the current Prison Service is reaching that aim at the moment?

Mr Wheatley: I think the Prison Service is doing better than at any point in its past. I have a past with the Prison Service which goes back 34 years. We have got a broad coherent strategy. We are using programmes and interventions of various sorts that are better researched than ever before, and we are reaching more prisoners than we used to reach in terms of delivering real change, of any behaviour programmes, education and drug treatment; but we are still not touching everybody. I am not claiming this is perfection; I am saying it is a big improvement on the position we have been in previously. We are trying to direct our efforts on to those who are most needy, and those who are with us long enough to make reasonable interventions. There are obviously problems with quite a lot of our population in terms of doing things that make a real difference. In many cases they are only with us on remand and not even convicted - they spend a brief period with us on remand and then go out again; or they are doing relatively short sentences, or they are doing longer sentences but have spent a long time on remand, a period which counts towards their eventual sentence so the period with us, when convicted, is relatively short.

Q227 Chairman: We will pick up a number of those points in questions. The measures you described are basically input measures and are things the Prison Service are trying to deliver to prisoners. In terms of the outcomes from the Prison Service, you saying you are doing better than ever before. How can you demonstrate that you are doing better than ever before?

Mr Wheatley: We have a commitment to reducing re-offending by 5% as against what we would otherwise have expected. You obviously have to work out what the rate of re-offending is on the basis of who we are holding and what their pre-convictions are. The rate of re-offending is, to some extent, dictated by who we take in and what degree of risk they are. Early measures suggest that we are reducing the rate of re-offending. It is always difficult in this area to be certain that that is a result of prison intervention or work the Probation Service are doing outside, because it is a joint correctional service target in total, or whether there is some change in the pattern of crime outside which is making a difference. It is very difficult to measure but, insofar as we can measure it, it looks as though we are making a significant difference.

Q228 Chairman: You say "early measures", can you give us some indication of that? You have a target to reduce re-offending by April 2004 but if you look, say, over the last three years 2000-2003 can you demonstrate a reduction in re-offending over that period of time?

Mr Wrench: The specific target is to get 5% lower by April 2004, against a 1997 baseline, and 5% again by April 2006. We are still at the indicative stage really of picking out trends, rather than being able to point to hard evidence.

Q229 Chairman: What happened, say, between 1997-2003? 1997-2004 is a seven-year period, we have had six years of it, do you know what the re-offending rates have done over the last six years?

Mr Wheatley: The last advice I saw, and this is indicative stuff so it is not the published final version, said that the re-conviction results coming in from the tranches of prisoners who have been discharged over earlier years were consistent with us making a reduction. It looks as though we are making that reduction, but one would hesitate to be certain until we have reached the end of the period and we measure it carefully. It is difficult to measure because you have to measure what the likelihood was of a particular group re-offending in any case; and the input to the Prison Service changes over time depending on what the courts do.

Q230 Chairman: You said you are doing much better than ever before and the difference is significant, but it all sounds a bit tentative?

Mr Wheatley: It is tentative.

Q231 Chairman: I want to press you on the evidence as to whether things are really getting that much better?

Mr Wheatley: We have not reached the end of measuring it. We are running this as a big programme with a careful programme management structure and looking at the data on a monthly basis. The data, to date, suggests that we are making that reduction. I do not want to claim for certain because we are not at the end of the period yet.

Q232 David Winnick: The figures given to us by the Prison Reform Trust paint a picture which is very poor indeed. I wonder if you wish to challenge the figures in any way, but the Prison Reform Trust say at 59% of prisoners are re-convicted within two years of release. If that is not bad enough, when it comes, however, to those under 21 the figure, according to the Prison Reform Trust, is 74%. It is pretty appalling, is it not? I am not suggesting that the Prison Service are responsible but, nevertheless, these statistics are pretty appalling and there is a danger to the community.

Mr Wheatley: I recognise the statistics and they are accurate statistics. We are holding people, because the courts have selected people for us, who are a substantial danger to the community; they have either committed very serious offences or, in many cases, probably the bulk of people coming in to us have been committing persistent offences. They have a very high probability of re-conviction. Whether in prison or on community sentences they are a very risky group. The question is: can we reduce the rate at which they re-offend, as opposed to what you would otherwise have predicted from a series of quite factual data - age, number of pre-convictions, marital status, do they live in the country, do they live in the city - where you go into a predictor which does predict very high rates of re-conviction for this group? They are, in the main, persistent and regular criminals and that is why the court has sent them to us. There are obviously exceptions to that, and there are people coming in for a single very serious offence. The majority of our population fit in this group, who are very likely to re-offend. It is not a product of being in prison; it is a product of having begun on a criminal career and persisted with it over time.

Q233 David Winnick: You are not challenging the Prison Reform Trust statistics, are you?

Mr Wheatley: No, not at all.

Q234 David Winnick: In this Inquiry we are dealing with rehabilitation and have no illusions about some of the difficulties of those people sentenced and how they are treated.

Mr Wheatley: My view is if 41% of them are not re-convicted, given where many of them come from, that is not total failure.

David Winnick: It is not total failure, but it not a very appealing picture.

Q235 Chairman: One of the things we have been trying to get to grips with in the Committee is actually whether prison can have any really positive impact on rehabilitation. To have a 5% reduction in re-offending over a seven year period of time suggests that, even if things are not going very well, prisons are not doing a great deal to rehabilitate. People like the Howard League have said that "the best that can be hoped for is to minimise the damage that is actually caused by the prison system itself". Do you share that rather pessimistic view of what you can actually achieve in prisons?

Mr Wheatley: I think one has to be very careful of talking up any treatment intervention as the answer to crime. I think prison has a role to play in holding some very dangerous people and some persistent criminals. There are challenging community sentences which, again, succeed sometimes in making a difference, but it depends on the input and the number of pre-convictions and sort of risk that people present even when they are in the community. I think we can make a small difference as a result of interventions in custody, which will reduce the rate of re-conviction. We also do other things. We protect the public from serious and persistent criminals. Prison, for our society, is the most extreme form of punishment given for offences that the courts think must be punished severely. We do all those other things as well. We do indeed have to be careful that the experience of imprisonment is not itself damaging. Getting through imprisonment as a prisoner is a difficult thing to do. Long sentences are not easy and we have to work hard to make sure that prisoners arrive at the end of that point in tact, improved, not having contemplated suicide and tried to commit suicide, and coming out at the end of their sentence with reduced problems and with a better chance of succeeding in the future.

Q236 Chairman: Basically as part of the overall Criminal Justice System you are saying we should have fairly low expectations about how much can be achieved by prison in terms of rehabilitating offenders and reducing offences?

Mr Wheatley: I am saying for any of us involved in reducing re-offending we have always got to have realistic expectations of what can be achieved. We have certain advantages in prison. We will find it easier to get people to courses, and have many of the distractions that are in the community removed, access to drugs and things like that, but I do not expect us to achieve more than the 5% reduction we are speaking about and we have to keep on working at that and there will be more to do. We are not going to see enormous reductions in crime as a result of imprisonment.

Q237 Chairman: This is such an important philosophical point about what prison is there for.

Mr Caton: From a staff perspective, and from someone who has served as a prison officer, my view and that of the POA is fairly simplistic. If you approach the rehabilitation of offenders purely from a prison perspective, and that of itself should be the rehabilitative process, then I think it is a bit short sighted. I know later we will probably discuss the joined-up methods we can use but to use the figures to say that prison is not in itself rehabilitative I think belies the fact that when people leave prison they need to be looked after, and need to continue the rehabilitative process. If that process ends, for whatever reason, if you go back into the same kind of social climate you have come out of which contributed or caused your criminal behaviour, if your mental health problems cease to be adjusted or corrected at the prison gate, if you cease to take medication for mental health problems, if you cease to get intervention with regard to your personality disorder, or if you go back into a community where hard drugs are normal then one should not be surprised, when you compare those people coming out of prison, that the re-offending rate actually is not as good as anyone would like.

Ms Wallis: What I would add to this issue is that the sentence of imprisonment is, of course, one that is partly served in custody, and for part of the time the offender is actually released back into the community. Where the sentence is less than 12 months of course there is no statutory supervision, although we hope that is going change with the implementation of the Criminal Justice Act. Where the offender has been sentenced to more than 12 months imprisonment then the bulk of those offenders are actually returned under statutory supervision, and that is obviously supervision by the Probation Service. Although on one level you might say that the pickings have been slim, as it were, that should not belie the ongoing work that is there, and the fact that in recent years (the last couple of years in particular) probation and prisons have been working hand-in-glove to try and, first of all, gather the evidence not just across England and Wales but actually from around the world as to whether anybody is doing any better. Is there anything we can learn from elsewhere? Together we have been trying to build new tools, new programmes, new interventions and, indeed, get into different kinds of partnerships with other providers in the system, like education, accommodation and health, to actually help us provide the best chance of successfully rehabilitating the prisoner.

Q238 Chairman: When we look at the statistics about re-offending we are measuring, in effect, the combined impact of the Prison Service and the Probation Service, are we not?

Ms Wallis: Yes, we are with the 12 month plus. Obviously there is no supervision for the under 12 month.

Mr Wheatley: For the under 12 month we are not but for the rest there is statutory supervision.

Q239 Chairman: We will come back that in a moment. Could you clarify one point that has been raised by witnesses. It has been suggested to us several times that as prisons get better at providing drug treatment, for example, or in some cases dealing with women with mental health problems in specialist units and so on, that sentencers are becoming more willing to send people to prison, or actually sending people to prison in order to gain access to those things that are not available outside. We do not have any evidence as to whether that is the case or not but it seems to be a widely held belief. Can you clarify whether this does happen in your view, or not?

Mr Wheatley: I have no evidence that it occurs. From the evidence I have seen - and the Prison Reform Trust sponsored a careful piece of work by Professor Mike Hough looking at what sentencers were doing - sentencers specifically deny doing that. They are thinking, they say, - and this confirms everything I have ever heard from sentencers, and I include judges as part of that continuity - should prison be the right thing, before deciding anything else, and not whether this person should get treatment, but is prison the right award for this person and this offence?

Q240 Chairman: You would not share the fears of the people who have said to us that if you concentrate too much on improving things in prison, in terms of rehabilitation, drug treatment and so on, you will simply influence the sentencing patterns? Some people have tried to warn us almost against trying to improve those programme for fear that sentencers will send more people to prison?

