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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 66-iii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
Tuesday 25 May 2004 MR MIKE NEWELL and MR CHARLES BUSHELL PAUL GOGGINS MP and MR MARTIN NAREY Evidence heard in Public Questions 440 - 544
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Home Affairs Committee on Tuesday 24 May 2004 Members present Mr John Denham, in the Chair Mr James Clappison Mrs Claire Curtis-Thomas Mrs Janet Dean Mr Gwyn Prosser Bob Russell Mr Marsha Singh Mr John Taylor David Winnick ________________ Memorandum submitted by Prison Governors Association Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Mr Mike Newell, President, and Mr Charles Bushell, General Secretary, Prison Governors Association, examined. Q440 Chairman: Good afternoon. We will make a prompt start because we fear that there may be divisions in the House, in which case we will need to adjourn for 15 minutes and I know that the Minister is required by higher authority at 5.00 elsewhere, so we will need to stick to the time. Mr Newell and Mr Bushell, thank you very much indeed. This is the closing day of our evidence sessions on the inquiry and we are very grateful to you for coming. Could I start with a general question arising from your written evidence, which is that you acknowledge or point to strain on the Prison Service caused by chronic overcrowding. Could you very briefly summarise the main impacts of overcrowding on the service your members are trying to provide. Mr Newell: The main effect on both rehabilitation and work with prisoners is simply that we often end up with a great deal more starters than completers. We are trying to follow programmes but obviously the pressure of overcrowding overtakes that. Actually finding a bed for everybody is the key issue. Overall, it is this change of focus rather than from doing the positive work of the service to actually providing the hotel functions service. Q441 Chairman: On any reasonable assumption, it looks likely that prisons will remain overcrowded for the foreseeable future, even if longer-term changes in sentencing policy come into play. It has been suggested that the problems that exist with overcrowding have been made worse by ineffective management systems, high turnover over of key personnel and so on and we have had large numbers of changes in prison governors. To what extent do factors like that exacerbate the overcrowding problems? Mr Newell: I do not think they exacerbate the overcrowding issue; that is a matter for the courts and that is about capacity. I think that the turnover of governors is unhelpful in establishing continuity within prisons and therefore consistent delivery. New governors bring new ideas. Q442 Chairman: What is the right balance we should aim for? We have sometimes been told that certainly new governors bring new ideas and we have sometimes also been told on our visits that a sudden change in governor who takes a prison in a completely different direction, for better or for worse, does not lead to consistency in the regimes that those prisons are able to offer. Mr Bushell: I think both of those things are true. I governed three establishments and hoped to work about four years in each - I achieved that on one occasion and I did not on the other two. With regard to the change of direction, I felt, certainly on the occasion when I stayed for nearly five years in an establishment, that it really did need a new lease of life at the end of that time and that I needed a new challenge and I think that is probably about where we are. I know that there are head teachers in schools who remain effectively forever, but the job is changing so quickly that actually it is about learning new skills and keeping yourself on top of an ever-changing game. Q443 Chairman: What would you say was the optimum period of time for a governor to stay in post? Four to five years? Mr Newell: We would say a minimum of three. We would say that the three to five year period is the appropriate period. If you were to simply break it down, I think it takes you a year in there to get to know the prison and to start things happening and a year then to begin to deliver and a year of consolidation in very simple terms. Q444 Chairman: It has been suggested to us that the best governors are sometimes likely to be moved most often to go and fire-fight or to sort out problems where things are going wrong. Firstly, is that true? Secondly, are there things that the Prison Service could do to get closer to that optimum period of time for a governor? Mr Newell: We have a problem which I think is about some inexperience in our service now and perhaps some failure in personnel planning from 10 or 15 years ago for which we pay the penalty. The question of calibre of the individuals that we have around and therefore what constitutes good governors who need to be moved to fire-fighting I think is a problem that is getting worse. There is a lack of experience there and, if you have some serious problems, then you are likely to pick upon an experienced governor to go and deal with those problems. So, that is an issue for us. I would not like it to be thought therefore that, at the other end of the scale, we have loads of bad governors and that there is poor performance surrounding that. I think it is simply the case that we are living with a legacy of some things that we did wrong in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Q445 Chairman: Do you feel that those legacy problems have now been addressed? Mr Newell: No, I do not think we think that they have been addressed. There are real questions about how we are recruiting and the balance that we have between those who are coming from outside and making contributions to the Service and bringing new skills and those who have been promoted from within the Service. The starting salaries for those coming from outside on to the schemes are not incredibly attractive for the particularly difficult job that people are doing. I do not think we are appealing to that and getting the right balance. What we are actually doing is promoting a number of internal candidates. Q446 Mrs Dean: Are internal administrative problems, such as the failure to transfer prisoner records which we have heard so much about, caused by overcrowding and an overstretched Prison Service or were they already a problem and do we find that the overcrowding is becoming an excuse for the problems in the Prison Service? Mr Bushell: I do not think there is that much of a problem with records going missing. Yes, they do go missing from time to time but not in huge numbers. We are dealing very largely with an outdated system. We should not be humping records around for everybody that we move. As we have already indicated to the Chairman, the number of people being moved around as a result of the crowding that we have is absolutely enormous. Somebody spending four months in prison could quite easily spend them in three different establishments now. So, he hardly gets more than bed and breakfast in each of those. That means that there is much more movement and much more opportunity for records to go astray and occasionally they do. I would not wish to use that as an excuse. It is a fact of life that occasionally they do. I am hopeful that we are going to end up with systems which are going to enable us to press a button and send the material off. Q447 Mrs Dean: How close are we to getting systems that ensure that records go with the prisoner? Mr Bushell: We have been working our way towards this for many years. We do have one or two issues coming on line. Technically, I am told it is feasible. I am no expert in these matters, however. I think it is a race against time for me because I retire at the end of 2007. Q448 Mrs Dean: We do not have to wait three years, do we? Mr Bushell: Indeed. Q449 Mrs Dean: Do you think it is acceptable that the approach to and standards of rehabilitation programmes are often dependent upon the imagination and commitment of individual prison governors? Mr Newell: I do not think it is appropriate, I think it is reality. As the standards and resources available in any particular prison are either an inherited advantage or disadvantage when you take over as governor, the energy