Mr Wheatley: I think not. All the things we do in prison are actually available in the community. If one wanted to gain access to offending behaviour programmes there are lot of offending behaviour programmes run by the Probation Service. The Probation Service will help get people into education to do basic skills.

Q241 Chairman: The Offender Assessment System, where has that got to in its implementation?

Mr Wheatley: I will say where it has got to with prisons, and Eithne can say where we are with probation. We have been producing an OASys form that can be used in an IT way, so that it works very efficiently from our point of view. It gathers lots of the data together so we do not have to go into records to get data. That makes it an efficient and effective system. We are piloting it in three of the Prison Service areas. We have just short of a thousand (150) completed OASys assessments; and another 1,081 at the last count, yesterday, are halfway through being done. It is working very effectively. I was at Lancaster Farms in one of the pilot areas looking at the work of the staff who are operating OASys. They are very pleased with the IT kit they have got - it does the job well - and very impressed with the assessment system. We are gradually beginning to build a really good database on prisoner needs. The Probation Service are doing it differently and are rather further on, on a less IT-intensive method.

Ms Wallis: If I could, first of all, explain that in building OASys together we were building both a micro assessment tool - namely a tool to assess risk with the individual offender - but we were also building a micro-strategic planning tool. If I could separate those for a moment. In terms of using it as an offender assessment tool, it is in all 42 probation areas, and we have trained about 11,000 staff and everywhere it is now in use. By early next year, for example, we will produce about a quarter of a million court reports and I would expect OASys to be used as the offender assessment tool in the bulk of those reports. Certainly by early next year in each of the cases actually supervised by us then that should be there in use. In terms of the technology, developing OASys and making it possible for probation and prisons to have a joint offender assessment database, then we expect that productivity to be in place in the spring. By something like May we would hope that our two systems will be able to converse and talk together.

Q242 Chairman: Would all prisoners in the Estate be covered by the OASys system?

Mr Wheatley: At the moment we have no plans to cover all prisoners in the Estate. We are covering those who are doing longer sentences - I think the cut-off point is 12 months - but not for short sentence prisoners. Peter sits on the board which runs OASys. By the end of this next financial year we will have everybody done. All the new people will be through the system.

Mr Wrench: At the end of the next calendar year we will have it rolled out completely across the Prison Estate.

Q243 Chairman: As far as the shorter term prisoners are concerned the position will continue to be they will still be subject to frequent movement from prison to prison? Any programme they are on will be disrupted, their records will not travel with them; and when they arrive somewhere else if there are any staff shortages any rehabilitation programmes will be disrupted?

Mr Wheatley: That is not a fair picture of the position at all for any prisoners.

Q244 Chairman: We have been told by several witnesses that when prisoners are moved two things frequently happen: first, is their records do not move with them . The assessment that has already been done in one prison then has to be re-done. Second, that programmes they are on may cease, either because they are not offered in the prison they are going to, or because the assessment has not travelled with them. Are you saying that does not actually happen?

Mr Wheatley: No, not in the form you are saying. If we are dealing with offending behaviour programmes we have got hard data on offending behaviour programmes lost through transfer.

Q245 Chairman: Offending Behaviour Programmes are only one of the types of programme.

Mr Wheatley: Bear with me for a minute. We have got hard data on that which shows we lost last year 1% of ETS completions, 2% of R&R completions, I do not think we lost any SOTP completions. We are prioritising those offending behaviour programmes to make sure we do not move them, and we do that with some care. In our drug programmes we have got a slightly higher rate lost through movement. If I remember the data correctly that runs to about 10% of those who have gone on programmes who have moved on transfer. Not all of those transfers will be because we are moving people simply to cope with overcrowding. In some cases we are moving people, involved in drug dealing, deliberately. They are also in programmes because they have become involved in drug dealing in prison. Some of those will be planned and careful moves. We will try to ensure that we do not move prisoners out of education classes leading to qualifications. Our success in gaining qualifications suggests we have been rather successful with that. We are not as successful in guaranteeing (and do not claim to guarantee) that long sentence prisoners, who are often engaged in very long coursework, Open University and things like that, will not be moved during their sentence. Most of that is actually portable. OU, for example, can be done as you move from prison to prison. After all, the public at large would do that around a job as a part-time piece of work. There will be some courses which are lost because we have moved people. I do not think there is that major disruption; nor is it particularly targeted at short-termers, because we are having to move and we plan to move prisoners as they come into local prisons and we plan to move then into training prisons. We also plan to move people once they have got into secure prisons into Category D prisons, into open conditions, as soon as we can.

Q246 Chairman: Do you monitor all these different types of courses to see whether they are delivered? The picture you are painting is very different from the picture that has been painted by the witnesses we have had so far?

Mr Wheatley: All our offending behaviour programmes are monitored. Our drug treatment programmes are monitored. We do not monitor every class. We do monitor the rate at which we are getting completions, so we know how many people are getting basic skills qualifications; and because those are usually relatively short courses they are not normally disrupted because they are planned to be short courses.

Mr Caton: The experience, as far as the staff associations are concerned, particularly with regard to OASys - and I cannot necessarily speak for NACRO but we spend a considerable amount of time discussing these matters across the two unions and, indeed, with the health and justice forum, the gathering together of justice unions - is that, whilst at the end of the day it may produce the desired effect, it has certainly been brought in in a very, very bad way. If you are going to do something which is going to be purposeful towards what happens to a prisoner, and what kind of rehabilitative processes are necessary for that individual, one would imagine you would bring in a system which would immediately take over that piece of work. Colleagues in the Probation Service through NACRO tell me they are constantly behind on doing this work. Colleagues in the Prison Service, as the Director General quite rightly pointed out, are in a roll-out programme. We have many, many thousands of prisoners who are going to go through the system during that period of time whenever it joins together. Based on what I have seen in other information technology methods applied to the Prison Service I personally doubt very much if it will come in on time, if all at. Therefore, during that period of time, we are not going to have a system where the correct rehabilitative processes are necessarily applied by staff to prisoners to prevent further offending. That, to me, is poor planning. It is poor resourcing and against a backdrop of a huge, massive rise in prison population, which you will deal with later, Chairman, and more workload regarding those prisoners who are released in various forms for the Probation Service. If we are going to have a holistic approach let us have the same system working across everywhere, so all people can put it in, and it measures the chances and what we have to do with prisoners to give them the opportunity to rehabilitate them.

Q247 Chairman: For those prisoners who are not covered by OASys, and may not even be in the longer term, Mr Wheatley has painted quite an optimistic picture with regard to what happens when prisoners are transferred. I will put to you what has been put to us that records are frequently not transferred at the same time, courses are disrupted, prisoners face a delay before they have a further assessment. That is what has been put to us. What is your view? Does that happen?

Mr Caton: My view, and it is anecdotal, is simply this: prison officers tell us, through the meetings we have and through our annual conference, there is massive disruption to the rehabilitative process of prisoners due to the need to transfer them - transferring them normally to make way for new prisoners coming into the system. There is little regard, for the pressures on the Prison Service, which can be given as to whether the move is going to benefit them in relation to the rehabilitative process. One thing for sure, we would say it is very challenging to a system where you are making cellular spaces available by putting people in lower category prisons whom we consider are probably too dangerous to be where they are. We do not believe it is done in a proper way, Chairman. To sum that up, staff tell us something different from what the Director General has just said.

Q248 Chairman: Can we conclude that outside of the specific programmes monitored, like the offending behaviour programmes and drug treatment programmes, there is not actually a hard body of evidence yet which will resolve the question about whether significant numbers of offenders have courses, qualifications and so on disrupted by moves?

Mr Wheatley: The movements take place from local prisons. Local prisons act, during periods of pressure, much more as transit camps. Local prisons are not the majority of the Prison Estate. I am sure that in local prisons many prisoners experience the moves as disruptive, at short notice and move long distances to places they would rather not have gone to. I am sure that is accurate. That probably explains some of the anecdotal evidence the Committee has heard. Within the Training Estate we are not moving people in the same way at the same short notice. Most of our efforts, which are lined up towards rehabilitation, are mainly in the training prisons rather than the local prisons, although there is some work in local prisons.

Q249 Mrs Dean: Mr Caton, you mentioned prisoners being moved to where perhaps they should not be moved. Does that apply to open prisons? I recently had it drawn to my attention that a prison just over the border from my constituency, Sudbury, has had an awful lot of prisoners who have absconded and quite a lot of those have not been picked up? Would you put that down to the system that is in operation at the moment?

Mr Caton: I think I can answer it best in this way: it is prison officers, on behalf of the Governor and the Prison Service, and it is the Governor's final say on these matters. The categorisation system in the Prison Service has been in place for a considerable amount of time. It necessarily comes under pressure, and so do the people, our members, when they are under pressure to move people and to assess them. I am convinced by what I have heard, from our members who do that, from prison officers who are involved in the allocation and categorisation of prisoners that they are now sending people whom they would have put into more secure conditions into less secure. I think that has a knock-on effect on the Open Estate where people are moved to the Open Estate who probably, if they were not under the pressure of the rising prison population, would not be there. It does not surprise me that the problems we have Sudbury do exist.

Mr Wheatley: As we run up to near full capacity we are making full use of the open prisons. It is probably fair to say that as there are an increasing number of prisoners who are on home detention curfew, out early on a tag, that the supply of prisoners for open prisons is not as great as it once was and we are using open prisons (and we are prioritising it so we reduce the risk as much as possible) for people who perhaps ten years ago we would not have used them for. The consequence of not doing that would be they would be in police cells and we would have run out of accommodation. We are making sure we keep people in Prison Service accommodation, and judge the risk the best we can. The abscond rate has increased slightly. It has not increased very much. The real difference is that we have now got the prisons full. If we were running Ford, for instance, at about half full (as we did for most of my career, although it is now full) it has the same rate of absconds as it always had. It has had more absconds because it has a lot more prisoners at risk. There has been an increase in the number of absconds, although the rate of absconds has only changed very slightly. Open prisons obviously cannot prevent prisoners escaping; they are, by definition, open without significant barriers between the prisoners and freedom. They are mainly very short sentence prisoners; those are the people we are putting in them.

Q250 Mrs Dean: Do you agree it is of concern when those prisoners are not actually picked up?

Mr Wheatley: We regard it as a concern whenever we have got prisoners who have absconded and escaped and are not back in custody. I like them back in custody.