that is put in locally to how you can get various pilots and various funding ... If I take my own prison, the reality is that I am short of 400 activity places. Therefore, it is likely that in any one day as a full prison, 400 people are locked up without really anything to do. You cannot do much about that other than by various innovations that give some people some activity but, unless there is a central strategy and structure to provide places, then you cannot actually deliver. I think that governors are constantly working because there is not a central way of determining the resources that we require for delivery of regime activities. Q450 Chairman: Can I just pursue that point. It would be useful for the Committee if you could just explain briefly - I am sure it is very obvious from your point of view - why it is that you are 400 activity places short? What is the constraint? Is it space, it is money or is it staff that leaves you that short of activities? Mr Newell: I think it is mainly, in most of our Victorian prisons, the first two. There is a space problem. We have had to increase capacity in those prisons dramatically, so people are doubled up in their cells. That is where the overcrowding is felt in our local prisons. Secondly, there are not a lot of options in space. Most of our local prisons were built in the centre of cities and, consequently, there is really nowhere to expand. Workshops or education classes take a lot of space. It is the first two. I think the staffing issue can always be dealt with; I think we can always find staff to take on a variety of activities. Mr Bushell: There is a link with that which is that I started governing prisons 12/13 years ago and, at that time, I governed an establishment with 168 people. That place today has 250. I moved to a place which had 375. I left it with 500. All establishments are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and it is not always possible to bring in the ancillary requirements of workplaces and so on at a time when our top priority in terms of what to provide has to be accommodation. We try, where possible, to bring with that the other bits and pieces, the workplaces and so on, but that cannot always be delivered at the moment, I am afraid. Q451 Mr Singh: Coming back to calibre of staff, do you think that the Prison Service recruits enough people of high calibre into senior management? Mr Newell: I think it could do better. We would always wish to have the highest calibre staff possible and we would like recruiting and training policies to reflect that. It is not an easy business to attract people into - I do not think that you grow up wishing to be a prison governor. We need to do a lot more at every level, at officer level and right through to senior management, to attract people who see this as real opportunity and therefore the various salaries and structures and ease of joining the Service need to be constantly looked at. Q452 Mr Singh: In your view, what puts people off? Is it the pay or the image or some other factor? Mr Newell: I do not think it is easy for it to have a good image. One has to say that our media only report anything about the Prison Service in a negative sense. Therefore, it is not likely that it looks an attractive job to people. I think it is hugely complicated and difficult - and it has been described in many reports - and therefore we believe that the training required to deliver that is a long way now off the mark and we think that people entering it do not see that there is sufficient training and support to provide the skills that they need to do this job. It is a combination of matters and I think that we have had the problem as a Service that we have tended to see the operational side as really just generic: it is a civil servant job. I do not think the police would see their senior command officers in the same way perhaps as we have seen our senior command officers. Q453 Mr Singh: At prison officer level - forgive me if I get the words wrong - are you still recruiting or attracting the traditional types who saw the role as a security role maybe, or are you attracting different types of people with different skills? Mr Newell: First of all, there are different recruitment patterns in different parts of the country and I think that, if you were to take parts of the country where traditionally there have been high levels of unemployment, you get a number of people being attracted into the Prison Service for what they would see as personal job security - they may have been made redundant several times in their lives. If you were to take London, it is a difficult recruitment area on the basis of salary, but people are used to multiple careers and do not see their personal security and job security in the same way. So, I think it is different and that we need to recognise that we need different strategies to handle recruitment. The important thing is that we need to do a great deal more in the initial training and screening of those individuals. We need some quite special individuals in the Service to deal with a job that is often undervalued in society in dealing with some of our most difficult and damaged people in society. They need special skills which often I think we do not prepare people for and make sure that we screen out some attitude issues. The Committee suspended from 2.48 pm to 3.00 pm for a division in the House Q454 Mr Singh: In terms of turnover, I understand that some of the turnover is caused by good governors being used as fire-fighters. Is there evidence to show that governors are leaving the Service and that you are having to recruit more governors because of people going into other jobs? Mr Bushell: There is an issue about this. Quite clearly, there are many of us who were born immediately after the war, roughly nine months after our fathers arrived home, who are now coming to the end of their life within the Service, so we have an enormous turnover and that is going to continue. It has begun now and it is going to continue for the next four or five years at a considerable rate of attrition. That is bound to happen. There is also the fact that there are a great many of us who joined this Service through advertisements suggesting that we might be interested in a career of management with a social purpose and, as time has gone by, as we find that there are more hoops to jump through and more of our being managed ourselves to a certain extent I suppose, many of our colleagues are finding that more and more difficult. The older colleagues, people of my age and older, have found that more and more difficult to deal with and have perhaps slid away a year or two earlier than they might otherwise have done. Mr Newell: I do not think there are as many people joining senior management within the Prison Service to be governors and to have a career in the operational side. I think that, for a number of people, it is something now to be put on the CV to be used elsewhere and I think because we have an age profile issue, we have very young governors who see it as quite useful to have that profile for future careers. You are not going to remain governing for 20 years and still be alive, that is for certain. It is a very demanding job. Q455 Mr Singh: I should not really ask you this leading question but is salary a problem? Mr Newell: I think salary is a problem because of the actual level of work and people say, "For that salary, I can go and earn and great deal more now with this on my CV." I think we are seeing people leave. Q456 Mr Singh: In Germany, we met a judge who became a governor and we met a governor who became an adviser in the Ministry of Justice. Would that be possible in this country or even desirable? Mr Newell: To my understanding, it would not be possible as things happen. I also visited Germany and I have been to a number of their länder and looked at the systems. I am quite impressed with the way that criminal justice careers have developed and I think that Denmark is another very good example of where effectively the police, the prison and the judges all come from the same basic stock in recruitment and understanding. I think if we are going to make our criminal justice system work in the way it needs to, actually it is that sort of model that we need to move towards rather than, I regret to say, the separated professional model that we have at the moment. Q457 Mr Singh: So, a number of walls to knock down there? Mr Newell: I think so. If this is all going to work, if we are going to deliver some of the things that I think we all wish to deliver in our improved society in relation to the criminal justice system, then some of the walls have to go and one of them is that there is not a criminal justice career. Q458 Mr Singh: Just to change tack, as you may know, we are doing an inquiry into the role of work and prisoner rehabilitation. Many witnesses have advocated that work in prison should as near as possible mirror a working week outside in what goes on in society and that the wage should be some kind of real wage. I do not want to say what a "real wage" would be in the prison context, but that it should be something that a prisoner feels it is worth working for. Is that something with which you would agree? Mr Newell: I think there is a simple answer: it is an ideal position that we would all like to move towards. There are huge practical problems in getting there but it does seem to us that the position of work and the work ethic and the relationship between work and reward and learning useful skills through useful work are all things that we have to move towards better. How much of that we should do inside the prison and how much of that we should do in our communities with people on effectively day release under the old schemes that used to operate --- Q459 Mr Singh: I think we are going to come on to that. In terms of new prisons, I am sure that with numbers rising whatever we do, new prisons are going to be necessary. Do you think they should be built specifically to cater for the provision of work for maybe every new prisoner? Mr Newell: I guess I think that they should be built with the right facilities in to deliver a regime which is purposeful and rehabilitative in its nature. So, if we are actually going to look at where things may be going in terms of the National Offender Management Service and the contribution of the Prison Service, then we have to be building prisons that are actually going to be a great deal more than warehouses. Q460 Mr Singh: Would work be a central factor to that? Mr Newell: Work would be a central factor to that. It is a central factor in the community and we also know that, in rehabilitation terms, giving people a job and a way of enhancing their self-esteem and skills and legitimately earning money is a serious way to reducing re-offending. Q461 Bob Russell: You have painted almost a doom and gloom scenario. Do you honestly believe that what you have just said is going to happen? Mr Newell: First of all, I do not think that I painted a doom and gloom scenario. I think that the performance of the Prison Service in the current circumstances has been remarkable and I think that we are doing an awful lot of extremely good work and a lot of good work with our communities. What we have is a very, very long way to go and we must do a great deal more and what I have been talking about are the things we need to invest in to try and deliver that better vision. Q462 Bob Russell: Do you think that your members will welcome the new National Offender Management Service? Is this going to transform things or is it just going to be a change of name? Mr Newell: I think we would welcome something which transformed the position in our prisons and in our communities and brought the issue of the offenders actually being more of the responsibility of the community rather than a discreet service such as the Prison Service. We would welcome that. We know that tinkering has not really delivered much for us. So, there needs to be a new approach. Like everybody, we have a whole series of anxieties around that at the moment. It is very early days and those anxieties are natural. Q463 Bob Russell: So, there has to be a major change, not just a change of name: a change of attitude, the judges and the magistrates have to have a different attitude to the numbers and we do not have to be league leaders in Europe forever? Mr Newell: I think that we have to take on the social responsibility for crime in our communities. It is created in our communities; it is not created in prisons. To believe that it is going to be resolved by some laying of hands experience inside prisons is just obviously an approach which is going to take us nowhere. Q464 Bob Russell: You have broadly answered my next question previously, but what do you perceive are the biggest challenges facing the new organisation? Mr Newell: I clearly think there is an issue about sentences. We have to start sending people to prison or giving them community punishment for purpose. We constantly talk about value for money. It appears to be the only area where we do not look at value for money and outcomes; we actually look at passing sentence with no concern about the outcomes. If we are going to deliver this in the whole, in the round, then obviously we need to look at the outcome and, if the outcome is about reducing offending and protecting the public, then certainly protecting the public by short-term incarceration without addressing offending issues is giving respite. My understanding is that we are not shortening sentences and that those who need to go to prison for a very long time will go to prison for a very long time. Q465 Bob Russell: Are judges and magistrates therefore misreading what the Home Secretary is saying in his public utterances? Mr Newell: I think that is a very difficult question for me. All I would say is that I think, in our media and around, and therefore sentences must be influenced by that. Everybody has a different interpretation on what is being said. Q466 Bob Russell: Finally, gentlemen, what key recommendation would your members made regarding the development of a coherent rehabilitation strategy designed to reduce re-offending? Mr Newell: Firstly, we would start from the position of using OASys - I do not know if that has been mentioned before in this Committee - effectively the tool which is assessing the individual needs of a prisoner in relation to re-offending, and we would therefore say that there must be an alignment between what we identify as the needs of prisoners and the portfolio of interventions that is available both within the prison system and within the community to address them. There is no point in identifying that offender x needs all these things and actually saying, "Well, we only have two of these on the shelf, I am afraid, so you are having these two." So, there must be an alignment in that. Secondly, going back to the issue on work, there has to be an industrial strategy. We believe that to have prisons operating in the way that they are at the moment where it is really what you can get from the local community, what historically ... When I went to Durham, I had sewing machines for men and we were still making nets. Both of those, I am afraid, are quaint positions. They are not going to get anybody a job in society. We need an industrial strategy. A number of our partners in other countries do have an industrial strategy where prison after prison does the same thing and does it in a very businesslike way to very high standards and very competitively. Q467 Bob Russell: Are you confident that the National Offender Management Service is looking to best practice overseas, particularly to our nearby European neighbours? Mr Newell: I think the simple answer for me is, "I don't know." Mr Bushell: I think there is a third issue which is very important and which tends easily to get overlooked and I think has been recently and that is that 15 per cent of the people who are currently in prison are remanded in custody. So, they are not serving sentences. This group of people is more expensive during their period on remand than they are going to be at any other time and they are also going to be much more demanding - they are going to come in with drug problems of one kind and another - and work has to start with these people immediately, and it does start immediately but it starts in a fairly sort of localised way. The National Offender Management Service talks about offenders rather than people who are remanded and who are therefore innocent at this stage, but