Q251 Chairman: We have looked at the possible disruption to courses, whatever, when there are transfers within the Prison System and there are some issues to be resolved there. The type of disruption that takes place in the rehabilitation process is when a prisoner is released from prison and they are looking to continue drug treatment or education outside. Looking at those programmes rather than the broader resettlement issues for the moment, I have two questions: do we know what proportion of prisoners do not get a satisfactory transfer from the work they have been doing in prison for education or drug treatment to satisfactory provision outside? How many people slip through the net because services are not available when they are needed immediately on release?

Mr Wheatley: Insofar as I know, and Eithne obviously has some knowledge from the probation side, the main worry to us was releasing prisoners who had done drug rehabilitation work who, as they were going to go out into freedom again, would obviously find it easier to get hold of drugs because they would be available for them. We are fairly confident we will do best with somebody who has had a real drug problem which they have addressed in prison, they have dried out and are detoxed, if we can get them very quickly into treatment. That was proving difficult. It has improved as a result of the CJIP initiative which has produced, in at least 25 of the highest drug treatment areas, a system which means we can get them straight into treatment and I think that is very valuable. Drug treatment is the one thing you lose very quickly indeed.

Q252 Chairman: What proportion of prisoners who have successfully gone through a drug treatment in prison are now being offered at the point of release, directed to and supported to go to drug treatment in the community? What proportion of prisoners who are released, having been through a drug treatment programme, do not re-enter the drug treatment system outside?

Mr Wrench: I do not have that data.

Q253 Chairman: We are putting hundreds of millions into improving the drug treatment services in the community but we do not actually know what proportion of the people you work very hard with in prisons to get off drugs actually sustain their drug treatment in the community?

Mr Wheatley: We do not. The CJIP initiative was only announced two weeks ago, so it is very new. We are not in a position to assess the result of it. It has been targeted on the 25 highest crime areas on the grounds that that is where most people come from.

Q254 Chairman: That is the new initiative. There already is substantial expenditure on drug treatment in the community. I am surprised you do not know how many people we have released from prison, on whom we have spent a lot of money getting off drugs in prison, who actually get support in the community at the moment outside of the target areas?

Mr Wheatley: The immediate support I was speaking about would have been very much the exception. To get somebody straight into treatment you are looking to have people almost met because of the risk that they go into drugs because they are in their face immediately. That sort of follow-through I do not think we were able to do before at all. It is that sort of follow-through that may pay off handsomely, hence the investment in the CJIP initiative.

Q255 Chairman: In terms of continuity with drug treatment, the OASys system you have now got tells you, does it, at the point of release whether somebody has been through drug treatment in prison?

Mr Wheatley: It will when it is electronically connected, hence the need for the electronic connection.

Ms Wallis: We are not getting OASys through from prisons back into the community.

Q256 Chairman: A substantial proportion of the people on short-term sentences will have got a drug problem. They seem to fall largely outside this system, both in terms of whether they get drug rehabilitation in prison or whether they are a priority on release. Is that right?

Mr Wheatley: We will detox them. We will offer them counselling and the advice CARAT service, which they have access to. Many of the people we are detoxing are short-termers. The CARAT teams will -----

Q257 Chairman: When they leave they fall outside the Probation Service?

Mr Wheatley: They fall outside the Probation Service. They do not fall outside the drug treatment system.

Q258 Chairman: Whose job is it to hold their hand when they have been in for six months, they have been detoxed and they have come out? Who then picks them up in the community and makes sure they get drug treatment?

Mr Wrench: This is where the Criminal Justice Interventions Programme really ought to make a big difference if you have got the people based in the communities they are going back to who are looking to receive them.

Q259 Chairman: That applies to people irrespective of the length of their sentence?

Mr Wrench: Yes, that is right.

Ms Wallis: Could I just try and clarify the situation. I do not want you left with the impression that offenders come out on licence and simply disappear. Offenders on licence are picked up. The evidence is that, in terms of making immediate contact with them in holding to the standard of levels of contact, doing the assessment work and certainly strictly enforcing the terms and conditions, that work is done very systematically by probation. The evidence there is increasingly strong. What is more problematic for us is actually having available within that case management framework the actual offending behaviour programmes, access to the various treatments and assistance that they actually need. That is why, for example, we have been building together the national rehabilitation strategy and starting to try and enter into much stronger partnerships with accommodation providers, with education providers, looking harder at employment, and working with the drug treatment providers and so forth. I think we need to differentiate between are these offenders supervised and managed, as opposed to do we have all the rehabilitative interventions available that we actually like. It is the second we are still very short of and working hard together to try to plug those gaps.

Q260 David Winnick: The overcrowding in prisons is quite acute. You are not likely to say no, are you?

Mr Wheatley: There is quite a lot of overcrowding, yes.

Q261 David Winnick: At the moment would it be correct to say that there are more offenders than ever before? The figure I have in front of me is 74,452. Give or take a few we are basically talking about well over 74,000.

Mr Wheatley: It is actually dropping as we approach Christmas. The peak was 74,460, which was at 18/11. It has dropped to today's figure which is 74,182. We are beginning to experience a seasonal drop. I am not saying this is the answer to my prayers. In the pre-Christmas and over the Christmas period the Prison Service expects to have a reduction in population probably of the order of a couple of thousand.

Q262 David Winnick: The scenario painted by some is that the long-term projection for the prison population suggested that the numbers could go up to somewhere in the region of 100,000 within six years. Do you take such a somewhat pessimistic assessment?

Mr Wheatley: I take no particular view on it. I look at the projections as they appear. The projections vary over time, because it is very, very difficult to project the prison population accurately. You are trying to project and predict so many different actors in the system. What the police will do, what the CPS will do, what magistrates will do, what individual judges will do, how the media will respond and what is happening in politics all affect the numbers. The projections downstream are always likely to be inaccurate and have, in my experience, always been inaccurate. They are normally reasonably good in the short-term. It is a little bit like weather forecasting, to be honest. I always look, a bit like I do at a long-term weather forecast, with interest but I do not actually expect to see that. My experience is that is not what actually happens downstream because things alter in the meantime.

Q263 David Winnick: Are you telling us, based on what has happened in the last few years and with an ever-rising prison population, a figure of somewhere in the region of 100,000 by 2009 is not likely to be honoured?

Mr Wheatley: I am not saying it is not possible or impossible.

Q264 David Winnick: What is more likely?

Mr Wheatley: My estimate of this is not worth anything very much. You are really asking me to assess politics. The really key issue is whether you as parliamentarians, whether the Government, will want to fund that level of accommodation or not; and what your view will be about criminal justice acts - all things that are not within my gift. Your guess would be better than mine, actually.

Q265 David Winnick: That is one way of answering it!

Mr Wheatley: It is honest!

Q266 David Winnick: As far as accommodation in prisons is concerned, again I have figures which you can confirm or otherwise, that some 20% or more of prisoners are sharing cells designed for one?

Mr Wheatley: That is right, yes, over 20%.

Q267 David Winnick: That is 15,000 prisoners.

Mr Wheatley: Yes. There are other prisoners who are overcrowded as well. That is not the total of overcrowding. There will be prisoners who are three in a two cell. There are dormitories which should have four people in which have five people in. The sum total of overcrowding is rather large.

Q268 David Winnick: 83 out of 138 prisons overcrowded, is that right?

Mr Wheatley: That will be right, yes. I do not have the figures to hand. We have spread overcrowding in small amounts into the Training Estate, where once we did not overcrowd. We overcrowded, and have overcrowded for all my career, in local prisons. The levels of overcrowding are nowhere near what we used to do. I joined the Prison Service when every cell was three'd-up in the local prison. I could not go to any prison which had that level of overcrowding nowadays. I am not complacent about it, but there has been a substantial reduction in levels of overcrowding over a long period of time. At the moment we are running near to the peak levels we have certified as acceptable. We have, after all, been within just over 500 of what we think is about about absolute maximum capacity.

Q269 David Winnick: A point which has been made to us by a number of organisations, obviously those concerned with prison reform in one form or another but not entirely confined to them, is that with such an amount of overcrowding prison rehabilitation simply becomes that much more difficult and, therefore, we would be justified to have a pessimistic view of what is going to happen to those prisoners when they are released?

Mr Wheatley: What is realistic is, if we only have 7,900 offending behaviour problems, as an example I do not mean that is the only thing we do, if that is to be shared around amongst 74,000 rather than 66,000, the number of prisoners who will miss out will be greater. We have not got a delivering of offending behaviour programmes that totally matches the potential need. There will be a bigger mess. Similarly, what I know happens in lots of establishments is there is not sufficient ordinary occupations - not rehabilitative occupations - it is workshops and lots of fairly mundane work; but there will not be enough work for all prisoners to work full-time. The work will be shared so, in effect, you have a work-sharing system with people only working part-time, or a number of prisoners are queuing for work and are locked up during the period they queue and wait for a vacancy. That is as a result of increased population and increased levels of overcrowding. That shows in our purposeful activity figures which, although they have gone up substantially and we have increased purposeful activity since the late 1990s by 30%, the population has increased by 50% so that is again shared; it is either given to a few and some people do not get it, or it is shared so everybody gets less. All those are the reality of population pressure on us. We are still hitting our targets for which we are funded on things like basic skills qualifications, key work skills, giving people skills they can take as marketable commodities back into the community. We are not only hitting our targets, we are exceeding them substantially. We are hitting our offending behaviour overall target, and have managed to do that quite nicely. We have managed to prioritise our efforts so we hit the key things we think are making a difference. It is a smaller proportion who will get them because there is a larger population.

Q270 David Winnick: Mr Caton, your members are dealing with this situation day in and day out, do you feel with the present amount of overcrowding rehabilitation is really going to be in any way effective?