these people are going to be extremely expensive and, unless the work starts there, they will be half-way through their sentence before they are convicted. So, you are not going to have the opportunity to deal with them. Q468 Mr Taylor: Our justice system has for a very long time presumed two absolutes: one of them is judicial independence and the other one is the presumption of innocence. Would you care to revisit either of those presumptions? Do you think they would merit looking at again even if such a review came to the conclusion that they should stay just as they are? Mr Newell: I think you should always look in society at changes that are necessary to cross check that you are actually moving as a modern society. On a personal level, presumption of innocence is so vitally important that I could not possibly address it. The issue of judicial independence is a difficult one in that we constantly hear about the fact that one would not wish to interfere in sentencing. I do not think we would suggest that there was an approach to interfering in an individual sentencing process, but it also seems to me nonsense to suggest that there is judicial independence when laws are constructed in a way to change sentencing patterns and lengths in response to something that a judge has done. So, we will have an outcry and we will have someone who only goes to prison for two years because that is all the law allows them to do. What happens then is that there is a change in legislation to allow a greater sentence. So, we do sometimes become a little confused about judicial independence and our view would be that you do not interfere with the individual sentence but you must structure sentences and opportunities available to courts in a way that allows you to deliver for the greater good in society. Q469 Mr Taylor: In my experience, which is probably longer than I would care to admit, I found that judges are very willing to be told what to do by Parliament but are extremely unwilling to be told what to do by the Home Secretary. Mr Newell: I make no comment! Chairman: Mr Newell and Mr Bushell, thank you very much indeed. That was a short session but very, very helpful.
Memorandum submitted by National Offender Management Service Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Paul Goggins, a Member of the House, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Correctional Services and Reducing Re-offending, and Mr Martin Narey, Chief Executive, National Offender Management Service, examined. Q470 Chairman: Minister and Mr Narey, thank you very much indeed for coming. Both of you are well known to the Committee. Can I begin, Minister, by asking about current rehabilitation strategy. In the Home Office publication Reducing Crime - Changing Lives, I think it is fair to say that there is a great deal of evidence on what should happen beyond the prison sentence: resettlement, housing, education, drug treatment, those sorts of issues. I wonder if you could say, because we are focused in this inquiry particularly on the prison regime itself, what changes in what goes on in prisons will be necessary to deliver the overall rehabilitation strategy. Paul Goggins: I think if we look in prisons, then what I see are some very encouraging signs that the rehabilitation process is well under way. Certainly as I visit prisons and meet the staff involved in resettlement work, they emphasise to me the importance of it and, if we look at the offending behaviour programmes, the educational courses, the skills training and so on, we can see in most cases that the Prison Service is outperforming the targets that have been set. However, I think we face a couple of big issues which we have to overcome if what happens in prison is to be even more effective. One of those is to reduce the number of short-term sentenced prisoners who occupy so much of the resource within our prisons. If we look at 2002 for example, 95,000 people were sentenced and, of those, 53,000 were sentenced to six months or less. You can do very little with those people in the very short time that they are there in terms of rehabilitation, training and so on, and of course there is no follow on supervision for them under the current arrangements because short-term sentenced people do not get that though in the future they will. I think we will have to reduce the number of short-term sentenced prisoners in our system. The other change is that we need to join up the Probation and the Prison Services in the new National Offender Management Service in order that we get the real benefits of investment of money but also of time and skill that goes on in prison continuing on beyond the discharge from prison in a way that frankly does not happen at the moment. In summary, I see encouraging signs for what happens in prison. I am sure that we could do more. As the two services come together, I think we will see better in the longer term. Q471 Chairman: Would it be a fair summary to say that it is not so much the prison regime that you have at the moment that is the focus of your attention, it is either reducing the flow of prisoners in on short-term sentences or joining up the prison regime to the services that will lead outside? Paul Goggins: I think the quantity and the quality of what happens in prisons is vitally important. Providing detoxification programmes for drug-abusing prisoners is an important first step. The drug treatment programmes which increasing numbers will go on are very important. If we do not feed that benefit through into the aftercare beyond their release from prison, then we waste a huge opportunity and, until we get that full joining up, we will not get the full benefit in terms of resettlement and reduced re-offending that I intend to improve. Q472 David Winnick: Minister, how many people are in prison at the moment? Paul Goggins: As of today, 75,304. Q473 David Winnick: Would you like to break that up in to male and female. Paul Goggins: There are 4,510 women in prison - there has been a huge increase of women in prison, although it is a small proportion of the overall total; it has been a huge increase over the last ten years - and the remainder are male prisoners. As I said, a large number of sentenced prisoners over the course of a year are sentenced to six months or less although, if you take a snapshot at any one time, obviously the figure is much smaller. Q474 David Winnick: So, how many male prisoners? Paul Goggins: Just under 71,000. Q475 David Winnick: Would it be right to say that this is the highest number in prison? Paul Goggins: The record figure from a few weeks ago was 75,544. Q476 David Winnick: And that was the highest ever? Paul Goggins: That was the highest ever. Indeed, it is true to say that the increase over the last ten years has been huge at a time when there are not that many more offenders and they are not committing particularly more serious offences. It is very clear, in our analysis, that the reason for the increased number of people in prison is more severe sentencing. You are three times more likely to go to prison in front of a magistrate and twice as likely to go to prison in front of a Crown Court judge as you were ten years ago and you are five times more likely to go to prison if you are a shoplifter than you were ten years ago. So, clearly, there are some fairly fundamental issues that need to be addressed there. One of the responses that I am seeking to develop is more robust community sentences, which can be an alternative particularly to short-term prison sentences. Q477 David Winnick: What would you say to those sitting on the bench passing sentence and also to the general community who say in effect, "That is all very well, but what does this community service really amount to?" There is the general feeling that they may or may not turn up as the case may be, that it is a soft touch, that it is all pretty useless and that the only real way of punishing offenders is by sending them to prison. What is your response to that? Paul Goggins: What I would say is that we are developing some very robust and intensive community sentences: the drug treatment and testing order and the intensive control and change programme. These are very intensive programmes, frankly far more rigorous and challenging to offending behaviour than a short-term prison sentence is. We are seeking to use electronic tagging in greater measure and increasingly, I hope, tagging in the future. Also, in the Criminal Justice Act 2003, we have brought forward the generic community sentence, which will enable sentencers to pick from a menu of different kinds of activity which can be put into a community programme, maybe drug treatment, maybe some reparation, maybe tagging as I indicated. These things will be in the power of the sentencer to decide. I think it is incumbent on the Home Office and the Prison and Probation Services, in the future the National Offender Management Service, to provide those robust alternatives and then to persuade sentencers that that is a more effective way to deal with particularly low-level less serious offenders who, at that moment, in too great a number go into prison. Q478 David Winnick: Clearly, judges and magistrates are not so persuaded because presumably, unless they have some obsession with sending offenders to prison regardless, they must be taking the view that non-custodial sentences remain a soft touch and I put it to you, Minister, do you not have a particular responsibility with your fellow ministers to persuade those passing sentence that that is not the position and that non-custodial sentences, as you have been indicating to us, are simply not a soft touch? Paul Goggins: No, they are not a soft option and we have to make sure that that is clear. We have to enforce community penalties. Q479 David Winnick: What are you doing about it? Paul Goggins: I think one of the key things that is happening is the dialogue which is now opening up with the New Sentencing Guidelines Council. Martin Narey has a place within the New Sentencing Guidelines Council, which no doubt he will want to outline to you, and he is able to feed back to sentencers the evidence for what actually works and my belief is that, as that evidence is fed back, it will become clearer that short-term prison sentences are, frankly, a waste of time and that robust community penalties are a very credible and effective alternative. Q480 David Winnick: One hopes that you can do the persuading! As it stands at the moment, would one be right in saying that, with the prison population as high as it is, even though it has gone down in the last month or so, the chances of effective rehabilitation are weakened and undermined? Would that be a fair way of putting it? Paul Goggins: Life is tough for people who run our prisons and who provide the kind of programmes that I have just described. I do not think it is necessarily the total numbers that is the real challenge, I think it is the amount of movement within the prison system that results from the very tight situation that we have at the moment. People are moved around. Last year, there were some 100,000 transfers within the prison estate. It is that movement around that makes it difficult to work effectively on rehabilitation and resettlement. People are doing certain courses and then get moved to a different prison. What we have to do to get a better balance in our correctional system is to make sure that there is more stability and more linkage between what happens within prison and what happens outside of prison. Q481 David Winnick: What is the reconviction rate within a period of two years? Paul Goggins: Currently, the latest figure that we have is 59% for people leaving prison. We have some encouraging signs that that rate of re-offending is reducing and we will have some further figures published for juveniles in the summer and for adults in the autumn of this year. It is a very relevant question that you ask because with all of this change and the development of the National Offender Management Service and all the investment that is going in, in the end, it is not about creating systems for their own sake, it is about reducing the re-offending rate. That is our goal. Q482 David Winnick: A reconviction rate within two years of 59% is a sign of failure, is it not? Paul Goggins: I do not think that it is and Martin may wish to add to the comments that I am making. One of the things we have to understand is that with that large number of short-term sentenced prisoners in the system with whom we can do very little, it is not really surprising that many of them come out and re-offend. We have to have is a system where they are dealt with more effectively in the community and where those longer-term prisoners are dealt with more effectively during the longer periods of time that they are in prison. Q483 David Winnick: What is the position regarding cell sharing at the moment? How many prisoners are sharing a cell? Paul Goggins: At the moment, 17,000 prisoners are sharing a cell. They do so in a way that is as safe as we can make it. There is a risk assessment process which is always carried out in relation to prisoners where cell sharing happens. I might say that whilst there may be two to a cell originally designed for one, there is no sharing of three in a cell designed for one that was in the past a feature of our Prison Service. Q484 David Winnick: Is that something that is absolutely finished? Paul Goggins: That will not happen. Q485 Chairman: May I just clarify one point. You talked about the new sentencing regime. What is your forecast, and you can choose the day say five years after the new sentencing regime has come in, of what the change will be in the overall prison population and what the reduction will be in the number of short-term prisoners that you can see? Paul Goggins: Patrick Carter's analysis said that, if we did nothing, we might have 93,000 people in prison by the end of the decade and some 300,000 people on community supervision. Under the proposals we made in response to that, we believe that we can reduce the community supervision to some 240,000 and we can reduce the prison population to a stable and manageable level of about 80,000. That is our projection for the end of the decade. Q486 Chairman: So, even when the new sentencing regime is fully in place, you will have more people in prison than you do at the moment. Paul Goggins: There will be more because clearly this is the result of the balance which the Home Secretary speaks about of the need for those who are in prison for short periods of time to be dealt with in the community but, for those who commit very serious grave offences, to be in prison and there for longer. So, clearly, as people remain longer in prison, those numbers will grow. Q487 Mr Prosser: Just to clarify the figure of 17,000 sharing, is that 17,000 cells with two prisoners in them? Paul Goggins: No, that is 17,000 prisoners in a cell meant for one. Bob Russell: That is one hell of a big cell! Q488 Mr Prosser: Thirty-four thousand prisoners --- Paul Goggins: No, 17,000 prisoners in a cell designed for one, so 8,500. Q489 Mr Prosser: You mentioned in your previous evidence the difficulty caused by transfers, churning of prisoners. A number of witnesses who have come before the Committee have said that that is probably one of the most serious impediments to proper and effective rehabilitation and training etc and that has been backed up by people we have met on the ground actually in prisons in Great Britain. When we visited Germany this last week or the week before, we went to prisons which were not of equal strain to the situation in Britain but were under strain and yet they seemed to reduce this. They did not know what "churning" meant and were absolutely amazed when we told them the statistic we have. As regards churning, we have a figure of 60,000 transfers by 2001 when the population in prison was only 65,000. There is an enormous amount of movement in the statistics and an enormous amount of undermining of rehabilitation. Why is it that, in Germany, they manage to keep just about all of their prison population static under similar pressures and we cannot do that? Paul Goggins: Frankly, I do not know. I have already heard enough in this session to make me want to go and study the prison system in Germany! I think one of the things that we have to get better at - and I think the National Offender Management Service will help us to do this - is to get a stronger regional focus within our prison system. At the moment, about one third of prisoners are more than 50 