Mr Caton: The Prison Service which Phil Wheatley and I knew in the early 1970s through the 1980s was dramatically overcrowded. The Prison Estate had not been maintained correctly and cells were overcrowded. One thing we did have was work for prisoners. Prisoners went to work in the main. We had workshops, and it was thought at that time that what we would do was give them work, give them purposeful activity and, hopefully, they would not commit offences while they were in prison and it would lead, as the Chairman said in his opening remarks, to people being better on release. The problem is now that we have increased the prison population. We have put quick build units in prisons. What we have not done or been able to do - and I am not blaming anyone for it - is increase the opportunities of prisoners to go to work, to be involved in work, to get into routines which lead towards the beginnings of rehabilitation - because we have concentrated on being able to warehouse prisoners and put prisoners in new cellular accommodation and to ensure they are kept in safe custody. The ethos of rehabilitation is about getting prisoners to do various pieces of work. I actually believe that in the 1970s (and it continues today) part of the rehabilitative process is that you make sure a prisoner is clean; you make sure they keep their cell tidy. All those things matter as a base before you start building. You want to change these people and give them reason to change themselves. Rehabilitation is not the gift of the Prison Service or the Probation Service, it is a gift of the individual to be provided with the resources, to be able to look at what they have done and correct it. That is what we are trying to do. My members are very, very frustrated indeed. If you give prisoners an expectation then you should deliver on that expectation. If you do not they very quickly tell you that they are upset. We have seen an increase in assaults and an increase in antagonism between prison officers and prisoners, which is always there lying dormant but comes to the fore when you are not able to give them what you have told them you can. Even things like physical activity and gymnasiums, those kinds of things have not been increased at the same level as the accommodation or the prison population, and neither have staff numbers to be able to deliver these programmes. It is a very disappointing stage we are living in. Yes, we are getting the resource and we are having further accommodation in existing prisons, and the alternative to that is to privatise prisons because the new prisons would be privatised, but we are opposed to that as well.

Q271 David Winnick: The Probation Service when it looks at the numbers in prisons do you take the view that one should be somewhat pessimistic about the chances of rehabilitation while in prison?

Ms Wallis: In terms of prison numbers, given the current environment in sentencing climate, I do expect to see those numbers grow. At the same time, we are working very hard indeed to create the kind of community penalties, the kind of supervised community penalties, that we hope will be able to displace a lot of those prisoners who are actually getting very short custodial sentences. Clearly we are not aiming to try and displace the longer sentenced and the more serious offenders, but many offenders who are currently in prison are there for very short periods of time and are not coming out at the moment under statutory supervision. We are trying to build provision in two ways, first of all, through creating more programmes in interventions in the community of both sufficient punitive weight and, if you like, rehabilitative content that we hope will be attractive to sentencers. For example, regarding the 18-20 prison population at the moment, and you referred to them earlier about the very high re-conviction rates, they spend very short periods inside and very short periods on licence; and it is hard for either of us to be able to grip them. We have recently built a programme called Control and Change and this combines home detention curfew where the young adult is actually electronically curfewed and monitored for up to 12 hours a day. We work with the police on their oversight in the community and the enforcement of the terms and conditions. They also do up to seven hours a week community service, unpaid work for the community. Again, we deliver with partners up to 18 hours a week rehabilitation, depending on what the OASys assessment actually has told us that the offending behaviour is all about. These are the kinds of programmes we hope are going to help keep some kind of grip on the potential for the prison population to rise still further.

Q272 David Winnick: Mr Wheatley, I wonder if I could ask you about community prisons which Lord Woolf recommended. This would allow prisoners to maintain much better links with their families and deal with employment and accommodation when released, to some extent arising from what has been said just now. Is it the aim to provide more such prisons?

Mr Wheatley: I no longer build prisons myself, as it were.

Q273 David Winnick: The Home Office.

Mr Wheatley: There are no plans to produce the sort of change to the Estate that would mean we could move in any wholesale way to community prisons. The reason why we do not have community prisons, is not because they are not a good idea, is because the Prison Estate is where it is and it does not actually line up with where prisoners come from. For instance, to produce community prisons in London I think we would have to build something like another 20 prisons in London to cope with the large population of criminals convicted and sentenced to prison in the London area. All we have in London as prisons are local prisons sending people out to the south-east, out to the Isle of Sheppey, up into East Anglia, down onto the Isle of Wight. That is where the prisoners go. To produce community prisons you have to be able to hold them near home. That would be an interesting venture for any government to decide to do, to increase the London prison provision to such a great extent. Similarly, Dartmoor is not near anywhere, Haverigg up in Cumbria is not going anywhere, but those are our prisons and we have got to use them. To produce a good community prison you really need a large prison that is multi-functional so you can move prisoners through the security categories within it, and you do not have to move them when they require lower security. We do not end up expensively holding them within a secure perimeter when they do not need it. You are looking for a multi-purpose establishment, probably purpose-built to be effective, near to a site where lots of people come from - normally the big conurbations. What we have been trying to do is build our new prisons in a way that line up with that and do not exacerbate the problem of our Estate as it currently is, spread around areas of the country that are not, in the main, places that are good providers of prisoners. New accommodation has been built near to centres from which prisoners come. That has mainly been new private sector prisons, because that is what has been built. The Park near Bridgend in South Wales is an example; the new prison built in Manchester that supplements Grantchester Prison in the private sector prison. We have tried to build in a way that moves us towards being able to run community prisons. If we did build at some point in the future large multi-purpose prisons they would particularly assist if they were built with ready access to a large conurbation.

Q274 David Winnick: Lord Woolf's wish is not likely to come true for quite a while?

Mr Wheatley: Not unless somebody wants to build a lot of new prisons at whatever cost that would be, or the prison population is reduced so sharply we can close the places that are not near where prisoners come from. While we are running at full capacity with the existing Estate we cannot run with the community prison concept, except in one or two areas where we have got an over-provision of places - Kent, for instance, and Yorkshire and Humberside are really quite good and we can hold people fairly near to home and try and make strong local links and there are advantages from that.

Q275 David Winnick: Again, a question regarding the Prison Reform Trust. They told us during an earlier session that some 44 of the 138 prisons in England and Wales had had at least one change of Governor in the last four to five years. That seems to be a pretty high turnover?

Mr Wheatley: There is quite a high turnover of prison governors and there are a variety of reasons for that. The Prison Estate has been expanding, obviously enough, as the prison numbers have gone up. It has actually been expanding in the new private sector prisons and the private sector buy my staff. Although they may be the private sector they are still buying my governors who then leave and have to be replaced. We have had an expanding Prison Estate and that produces pull-through effectively. The ideal time for a prison governor to be in a prison is something like three to four years as the ideal. That gives you a chance to look at the place, understand it, make long-term changes. If you stay there too long, there is a risk of becoming stale as a manager. Really there is a prime responsibility for creating change and we grow our governors. That is the other thing that we have to bear in mind, that I do not just produce a governor off the shelf for a big prison like Wandsworth and I have to get somebody who has worked in smaller prisons, learned their trade, proved their worth, worked as a deputy governor somewhere and that produces long careers with lots of steps in them, and that is what generates the need to move people. Sudden death, sudden movement to the private sector, promotion into other parts of the Home Office, all things that are beyond my control produce a pull-through effect and then lots of steps because you are pulling governors up the various steps as you pull. You bring a prison governor from a medium-sized prison to a large one and you bring somebody from a small prison to a medium-sized prison, so it is a bit like a house purchase where there is a whole chain behind any move.

Q276 David Winnick: Do you agree with that, Mr Caton?

Mr Caton: No, I do not.

Q277 David Winnick: I did not think you would.

Mr Caton: Unsurprisingly not. The change in general is causing massive problems in the Prison Service for the people who deliver the service on behalf of society. A change of governor is a massive thing, let alone when we get the governor, the deputy governor and senior functional heads all moving together. The staff then become a little bit like a boat without a rudder for a long period of time sometimes until another governor comes in. The handover, on numerous reports and recommendations of the way in which governors hand over a prison, it is always recommended that there should be quite a considerable amount of time for the incoming governor and the outgoing governor to get to grips with what the prison is about and where it is going. It seems every time we get a change of governor in some establishments, they take it in a different direction. They have huge amounts of autonomy, and I am not saying that is wrong and I am not saying that is right, but they do have huge amounts of autonomy. It causes massive industrial relations difficulties when people have an expectation that they know what they are expected to do for the next two or three years and then suddenly it changes and new governors do bring new ideas, some of them good, some of them bad, some indifferent, but I would say to the Committee that change is the biggest enemy to prison officers. We never seem to be in a position where we are not being expected to change considerably either on the wish of government, individual ministers, senior members of the Prisons Board, the governors or functional heads, and if we are to have a successful Prison Service, one that can link up and have a joined-up method of dealing with prisoners with other members of the criminal justice system, then what we need to do is put the brakes on all the change because with some of it, we have been there before and it has failed. That is a fact.

David Winnick: I would like to give the right of reply, but that is for the Chair.

Chairman: Perhaps we will pick that up later on.

Q278 Bob Russell: I think my question is almost redundant now that Mr Caton has given such a totally different version than Mr Wheatley, so clearly there is a conflict. I just wondered, Mr Wheatley, whether you would like to come back on that because quite clearly the lack of stability of consistency, as Mr Caton sees it, is a serious problem. I just draw your attention to the fact that we have been told of this constant changeover of governors, and indeed I understand that at Chelmsford Prison there are proposals to give the Governor a long service in grave watch in the last two years.

Mr Wheatley: Yes, I will come back to what Mr Caton says because it is quite interesting. Mr Caton says that his members find change difficult and it is the enemy of being a successful prison officer. Actually my view is that we must change prisons and improve them and I think that you, as parliamentarians, will expect continuous improvement. That implies continuous change and I think Mr Caton is quite accurately representing the views of many of his members who would prefer there not to be change. I understand that. I joined as a prison officer and I know that change is often challenging. You are not certain it is going to work and you are never absolutely certain in prison quite how you manage to make it work. When somebody comes along and says, "You can do it differently", we look at it with some nervousness whether it will really work. I have got to create change, I am required to create change and make improvement and that involves governors leading improvement and leading change and moving governors is part of making sure that we have got the right governor in the right position to make the right change. I can see no way of doing anything other than growing governors through the process of trying small places and then moving into bigger places because that is the safe way of doing it. If you pick somebody as a young assistant governor, as it were, and say, "Well, you are a pretty good chap. We want stability, so go straight to Wandsworth because that way you can stay there for 20 years", it would not be, I think, a very good way of operating. We believe that we have got to have a pattern of good changes in governors and we are doing that very quickly. The one thing we are not doing is leaving interregnums in the way that we once did and I think rather dangerously actually for long periods of time. We have been very careful in judging that, so at Feltham where the Governor has been promoted (it is very difficult to deny somebody their promotion) and he will make an excellent area manager, he has been very successful, very capable and experienced in both the Prison Service, public service and the private sector, and we have immediately moved in, as he has moved into his new job, another governor. He is the Governor of Bedford Prison and he was just short of three years in Bedford Prison and was doing a very good job of Bedford Prison, but he is the best governor for Feltham and I do not want Feltham to fall back. It has been a prison that we have put a great deal of effort in to change and work reasonably and where actually Mr Caton's members are probably working more co-operatively with the management of the prison than they ever have before. We have moved him quickly from Bedford and we will then advertise for Bedford where we judge at the moment that the Deputy Governor can hold the fort. It is those sort of fine judgments we are busy making and that is part of my job. There is no easy way of slowing this process down.