miles away from home. That cannot be helpful in terms of the kind of agenda you are addressing here: resettlement and rehabilitation. We clearly face some very, very difficult terms in terms of managing the prison population and I think that, as we have a greater emphasis on offender management and as we have a greater regional focus, we should be able to manage this more effectively and in a more stable way for the long term. There is no denying that, at the moment, people appear in court, they have to be remanded to their local prison, prisoners are moved on from the local prison to other prisons and that is the kind of churning movement that is there in the system. I come back again to the short-term sentenced prisoners. If we can get more of them out of the system, it will help us to create a more stable climate, I am convinced of that. Q490 Mr Prosser: You mentioned strategies. What practical plans are there to reduce churning and to reduce the effects of having prisoners living hundreds and sometimes more than 1,000 miles way from their homes? Paul Goggins: I will ask Martin to respond to that question. Mr Narey: First of all, I do not think that Germany is under the same strain as England and Wales and has not seen the explosion in the prison population in the last ten years and the dramatic changes in sentencing practice which are unprecedented. There are two things which drive us to have to move people. First of all, we have a bed occupancy which no hotel chain would try to achieve; we have to use every bed wherever it is. In my last months as Director General, I had the governor of Feltham telling me that I had made him feel ashamed because I had made him move boys, 16 and 17-year olds, from Feltham to Northumberland but that was the only place we had beds. The second reason why we have to move people - and we have a more sophisticated categorisation system than in Germany since we have four categories of prisoners - is that, if we are not under great population pressure, we do not fill up the prisons because we are cautious where we put prisoners and we keep them in Category C prisons. The population pressures mean that you have to fill every bed. So, not only are people moving for geographical reasons, they might be moving from being a Category B prisoner to a Category C prisoner to a Category D prisoner. So, moves which we would not have to press in times when we were not so stretched are essential if we are to keep some sort of stability in prisons and keep some element of control. Q491 Mr Prosser: As you plan your increased capacity to meet the increase in prison population, how much effort do you put into planning locations? Is it just whatever turns up or does some thought go into the process? Paul Goggins: It is not whatever turns up! We are about to see a new prison opened: Bronzefield Prison which will open up soon for women. Clearly, there is a great deal of development going on within existing prisons. For example, a few weeks ago I visited Birmingham Prison where they have increased the capacity there by 400 and also built a very impressive new health centre there for the inmates. So, it is both of those things. In the long term of course, we need to think very carefully about what the right location is and what the right size for the prisons of the future is given the need to create this stronger regional focus and indeed this very important link between the rehabilitation work that goes on in prison and that which is followed through in the community. Mr Narey: We are certainly doing that now although it takes a long time. We are opening a prison at Peterborough at the end of this year. I was first going to meetings with members of the public in Peterborough to discuss that prison in 1997. It sometimes takes an awful long time to persuade a community that they should accept a prison. What we have inherited is a situation where we did get prisons wherever they turned up. We have three prisons on the Isle of Wight. There is no possible need for three prisons on the Isle of Wight in population terms but it just so happens that we have been able to build there; we have been encouraged by the local authority. We have a number of prisons which where were old stately homes or old RAF or Army camps. So, although we are being much more careful now about where we site prisons, we have an estate which is not fit for purpose in terms of geographical distribution. Q492 Mr Prosser: Does prison planning actually feature the need to provide "local prisons"? Mr Narey: So far as we can, yes. That is why we are building the two new prisons: one is near Heathrow Airport to fulfil a real problem over prison places in South West London, particularly for women because of the population problems in Holloway, and a male and female prison at Peterborough. We have no prison at all in that area at the moment. Q493 Mr Prosser: Do you look at other areas where, because of constraints on space or because of the state of the buildings, there is no facility for effective rehabilitation and say that that area needs a purpose-built prison which would provide all these needs? Is that part of the statute? Mr Narey: I am not sure that I understand the question. We are forever searching for sites to try to find something that will be suitable. Q494 Mr Prosser: Just by definition, hopefully your new prisons will be purpose-built and take into account training and education. So, I would guess that you would say that in areas which are poorly served in that respect, those will be the areas where you might want to put your new purpose-built prisons. Mr Narey: We try as much as possible to pitch prisons in areas where we know we will have a lot of prisoners from that community so that we can, despite the population, try to keep people closer to home. For example, we have a deficit of places in the south east and, in searching for a possible site for future prisons, we are searching very hard in the south east right now. Q495 Mr Prosser: You have touched on this already but looking ahead and looking at the way in which NOMS will act, what effect will that provide for local prisoners to be in local prisons, so that rehabilitation can be more effective? Paul Goggins: As Martin was pointing out, because of the categorisation system that we have, it is not always possible for people to be as close to home as ideally you would like. If somebody is a high-risk Category A prisoner, they may need to be further away from home than the 50 mile measure, but it should be and it will be a key focus for the National Offender Management Service, through its regional arms, to make sure that as much work as possible is done within the regions. So, each region will need to look to see whether it has the right kind of prison capacity to meet the needs of that region as well as the amount of capacity in terms of community supervision as well. I think that regional focus will help enormously in this area to make sure that we get the level of provision right and the level of joining up between prisons and community. Q496 Mr Prosser: In the meantime, when we are still facing the pressures you have described, what strategy have you put in place to ensure that prisoners, at least when they come towards the end of their sentence, can come back to a local prison and prepare themselves for rehabilitation and release? Paul Goggins: That is ideally what we would like to do but I think as important as the location is the systems that we are building up around the prisoner to support them through their prison sentence out through release and back into the community and it is really those systems which I think are increasingly impressive. In most prisons that I visit now, I meet JobCentre Plus staff who talk to me about the way in which they provide initial advice to prisoners when they come in on a whole range of issues and how they help to link them to the JobCentre for the FRESHSTART interview that many of them have when they come out of prison. There is obviously the drug treatment. Increasingly local authorities are linking into prisons providing housing advice, because we all know that absolutely the number one issue for a prisoner coming out of prison is having somewhere to live. Even over and above having a job, having somewhere to live is the key