Q279 Bob Russell: So the Prison Service practises a policy of evolution, and stability and consistency are okay?

Mr Wheatley: We practise a policy of continuous change actually. We are continuously trying to improve prisons. I think you would need to worry about me and the Prison Service if we said, "We've now got it right. We can't alter anything".

Q280 Bob Russell: I will move on, if I may. What is being done to challenge the high levels of staff sickness and low levels of staff morale? After you have answered that one, I will ask Mr Caton if he agrees with your answer.

Mr Wheatley: There are high levels of staff sickness, slightly lower this year than they were last year, so we are 13.2 days at the moment, I think it is, as opposed to the 14.3 outturn last year. That is a very high level of staff sickness. We are tackling the problems in a number of different ways and they are being tackled by governors because governors are made responsible for sickness, or not sickness, but they are responsible for managing sickness in their establishments and, after all, this sickness is occurring across the country. Differentially some prisons are doing better than others, but we are making sure we follow the rules on sickness. We are civil servants with a fairly generous sickness scheme compared to many people who are not in the Civil Service. We follow the rules carefully on that and make sure that we warn people if they look as though they are misusing sickness, offer support and advice to people who look as though they are in difficulties, operate that system to as good an effect as we can, and we have increased sharply the number of dismissals of people who have been off for a very long time and who do not appear to have an illness that is going to get better, but it does not make them unemployable, so the number of dismissals has gone up sharply. We have introduced in co-operation with the POA a scoring system that works to score sickness, produce trigger points at which there is mandatory action to be taken by management and which makes it plain to people taking sickness what a mandatory action will be. That is being done in agreement with the POA and I am surprised that Mr Caton says otherwise, which is interesting. All of that is making a difference. I think that prison officers in particular, they and nursing staff have the highest rates of sickness and I think it is very stressful work. I have done it and I know it is stressful. Front-line work, dealing with prisoners is wearing and taxing and requires resilience and I do not want to undersell the difficulties of the work that front-line prison officers are engaged in. We know that something like a quarter of the sickness, just over a quarter, relates to stress, another quarter relates to muscular-skeletal injuries, not all of them at work, I hasten to add, and we carefully analyse what our sickness is and try to make sure that we are intervening in a way that reduces it as far as possible.

Q281 Bob Russell: Mr Caton, perhaps you could answer that question and combine it with a further follow-up question because in your written evidence you commented that, "Politicians, law-makers and those who direct the sentencing of offenders appear to have little or no concept of the difficulties faced by prison staff...attempting to rehabilitate offenders in overcrowded prisons", so what are the major difficulties currently faced by prison staff which presumably leads to the high level of staff sickness and low levels of staff morale?

Mr Caton: Well, I think that the first thing to say on that is that we feel very, very undervalued as a profession. I think people may not understand that. When the judge says, "Take him down", that seems to be when society ceases to think about the offender, and I am not hoping that the violins are going to start playing in the background, but that is when our business begins. That is when we have to deal with people, individuals, human beings in probably the most traumatic state people could ever get into. They have had their liberty taken away, they are having to face up to the realities of the offence they have committed and been found guilty for. We are currently doing that in fairly overcrowded prisons, certainly with a hugely rising prisoner population and trying to do it well. That in itself has pressures. I think equally the changes that we are expected to bring on, as Phil quite rightly says, we are in a business that constantly changes and I do not move away from the fact that we need to improve, but I do not necessarily agree that constant change is the way in which you cause improvements. Many of the things that we are doing and having done have been thrown out like the baby with the bath water and that in itself is frustrating. We have in recent times been seen as having the highest level of stress of any occupation and I can understand why. We are dealing with violent, difficult, damaged people permanently. We are dealing with them from when we unlock them to when we lock them back up again of an evening and we are trying to get into their crime, some of which itself traumatises to the extent where prison officers never work again and where some prison officers have taken their own lives. We have to deal with the increase in suicide rates and we have to deal with the way in which prison officers are thought of not only by the general public, by parliamentarians, but by the people who manage the Prison Service, and the recognition that we fail to get for doing those difficult jobs. It does not surprise me that against that backdrop we have serious stress-related sickness. The other thing I would say is that we are doing this against a backdrop where we have very little occupational health processes, very little respite from the problems that we have. We do not have a process, like other services, where people can be taken out and we do not have convalescence areas, though we have never needed them because of the so-called macho image of prisoner officers. Prison officers actually believe they are pretty tough people and live that life, so people look at prison officers and say, "Well, you are a prison officer, so you are very tough", and they live other people's expectations and beliefs about them. Yes, sickness is a blight, but what I would say to Phil is yes, we agree with the way in which you are trying to tackle sickness, but I do not think you can drive prison officers like a herd of cattle towards better and lower sickness rates. I think some need driving and some need care, and I do not think we get a great deal of care, but I think we get lots and lots of driving. The effect that it has on the way in which the Prison Service carries out its work is shown in staff sickness levels. If I could add one thing to try and resolve this, it would be a determination by the Prison Service, the Board and parliamentarians to try to understand the difficulties of dealing with prisoners and to give us good occupational health methods to take us away, allow us to be away from it and that would mean additional resources, additional staff.

Q282 Bob Russell: Mr Caton, that was quite a catalogue and hopefully the inquiry this Committee is doing will lead to some recommendations which may assist your members, but we will have to see what happens. Mr Wrench, the current treatment of remand prisoners, short-term prisoners really, means, as Lord Woolf has commented, that, "they are often at the bottom of the pack when they should be, as unconvicted prisoners, at the top of the pack". How can this be justified?

Mr Wrench: There are difficulties dealing with remand prisoners, firstly, because of the uncertainties about how long you have got them for and the fact that they can get pulled out of activities for legal appearances and so on. There are difficulties in that they are going to be held in the local prisons which are under the particular pressures that Phil Wheatley described earlier, but clearly we want to do as much as we can for them when they are in that position.

Q283 Bob Russell: Bearing in mind that these are unconvicted prisoners in many instances, would you agree with me that if the facilities provided for their visitors are not good facilities, it has an adverse impact on their whole wellbeing?

Mr Wrench: I think that applies to prisoners generally. Obviously the better the visit facilities, the easier it is to maintain family ties and to not have the bad effect of imprisonment in that crucial area.

Q284 Bob Russell: Mr Wheatley, does the Prison Service have a policy about prison visitor facilities?

Mr Wheatley: We have a policy about prison visits in which we try to ensure that we have got good-quality visitor rooms with good surveillance so that we can have good visits and we can see what is happening and we can prevent visits being misused.

Q285 Bob Russell: We will watch this space on that one. You will be aware that a previous inquiry by the Home Affairs Select Committee led to recommendations to do with alternatives to prison sentences and I think it is widely agreed that the short custodial sentences are a poor alternative to sentences to be served in the community, so what strategies does the Prison Service and the Probation Service adopt to increase the credibility and effectiveness of community sentences?

Ms Wallis: It is just two and a half years since the National Probation Service was created. We had 54 quite autonomous probation services before that and the Government took the decision that those should be deconstructed and the National Probation Service should be created. The whole focus of the new Service was a move away from our old responsibilities, which were couched legally in terms of advising, assisting and befriending, into a new organisation where the focus would be on hauling offenders to task to the terms of the orders, it would be about reducing recidivism and it would be about public protection, so in the last two and a half years what we have set about doing is profoundly changing our practice with offenders and with victims and we have been reskilling, retraining and retooling our staff. In the first instance, we have been building new building blocks for new sentences and offender practice. We supervise every day over 200,000 offenders and clearly the start point is that your staff must have a good tool for assessment. You have got to be able to differentiate what those 200,000 offenders have done, the level of risk that they pose and also separate out their needs, what was the offending actually about, and that is why with prisoners we have built the offender assessment tool which you have heard about, the expectation then being that when you have a sharp assessment, then you can build a good supervision plan, so we have been together again trying to build models of joint case management and we hope to roll those out next year. We have been building offender programmes and interventions so that sentencers actually have different choices now from what they had, for example, three years ago and that is the case. There are a number of new sentences, many new interventions and programmes available to tackle re-offending.

Q286 Bob Russell: Notwithstanding that the prison population is growing, and we will come back to what you have been doing, it is still relatively early days, so are those building blocks working? Does it need any fine-tuning or a major overhaul or are you on course to achieve what you wish to achieve?

Ms Wallis: Well, it has been a major overhaul and I really cannot stress that enough. We have a whole range now of accredited programmes. They are general offending programmes, we have got 2,000 sex offender treatment programmes running and we have got a target this year to achieve something like 9,000 drug treatment and testing orders and we will achieve that. We have just upgraded the community punishment order and under that there were eight million hours of unpaid work done in the community last year, so we have just introduced a new element to that which is that while the offender is doing the hours of community service, at the same time they have the opportunity to acquire training skills and employment skills which are actually accredited and awarded so that as well as being punished and as well as making reparation to the community, we hope that we can actually make an impact on rehabilitation as well. That is just a flavour of the different kinds of programmes that have been put in place, but we are going to add to that in partnership with business in that this is a joint development, we build these programmes very often together, the programme is delivered in prison and we try to make sure that we build with a view to matching. For example, with our sex offender treatment programme, it is meant either to be able to stand alone if there has not been one delivered in custody, or if there has been one delivered in custody, then ours is designed to complement that. We are building booster programmes so that again when Phil and his team deliver offending behaviour programmes and the offender comes out in the future, we hope to be able to deliver booster programmes that both hold the effect of what has been achieved and actually add to it.

Q287 Bob Russell: Thank you for that very encouraging response. There is just one final question continuing the theme of joined-up thinking between the two agencies. Much of the education and course work in prisons has already been covered by earlier questions, but I just want to home in on this one where a short-term prisoner has commenced an educational training course and then returns to the community. Do you feel that the community social service agencies are sufficiently engaged in that rehabilitation agenda so that the work follows through to completion?

Mr Wrench: I think there is more we can do certainly and we are in the process of an exercise to put new contracts in place for education in business and one of the key things we will be trying to achieve there is a greater equality of standards between the provision in the community and in prison and through that a greater transferability of learning experience back out into the community.

Q288 Chairman: Relating back to what you have said about new developments and having sat here for the last few weeks, it is a little hard to avoid the impression that so far as short-term prisoners are concerned, everybody, and I do not just mean the Service, has largely given up on them in terms of what can be delivered for them, but perhaps they should not be in prison and perhaps they should be doing community penalty work, so if they are there for three to six months, including being on remand, is the truth really that not very much is going to happen to them and they are likely to re-enter the community with very little having been done to address their offending behaviour? I can see that for those having longer sentences, the system is more joined up and better co-ordinated, whereas we have a huge group of people with shorter sentences who go in and come out unchanged or worse and carry on re-offending and really there is not a strategy for them yet, is there?

Mr Wheatley: There are strategies, but you are right, it is very difficult to deal with them. We, for instance, are trying to work in prisons with the local community to try and link offenders very quickly back into housing and jobs and that is not just done for long-termers. I was doing a visit to Bedford Prison and seeing prisoners on the day after reception going immediately to get housing advice, whether they can keep their flat, where they are going to go, and that is mainly for the short-termers, immediately seeing somebody from the job centre, and again mainly aimed at short-termers.

Q289 Chairman: But the islands of good practice do not really illustrate a consistent approach to maximising the impact on the short-term prisoners. That would be fair, would it not?

Mr Wheatley: It is probably not far from that. It is not entirely fair because the resettlement money we are putting up, the £14.5 million of additional money for resettlement, lots of that is going into the sort of thing I am seeing at Bedford and our strategy is to try to work with the local community, with job centres ----

Q290 Chairman: That money is?

Mr Wheatley: That has gone out this year.

Q291 Chairman: And that is spread equally among short-termers and longer-term prisoners?

Mr Wheatley: It is available in order to get people back into work and we are going to have a target next year of getting them into accommodation. It is designed to help us with that and that is obviously aimed at the highest number of discharges, so mainly short-termers, so that money is there and primarily being spent on the short-term end of the market, but it is probably falls short of being an all-encompassing strategy and I am not saying that.

Ms Wallis: Could I just say that you know already that the Probation Service is not involved with those serving less than 12 months in the adult population. We hope that through Custody Plus, for example, when we get an opportunity to implement the Criminal Justice Act that will change and we would expect that when that is implemented, something like 63,000 of these offenders would actually start their time in custody and then come under the statutory supervision of probation. We have not been idle on this. What we have been trying to do in the last year is actually build the pathways, actually try to establish what good practice might actually look like between prisons and probation in that respect, anticipating the day when hopefully we will get the resource now that we have got the legislation. So we have run resettlement pathfinders in some areas, we have run a programme known as Four, for example, we have looked very specifically at women prisoners as well as the adult population and I had indicated that we were building a joint case management model, so there have been many things actually in the process and laid to build for good practice so that we know what it actually looks like and we know what other kind of organisations we need to help us by creating the provision. Clearly for prisoners on probation, our staff with all their many competencies are not educationalists, they are not mental health experts and we cannot provide the accommodation ourselves, so we need to get those powerful relationships with other people. It would be giving a wrong impression to suggest that we are not trying to do anything about this or that our staff actually are not working with great determination to try and build the practice, get other providers on board and that is about the national rehabilitation strategy as well. We have also got a Joint Sentence Planning and Implementation Group between us already designing and building new sentences so that the moment we have the resource and the opportunity for sentences to have Custody Plus, Custody Minus available, we will not just be starting then, but we will actually be ready, so I do not want you to have the impression that we have been sat simply watching this scenario and hoping and waiting, but a great deal of effort has already gone into that preparation.

Q292 Chairman: When do you think you will have Custody Plus?

Ms Wallis: Well, this is entirely dependent obviously on the resources being available. What I am being told at the moment is to be ready for the start of the implementation of the generic community sentence at the back end of next year, with Custody Minus in 2005 and Custody Plus in 2006, but those are very tentative planning dates and obviously those are not within the control of either prisons or probation, but we are getting ready and we are very anxious and eager to be part of this.

Chairman: Thank you for that. That is actually very helpful to the Committee to know where you are.

Q293 Mr Clappison: Mr Caton has already made an interesting remark about prison workshops and working prisons. Can I ask both him and Mr Wheatley if we feel that the prison workshops which there are are providing the right kind of skills for prisoners and that there is not too much emphasis on menial work rather than the acquisition of skills, which has been suggested by some of the submissions that we have received?

Mr Wheatley: There is provision of skills in workshops and particularly vocational training workshops and there is quite a substantial amount of new money around from DfES because DfES will now be responsible for all vocational training in prison and there is in their baseline substantial new money which will go into this area. We have run big prison workshops and many of them are designed just to occupy prisoners for relatively short periods of time, particularly in local prisons where we know people are going to go through, which is the point I made earlier, and so it is to some extent a transit camp in the criminal justice system. You can take somebody on to get them working probably for two or three weeks before they go on to their training prison and that has a role, I think, in that it occupies the prisoners and gets them out of their cells. We know from some of the research we are doing on suicide that that in itself is quite valuable, helping people to cope particularly during the early period of their imprisonment, so we have got workshops that are doing work that is not particularly inspiring, but occupies people. We have also got some workshops that are doing skilled work, which also makes us money, and I can think of, for instance, the workshops that produce, rather bizarrely, our own bars in the workshops. That produces some really quite skilled and good metalworking because prisoners like that work and it is helpful from our point of view. It is not too bad if they are making bars, but if they were making anything else, I might worry about it. We do that in a number of establishments. We have difficulty guaranteeing a supply of good work. We are obviously in competition with other people who want to do the work and there are some quite difficult areas around whether we should be making things that somebody in the private sector, perhaps your constituents, would be better making and whether we should be taking this work away from them, so there are all sorts of sensitivities about prison workshops.

Q294 Mr Clappison: Could you tell us a bit about the level of involvement of private employers in prison work initiatives?

Mr Wheatley: Quite a number of our workshops are doing work for private industry, supervised usually by our staff, so we have got workshops doing work that we are making a profit on actually, both work from the private industry and doing work for them, and there is a wide range of those contracts. We have got some specific contracts with employers who are actually helping us train people. We have a contract with Toyota which has a workshop at Aylesbury which is a very good workshop which helps to train young people in lots of work to do with maintaining cars and things like that, so it is good stuff. There are one or two other links with the private sector which are working very well. There are links with Transco and we are helping train people who will get a job outside working for Transco on the provision of gas mains, that sort of thing, so there are one or two links like that which are proving very productive, making real training opportunities and which help solve skill shortage problems for some employers.

Q295 Mr Clappison: Is it part of your plan that what you describe as one or two programmes with the private sector which are good stuff, as you put it, is it part of your plan to expand that as much as possible?

Mr Wheatley: We are trying to expand that as much as possible. From our point of view, it is very good stuff. We get real high-quality training and a direct link with an employer who is interested in employing, so that fits with getting people back to work in areas where prisoners reasonably can get employment. You obviously have to be careful in what you are training people in because there is no point in training people in, shall we say, being a bank teller because it is not that likely that we are going to get people into that sort of work, so you have got to make sure that you have targeted the sort of work that our prisoners with their track record can reasonably expect to get.

Mr Caton: I think the picture that Phil paints is an accurate one, but it gives the impression that we are doing lots and lots of excellent work in workshops when the work that is being done is, I think, sporadic and dotted around rather than there being a whole or holistic approach to it. We have this Project Rex(?) currently taking place which is intended to privatise the education side of the Prison Service and with it will go very experienced instructional officers who are PCS members, not members of ours, although some are. We have expressed some concern about that and obviously with our sister unions we will continue to express that, that we are worried by that. The other thing that I think is always a difficulty in prison labour is that a private company comes in and the international obligations on them to use prison labour is an issue in itself, but the only thing is whether they really want offenders to be used to take away jobs from people who have not committed offences. That will always be a difficulty. If someone wins a contract in a prison, is it taking work away from another small company that needs that work to survive? I think that the thrust of prison labour, as always, whether it be growing food for the Prison Service or raising animals for slaughter for the Prison Service or indeed, like Phil says, doing work that will save the prisons money by producing building materials, prison doors, prison gates, bars, et cetera, that is useful work in this day and age where there is a skills shortage and if we can teach prisoners to actually build something and save money for the Prison Service in doing so, I think that is good. The difficulty of course is that we have over a period of time had this swing backwards and forwards on whether we really want prisoners to be put to work and do all the useful jobs or whether we are all about security and making sure that they do not escape. I think that under the stewardship of Martin Narey and Phil, we have tried to steady that pendulum, although with the next big escape issue it will swing away again and then it will perhaps start collapsing because some money is needed somewhere else. It is always a difficult thing to do, but I would not want to see people thrown out of work in society to provide cheaper products being produced in prison. I think that is a balance that the Committee ought to look at as well when looking at prison labour, which we have looked at on many occasions. Prison officers themselves do deliver a lot of trade training. Some of these trades are obviously needed. How many on the Committee who pick up and want a plumber will have major difficulties? We used to produce lots and lots of plumbers.

Mr Clappison: Can I go on to asking you both again about how prisoners are assessed for educational programmes and if you could perhaps deal with what I believe is the 'Jeffrey Archer' point because he says, I believe, that there is an economic disincentive for prisoners to attend education rather than work because they are not being paid to do education.

Q296 David Winnick: As long as they are not forced to read his books!

Mr Wheatley: Another reason for literacy! We assess prisoners on reception to see what their education skills are and there is a standard battery of tests which are applied and I think it probably is these that do not necessarily travel between prisons and should, but sometimes they are repeated unnecessarily which I think is something we should be trying to sort out. That gives us an assessment of prisoners' needs. We have little difficulty in filling education places. Education is normally highly prized in prison and we have not a great difficulty, interestingly, in persuading people who have got low standards of literacy into taking education. We are trying actually to move away from a full-time education approach as I think that is not the best way of teaching basic skills. It is better taught in smaller amounts rather than taking people away from work full-time, so that to some extent means that I am less interested, although prisoners themselves have quite an interest in what they are being paid at work because they are still at work than in spending some time doing basic skills. We are even trying to get basic skills into the workshops so that we can teach it alongside doing things and that is probably the most effective way of doing it. Again there is an example from one prison I visited recently where there was a concrete-block-building workshop making building materials and fork-lift truck-driving was taught in the workshop and basic skills by the instructors working in the workshop, which is a very neat way of doing education. I would be very reluctant to get into a position where education always paid more than everything else because actually for those who are engaged in production workshops that are boring and where actually the only pay-off is the money you get for it, and, like education, where actually there is a substantial pay-off for prisoners both in terms of increased skills and actually while doing the education being able entirely to escape from prison in your head is one of the very interesting things about why education is prized because it is a way of forgetting you are in prison for a bit. You are engaged in something with your mind really actively occupied. Working in one of my pick-up and put-down workshops, putting together plugs, you are not very engaged with anything actually and the pay-off there is money, so I prefer leaving the pay-scales to prison governors against the clear knowledge that we are managing to fill education places quite nicely and we have been particularly good at getting those who have got substantial levels of illiteracy and very poor numeracy skills into education, hence the fact that we are over-providing against our targets in terms of achieving basic skills.