thing. Increasingly we see that connection with local authorities providing that advice, providing links to housing providers. All of these systems as they develop, as voluntary organisations work in prisons and in the community to provide support, it is that system and network of support that is so very important as well as the location of the prisoner. Q497 Mr Prosser: Finally, from me, given that important process during those last few months as they are getting ready for release, we have seen some evidence of a one-stop shop facility engaging people with advice, etc. What consideration have you given to improving their IT access so that they can make their own virtual connections with the job shop, the housing situation, etc, to start preparing themselves for the outside world? Paul Goggins: That is a very good question. I would like Martin to comment a little in a moment. Obviously IT presents some challenges, shall we say, in terms of prisons. Obviously in terms of internet connection and so on, one can easily visualise how access to that kind of capacity could become a very negative thing in prisons, so there needs to be some real control there. Having said that, increasingly to get qualifications, for example, one needs to be able to access IT, to use IT, and, therefore, within those constraints the Prison Service is developing a whole range of courses and training to help prisoners develop the skills that they will need. Everybody needs IT skills these days. Certainly, as I have visited prisons, I have seen some of these courses in action and I believe that they are helping. Mr Narey: First of all, we have now established electronic links with JobCentres, so although we have person-to-person surgeries in prisons, it is now possible for somebody with the help of an assistant from JobCentre Plus to link into their local JobCentre. I was at Northallerton Prison relatively recently and watched as somebody arranged a job interview in Manchester, which was where they were going on discharge. In terms of IT skills more generally, we do lots and lots of IT training. Very many of our work skills qualifications are in CLAIT, that is a computer literacy and IT qualification. We do allow the equivalent of surfing by prisoners through Learn Direct but on an intranet. What we dare not allow is access by prisoners to the internet because of the potential for them to access sites which would cause us some public embarrassment. Q498 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I should have jumped in earlier on. Last year I visited quite a number of High Court judges to talk to them about sentencing. How many of those judges have you been to see personally? Paul Goggins: I have had a number of meetings with judges. Q499 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Is that High Court judges? Paul Goggins: I have, yes, on a number of occasions. Q500 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Is that specifically on the issue of sentencing? Paul Goggins: We discussed a number of issues, sentencing being one issue. Also, in my capacity as the Minister responsible for the Probation Service, to make sure that the Probation Service responds in a timely and effective way to the needs of the courts. That has been a particular issue that I have discussed with judges. I might say as well that some months ago I appointed an individual within the Home Office to go out on my behalf up and down the country to meet judges, to also meet magistrates, to go and communicate some of the message from the Home Office but, more important than anything, to listen to the concerns and the points of view which sentencers have because it seems to me that we need to improve dialogue between the Home Office, the Prison Service, the Probation Service and those who are sentencing prisoners so that we have a proper dialogue. That is something I am determined to improve. Martin's work with the Sentencing Guidelines Council will also help in that regard. Q501 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: The observation that judges made to me is that Home Office ministers seem to live in ivory towers and had not taken the trouble to go down and speak to them personally. On the issue of churn, one of the things that particularly impressed me about the German system was to avoid moving prisoners on, prisoners are multi-categorised, so within one prison, the Pennsylvania-type prisons, which are very large, they can accommodate Class A, B and C prisoners, thus reducing the requirement to move them on effectively. Has that model been looked at here? If it has been looked at, what was the outcome of that consideration? Could it be re-looked at given the problems associated with people moving on in terms of their ability to be rehabilitated? Mr Narey: It has been looked at. Most of our local prisons hold all sorts of prisoners from Category B down sometimes to Category D and sometimes when somebody who would do perfectly well in an open prison is doing well in a local prison, in times past they have been allowed to finish their sentence there. Ironically they are often more popular than open prisons which are very remote. It is an expensive way of using places. If you are under the sort of population pressures that we are then it is necessary to move, as I have explained, to use every bed. In terms of what we might do in the future in terms of designing new prisons, the Home Secretary and Minister have asked me to look at whether or not we can design larger multifunction prisons that give exactly that purpose, so within a single perimeter you might have accommodation for different categories of prisoners as we reduce security and possibly accommodation for both men and women. We are examining that at the moment and we believe we can do that subject to finding large enough sites. Q502 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Finally, if I may. The incidence of sex offenders refusing to engage in sex offender treatment programmes is far higher in this country than it is in Germany. In the multi-categorised prisons that we visited they talked about sex offenders being included in general prisons and, in fact, the population within those prisons acting as a positive force and a positive source of encouragement which pushes individuals into sex offender treatment programmes which are perhaps conducted within the prison and then back out on to wings where it is understood by fellow prisoners that these people have been rehabilitated in the sense that they are now more able to manage their behaviour. We have prisons in this country largely dedicated to sex offender treatment programmes, has there been some consideration of moving them back into the general population with the express purpose of trying to get more of them through peer pressure on to the sex offender treatment programmes? Paul Goggins: My understanding is that one of the difficulties we face is that there is a larger than average number of deniers, people who deny their offence, amongst the sex offender prison population and, therefore, engaging them with particular programmes can be quite a challenge. I can confirm to the Committee that 1,091 sex offender treatment programmes were completed last year. Certainly it is our intention to work with sex offenders in prisons in the way that you have indicated so that they can do those courses, they can confront their offending behaviour and we can prepare them for life when they have been released from prison. Q503 Bob Russell: Minister, the closure of so many of the nation's psychiatric hospitals and the rapid increase in the prison population: a coincidence or a consequence? Paul Goggins: I think that is a very challenging question and almost impossible to answer because doubtless there will be some interconnections. I think the point is how do we respond to the fact that a substantial number of people in our prisons do suffer from severe mental health problems. Let me answer in this way. First of all, if anybody has need to be in a hospital rather than a prison, if they are diagnosed by a psychiatrist that they need hospital care then they should be in hospital and we make every effort to make sure that they are. I think last year, from memory, about 650 prisoners were transferred out of prisons into secure