Mr Caton: I agree that vocational education during vocational training is a good way forward. I think there are some very, very talented people who teach the basics which are needed to do a particular vocation in the construction industry or whatever the prisoner has set his mind on doing. Of course that is in an ideal world and in a world where things are not disrupted constantly, and of course people will lose heart in linking their education to their future employment where they are constantly told, "No, I'm sorry, you are going back to your cell this afternoon". That is the difficulty, I think, that we all face, but I am a great advocate of education, having dealt with it early on in my time at the education centre at Wakefield Prison where we could pay £25 an hour to teach somebody Russian, but we could not spend money on the very basic skills that people were needing to move on in their prison chosen areas of work and learning. It seemed very, very perverse to me that that was happening, bigger ticks for bigger education. Well, I am sorry, but small education will matter if we are going to deter people from going back to crime.

Ms Wallis: Could I just say that I think this is an area where prison colleagues really should be commended. It is undoubtedly the case that in the last two years they really have made enormous strides and very substantial numbers of prisoners have been given access to education. This then gives the Probation Service a challenge which is whether we can then build on that when the offenders come out into the community, so not just a challenge for probation, but for the education providers. We also took basic skills and education provision into our portfolio of service delivery last year. We have a national agreement with the learning skills councils and we are in partnership with them where we are meant to be doing the assessments, identifying the offenders either because they have come through custody or because they are in the community and actually making these referrals to the education providers and then of course case-managing, supporting and sustaining, really pushing them and helping follow them through. Now, the learning skills council provision is still very inconsistent across England and Wales, so there are some parts of the country where colleagues have started them when they come out and we are able to see this being connected in because the tuition provision is there, but it is also true to say that there are some areas where this infrastructure is not there in place and again we are trying to work on that and trying to make sure that this happens. Many of these offenders, if you are talking about getting an offender from almost no basic literacy and numeracy through to a position where they reach levels of attainment to make them employable, where they can genuinely compete in the employment market, you are talking about hundreds of hours' tuition and if that has begun in custody, then obviously we want to be able to continue that tuition through providers through the period of the licence. Indeed if they still have not reached the levels of attainment by that time, we want the community to continue with that investment in them, so again together we have made very considerable strides there, but it is true to say that the issue of tutors is still patchy in some areas.

Q297 Mrs Dean: How do you view the recent Home Office research which found that there were no differences in the one and two-year re-conviction rates between adult men who started a prison-based cognitive skills programme and their matched comparison group?

Mr Wheatley: Well, I have viewed the offending behaviour programme as in effect a giant research project. We are the only jurisdiction I know that has gone to such a scale on delivering offender behavioural programmes which have a good research base. I joined the Service after an interest in criminology and was amongst the people involved in visiting Canada as we looked at what worked initially in Canada back in the very early 1990s. It was always essential, it seemed to me, that we researched what we did carefully and we learned from that research, so, firstly, I welcome the research and I think that is the right way to do things. The initial research, the first tranche, looked as though we were achieving about a 14% change in re-conviction which was really very impressive, but often in bringing in new things you find that if you do something new, you get the so-called 'Hawthorne effect', everybody thinks, "This is wonderful, we are involved in an experiment", but when it becomes normal and you are doing it across lots and lots of places, it is much more difficult to keep that enthusiasm going. The second two tranches about this are both, from the point of view of making big differences, depressing. There was some quite interesting information in them. If we take out those who have dropped out of the programmes, those who have failed and simply said, "I'm not going to do these things", for those who have completed, there does seem to be an effect and a significant effect. Also now, because I think we know the research itself into this sort of programme is as good as there is in the corrections world, we need to crawl back over our programmes and see which ones have succeeded and which have not and then whether we can find ways of making sure that more succeed, and we are doing that in co-operation with the accreditation panel which helps us accredit these programme, which is independent of us and has on it experts of some standing. We think that we have probably been over-emphasising some procedural processes of the programmes rather than concentrating on what is probably absolutely the key thing which is the style of delivery and actually the personality and standard of the person who delivers the programmes. Certainly looking at the evidence of the early Canadian programmes, that was one of the big crucial issues. At the moment, therefore, I think we are not at the stage where we have got enough evidence to say, "This is just a complete failure and we should throw it away", but we are at the stage where we have got enough evidence to say, "We need to do further work to tell us what is going on here and we need to keep on testing it, and actually if it does not work all the time, we shouldn't do things that don't work". I have always thought that, but we should be careful in this sort of area where you have got to do careful research and think carefully about exactly what is going on, that we really have understood properly what is going on, drawn the lessons from it and tested them, so that is where I stand on the current research.

Q298 Mrs Dean: Is it selecting the right type of offenders as well?

Mr Wheatley: That is key to it. OASys helps with that because it produces over the years an assessment system. We have been relying on area psychologists to help select people, so at least some are, and we have selected those who were not ideal for the programme because these programmes need targeting as they do not work on everyone. They are not a panacea. They are pretty good when well targeted and built consistently by high-quality people and yes, targeting and the quality of delivery are, I think, the key things we need now to do work on and then test again.

Ms Wallis: I think we have to remember that this is one programme at one point in time, so of course it is a disappointing result, but it should not deflect us from our determination to actually keep trying and to build this evidence. If medical research, for example, had given up every time there was a disappointing result, then I think that we would all be a lot less healthy. This is a very new field, as Mr Wheatley has said. I think the other confusion around the whole breadth of offending behaviour programmes is often that they are described as if there is only one particular offending behaviour programme, but in fact when you talk about our joint What Works Programme and the accredited programmes, there is a whole range, and I talked about sex offender treatment programmes, there are drink-driver programmes, there are drugs programmes, so there is an enormous portfolio. If you take the sex offender treatment programmes, that is an example where we have stuck with it and we have got longer-term research now, so one of our sex offender treatment programmes, for example, that we run in the National Probation Service, the two-year follow-up re-conviction rates for those who completed the programme, there are very substantial gains. They have reduced the predicted re-conviction rate for sex offending by about 71/2%. Those same offenders have reduced by around 11% for other crimes of violence and, given that these offenders very often get into acquisitive crime as well as sex offending, they have reduced the acquisitive crime re-conviction rates by around 22%, so there is an example of another accredited programme which had we given up too quickly or too easily, we would never have actually got to this point, but yes, they must be properly targeted and we need to improve how well we equip our staff to deliver them and we have obviously to get the offenders through to completion because that also is a very important success factor.

Q299 Mrs Dean: Can I turn to how we treat women prisoners. A number of bodies advocate that women prisoners should be held in smaller secure units as close to their home community as possible. Obviously this would also help in making sure that they have contact with their children. What is the Prison Service doing to bring this about?

Mr Wheatley: We are not building smaller units as we have not got the resource or it is not money that I have available to spend in that way. What we are trying to do is to hold the population in prisons as near to their homes as we can. We have increased the size of the women's estate in response to the fairly rapid increase in the women's population. As we have re-rolled places because we have re-rolled male prisons, we have tried to select male prisons for re-rolling and it gave us a better closeness-to-home match, so Buckley Hall, for instance, was picked because it was a secure prison in the north-west where we did not have enough places for women, so we have tried to use expansion to help a bit. We also run our women's establishments mainly as multi-functional establishments, so we do not expect to move people around as much between places, so a prison like New Hall(?), for example, which I visited recently, has remand trials, has a mother and baby unit, it is holding young offender juveniles, and the YJV has got a young offender wing which does de-tox and it has women who are involved in education as convicted prisoners who do their sentences there and if it feeds into an open prison, it will feed into Aston Grange near York, and New Hall is near Wakefield, so we have got a reasonable compromise.

Q300 Mrs Dean: Over 75% of female prisoners have been sentenced to twelve months or less. Could more be dealt with without coming into prison?

Mr Wheatley: That is not really a question for me. I am the jailer, not the person who decides what they do. Really you should ask a judge or a magistrate that. We have got a hold on that once they come to us.

Q301 Mrs Dean: Ms Wallis, do you have a view on that?

Ms Wallis: Yes, I do. I have a very definite view on that. I think that if you look at the seriousness of the offences and again you look at the offender needs and you look at the risk assessment of these women, then I would argue that we now have both the kind of capabilities in the community that genuinely give sentencers a choice in terms of whether they keep some of these women in the community or whether they actually choose to sentence them.

Mr Caton: Could I just say that one of the things I think was a major step forward in dealing with women in prisons was the Prison Service's decision to have a separate directorate to deal with it which has now been scrapped and I think that was in itself a mistake. Had that been managed better, dare I say, I think that is a successful way forward. I think that they have particular needs, very serious needs. I think that as we see the contraction of the secure psychiatric provision in the high-security psychiatric hospitals, we will see more of those people who either have been or would have been in those units coming into prison. I think that in line with that, as Phil quite rightly says, we have no control over it. The re-rolling exercise is very disturbing to staff. I think we are going to get ourselves in a position where we are going to have to relook at how women are dealt with when they are in prison because there do not seem to be many people sentencing women in any other way than they have done in the last couple of years. I do express the POA's concern in the area of women in prison and I do not think we are dealing with it altogether well.

Q302 Mrs Dean: Can I ask, Mr Wheatley, why you have changed the system so that women's prisons are not dealt with separately in a women's estate?

Mr Wheatley: Actually to try and improve delivery, what we realised was that because the women's estate had grown so sharply, and it originally was a small estate with a single area manager in charge of it, and it grew rapidly, we had to re-roll places, and we had added in another area manager to assist, so there are two people working together, and a small policy group supporting them, all accountable to me as the Deputy Director General and now the Director of Operations. There is a big geographical spread. Keeping enough contact with the prisons for the area manager so that they knew what they were doing, making sure they visited often enough given the fact that this is a national estate which goes down from Durham to (?) by way of a prison in Kent, one down nearly in Bristol, so it is very widely spread, was proving difficult, and getting knitted into what looks like an increasing area for us, which is area resettlement strategies, working together with the Probation Service and with other providers, particularly local authorities in some cases, housing and things like that, we thought we needed to bring the women's establishments to get that sense of grip visited regularly under the area manager and integration into a resettlement strategy if we wanted to get women to get access to it via the area managers who are leading that. We know we have got to try and hold together the policy issues and not just policy issues, but just spotting trends across the women's prisons, for instance, the number of psychiatrically disturbed people, those with severe problems who are coming in, the extent of drug abuse, problems that come from mother and baby units, problems that come from having children in care and trying to keep in contact with the women in prison, so we need to find a way of crossing that over. We have developed an operational policy group which will work to the Director of Operations and we think we can get the best of all worlds out of that. It is never easy to get management arrangements right so that they match for all the various needs you have got and there are inevitably compromises because I think the developing area of the resettlement agenda and development of the regions actually has entities that count, which means that we have got to make sure that women are tapped into that and we were missing out there. We were missing on some of the support, such as drug action teams and all the rest of it because they were only speaking to those who were male prisoners. I think the compromise of having the operational policy group which will have one of the area managers, who was previously working in this area, in charge of it and all the same staff will give us the crossover nicely with a better sense of grip and better integration to the regional agenda because it is very tempting at the moment to knock it and say that we should have stuck with what we were doing, although actually when I speak to most people, they mention some of the failings in what we were doing, and I would like to be judged probably about 18 months down the line as to whether this is delivering better. It is certainly designed to and there is no other agenda than to make sure we do this properly and it is difficult work.

Q303 Mrs Dean: Turning to those prisoners with mental health problems, we have had witnesses say and it has been mentioned earlier today that where these people are concerned, the lack of adequate mental healthcare services in the community is the reason that people end up in custody. Do you share those concerns?

Mr Wheatley: I am sure that we end up with some people coming to us that the courts have sent to us because they did not think they could make any other disposal because they had a serious problem with the mental health of the person standing in front of them and felt that prison provided a place of safety and I think that happens from time to time, yes. It is very difficult, I suspect, sometimes for the courts to get offenders or alleged offenders to appear before them straight into the sort of psychiatric care that the court think they may need. We do allow the opportunity to assess and with much better links with the National Health Service nowadays and a rather probably faster track into getting prisoners transferred where that is necessary, but still it is not always easy. I do not particularly want to find that we are the sort of easy way of getting difficult people into secure psychiatric care or at least appropriate psychiatric care and I think that does happen from time to time.

Q304 Mrs Dean: What measures are in place to ensure the continuity of care for prisoners with mental health needs on leaving prison?

Ms Wallis: Well, the honest position is that they are inconsistent and to date it very much depends on which part of the country you are in, is the truth, and also in a way what kinds of offences you have committed. Ironically, the best provision is probably for those offenders who have committed the most serious offences because you may or may not be aware of the arrangements that we have in place, multi-agency public protection arrangements, across England and Wales and police and probation have a statutory duty together to identify those dangerous offenders in the community or it is for our prison colleagues to identify those that we are likely to be bringing back in the not too distant future. Last year, for example, we took almost 58,000 offenders through those arrangements and on any given day we assessed about 3,000 as being imminently dangerous and I understand that in terms of those who were actually charged with a further serious conviction last year it was less than 2%, so I think that here is an area where prisons, probation and the police are actually doing very well. I say "ironically" because it is easier to get provision sometimes for these offenders who have mental health needs because we bring around the table in the individual cases those agencies who are actually very key to both the management of the risk of this individual offender, but also where there is particular need, so it is very often possible to get health providers to actually come to these actual panels and to really meet those obligations. However, when you get into the less serious offenders, then it becomes more difficult. Again if you look at our approved premises estate, we have got 100 approved premises, which used to be called 'hostels', and again if you look through that estate we have got very good relationships and we are generally well served by community psychiatric nurses and such like. It is when you move out into the wider population that we really still do not have a good enough evidence base and we are not clear enough across the whole country as to where the services are good and where they are not, but we are in the process of trying to do that, that mapping exercise, and really get to grips with that information. We are starting to talk to mental health providers and as opposed to in the past with 42 operational areas, we are left to form our own arrangements and we are now trying to get a national strategy together on this and really trying to put some national weight and clout into it. However, I would be misleading you if I said that I was at all happy with the distribution of facilities that are available or if I tried to suggest that the service available was in any way consistent when it is not.

Mr Caton: I feel that probably the POA is well placed to comment on the issue of mental health of people in prison because we represent those working in the high-security estate in the NHS, in medium-secure units, but basically across the NHS in secure psychiatric units and indeed those who have a job to deal with mentally ill people in prison. The vast majority of those who fall through the net that Eithne has just identified do end up on prison landings with very little professional help. The finest community psychiatric nurses I have seen are the prison officers, prison officers working in house blocks and on landings who have the task of dealing with mentally ill people who have found their way through the system, come into prison, have got serious, serious problems with their mental health and the instability that that brings, are dangerous and self-damaging because of it, are a danger to other prisoners and staff because of it and are, if you like, being dealt with by people who are learning the task of assessment and psychiatric intervention on the hoof. I think it is a shameful example of society, not the Prison Service, not necessarily the Government, not this Government, but in part the last Government for deciding that care in the community would be brought in without necessarily ring-fencing the resources they got from selling all the old sites back into it. It is shameful, I think, that we in this day and age use prison to deal with those with serious mental health problems. There may well be a view that we house these people in prison healthcare centres, but we do not. There are too many with mental health difficulties of all kinds to house them in, if you like, a proper therapeutic health centre. They are on the landings, they are a very serious danger to themselves and others and personally I think this is probably for me one of the major areas that the Prison Service, the Probation Service and indeed the Government need to tackle because there are just so many of them.

Q305 Chairman: I would just like to ask one last question, if I may, because we have covered a lot of the ground on resettlement in bits and pieces of the evidence, and this is really to ask you about the structures which would be useful to get other agencies, education, housing, social services and so on better focused on resettlement. You mentioned those agencies and you also mentioned the learning skills councils. If the overall aim of the exercise is to reduce re-offending, and we have in every local area a crime reduction partnership, is there a case for requiring crime reduction partnerships to make resettlement strategies an explicit part of their local crime reduction strategy so that the commitment of health, education, all the agencies who sit around the table at the moment, probably not the LSEs, but all the rest who sit around the table at the moment is actually to deal with it locally in every local area? Is that the type of mechanism which would help you tie in these other agencies whose support you need, but over whom you have no direct levers at the moment?

Mr Wheatley: I can certainly respond from our point of view. We are finding that the big crime and disorder reduction partnerships in the big conurbations are one of the key players for just that reason and many of them are engaging with this because they can see that if they can do something about repeat prolific offenders, that will make a difference. There is lots of good local work being done on that, some really good stuff in the south-west, in Bristol, some good stuff down in Kent based on Canterbury Prison, and it is usually around the crime and disorder reduction partnership group. It is probably more problematic with smaller crime and disorder partnerships which, from the Prison Service point of view, are a bit difficult to deal with because we are serving such large areas with so many crime and disorder reduction partnerships with them. I have certainly been advocating to area managers to make links with the big crime and disorder reduction partnerships and that seems to be paying off. It is possible to do more with them to give them rather more responsibility in this area and I would be quite keen on that because it seems to me a very good working system which is bringing real local co-operation which we would like to tap into. It is a bit difficult to deal with an area that is perhaps serving something like 30 or 40 crime and disorder reduction partnerships, many relatively small, as you have said.

Mr Wrench: Just to add to that, I think as a national organisation in particular, the Prison Service needs to have more strategic engagement with resettlement partners as well and that is where I think that the regional resettlement strategies which focused on the government office of a particular region had a critical role to play in getting all the local partners together. However, having said that, as I said earlier in relation to the Criminal Justice Interventions Programme, I think that capacity at the local level to anticipate the problems that are going to arise when that community's offenders return to that area is critical. There is probably more that needs to be done to tie up what is being done and what the crime and disorder reduction partnerships are doing, but that ability to think about the local problems and reach back into the custodial system and anticipate the problems that are coming back to them I think will be critical.

Ms Wallis: I think I would want in a very simplistic way to segment the prison population to answer the question. If I can go back to the very heavy, serious end, then certainly the whole map of infrastructure has been powerfully effective and of course we are extending that and building on that. Certainly that critical relationship, as I have said, between probation, the police and prisons is working very well and now that prisons, under the Criminal Justice Act, have been made a responsible authority also, that will help. It remains to be seen whether the new provision in that Act which places a statutory duty to co-operate on some of the other players, which is health, local authorities, housing providers and so forth, we need to see whether that statutory duty to co-operate actually bites, but I am optimistic about that. I do not agree with Peter about those prisoners that we are trying to resettle who are not actually violent and dangerous in that sense, and certainly the national rehabilitation strategy and regional rehabilitation strategies and how they connect into the crime and disorder reduction partnerships and the other organisations I think is very important. We also now have local criminal justice boards in place and I know that their focus is on narrowing the justice gap and increasing confidence in criminal justice and so forth, but again there are powerful players around that table who might think they can have an influence in bringing people to the table. I think the other engagement has to be political, that the big departments of state, as it were, really do share cross-cutting, common objectives in a way so that whether it is health or education, it is not just that they help with the provision, but that they also in their policies think about whether this policy is likely to be crime-increasing or whether this policy is actually likely to be crime-reducing.

Mr Caton: We hear time and time again in the Prison Service, the Probation Service and the justice system about good practice. There is lots of good practice. I have to say that most of it is reliant on one or two good people, but because they are good they get moved and then that part of it collapses. The issue to me is that if you think small, you get small and if you think big, you get big. If we have got good ideas, then let's share them and let's make sure that it works better and let's tackle it so that on a range of issues which the Committee has heard from us today, there is, I think, sufficient to tell the Committee that what we should be doing is making sure that people work together better because we are not working together very well at all and I think that both reaching in from those agencies outside of prisons and indeed prison officers working out in the community will do two things: firstly, it will make things work better; and, secondly, it will give the general public the confidence that non-custodial sentences are actually not a soft option.

Chairman: That is a very good note to end on. Thank you all very much indeed.