mental hospitals. Where that is appropriate, that is where they should be. I have made it clear that I do not want to see people waiting unduly to get that treatment when they need it. In addition to that, there are about 5,000 prisoners at any one time in our system who have severe mental health problems and the way that we are tackling that is through something which is called a mental health in-reach initiative where we are putting substantial investment into improving mental health care for those prisoners. Some 300 additional staff have now been added to provide that additional mental health care. Any prisoner should be able to expect the same kind of mental health support as if they were in the community, and that is our objective. Finally, of course, nobody should be in prison because they have got a mental health problem. If somebody has committed a minor offence and has a significant mental health problem then, if it is appropriate, they should be dealt with in the community in terms of a punishment and in the community in terms of their mental health care. That is the kind of model that we aim for. I do not accept that because somebody has a mental health problem they should not be in prison. I think it is perfectly acceptable for people with mental health problems to be in prison but what we have to do is provide them with the right kind of support whilst they are there. Just one other thing, if I may add, finally. A couple of weeks ago I opened the new unit at Frankland Prison for prisoners with severe personality disorder. This is a group who, frankly, have been cast aside and forgotten for far too long. They are among the most dangerous and challenging people in our country but we have to work with them. What we are doing at Frankland and Whitemoor is providing new places with considerable investment, might I say, to try to provide effective ways of working with these dangerous and difficult people. Typically people would be in those units for three to five years and substantial work will be done with them. I hope I have been able to give some indication that the question you ask is a challenging one and the response that we are making needs to be proportionate to the health needs that individuals have. Q504 Bob Russell: Minister, as you know our inquiry is into the rehabilitation of prisoners and I would put it to you that those with serious psychiatric or, indeed, minor psychiatric problems, rehabilitation in the sense that we are looking at and also for the prisoner involved is almost an impossibility. Paul Goggins: I return to the theme of short prison sentences. If somebody with a severe mental health problem is only in prison for a short time and does not get the follow-through care that they perhaps need then clearly they are not helped by the system. That is why, as we move into the new sentencing arrangements where all forms of custody will be followed by supervision in the community and there will be more community alternatives available, we will more adequately provide for their needs. You are right that many people under the current system leave prison without the support that they need. Q505 Bob Russell: You have raised the question of short-term prisoners and in the course of this inquiry we have been told many times that for short-term prisoners it is almost a question of "warehousing of human beings for the sole purpose of containment", which is the phrase that has been used. When judges and magistrates impose these short-term sentences do they tally up? The cost to the public purse across the year of keeping the equivalent of 40 people in prison over a year is £1 million. Just because someone is going for 28 days they may think there is only a small cost but, of course, once you start multiplying all those 28 day sentences or two month sentences you quickly reach £1 million. Are magistrates and judges aware of the financial consequences of what they are doing? Paul Goggins: I will ask Martin to comment on this, if you do not mind, because he has worked with the Sentencing Guidelines Council. If I can just say a couple of things as a prelude to that. One of the best new Orders that we have developed and the Probation Service has developed has been the Drug Treatment and Testing Order working with some very chaotic, difficult offenders. One of the best features of that Order is that every month the offender and the Probation Service have to go back to the court, to the judge or the magistrate, to explain what has happened in the preceding month and how progress is being made. That kind of feedback on sentencing will be enormously helpful. In more strategic terms what we have to do, and Martin's work here is very important, is to show to sentencers what is effective in terms of sentencing and to begin to show that the more intensive community programme can be more effective than the short-term prison sentence. Mr Narey: The short answer is no, they do not take that into account. Until very recently they have not been asked to take cost or effectiveness into account. The Sentencing Guidelines Council, which has now met twice, is tasked not just with promoting consistency in sentencing, because there are some quite inexplicable geographical variations in sentencing between different areas, but the Sentencing Guidelines Council must also issue guidelines to promote the most efficient use of correctional resources. I have been providing the Lord Chief Justice with details of effectiveness, of what appears to work and also on costs as well. If I may say so, the main problem with magistrates is although the number of people coming to justice has not changed in the last ten years, numbers sent to custody by magistrates' courts has risen from 10,000 to 35,000 a year. There are 31,000 magistrates, so most magistrates say, "I only sent one person to custody last year", but the fact is if they did not send anyone the year before it is a huge change. I think magistrates find it very hard to believe that they are acting in a more punitive manner. Collectively they certainly are, although individually they may only use custody rarely. Q506 Bob Russell: I have referred to the warehousing of human beings, of short-term prisoners. One of the big problems that has been identified is because they are in custody for such a short time, work programmes are difficult to co-ordinate or sustain, training programmes cannot be completed before release, and also it has been indicated that even in that short time they could be moved two or three times. How can this problem be overcome? What is the Prison Service doing under the new regime so that prisoners are properly programmed through the system and rehabilitation is more than just words? Paul Goggins: I think what we are trying to make clear this afternoon is that there is a limit to how much can be done within the confines of the present system. What we have to do is to assist sentencers in changing the pattern of sentencing so that we are not dealing with as many short-term sentence prisoners. In addition to the measures we have mentioned, we have begun to pilot a new form of custody called intermittent custody where prisoners will spend part of the week in prison but part of the week at home. That is particularly beneficial if people have already got a job. The pilots are beginning to work quite well. People are going to prison for the weekend but carrying on working, earning a living, supporting their family during the week. Q507 Chairman: Is that not a bit of a counsel of despair? It seems you are saying to the Committee "we cannot do anything for short-term prisoners so we will aim to have less of them", but if you had work regularly available for all prisoners, short-term prisoners could do that. If you did not have a shortfall of purposeful activity in locations they would be able to do that. In the light of what we have heard, even if people were moved, if they were able to follow even short courses from one place to another it would have some value given that you will always have short-term prisoners. I get the sense slightly that everyone has given up on doing anything about short-term prisoners and we just hope we are going to have less of them. Paul Goggins: Martin will want to respond. No, we have not given up but I think what we are saying is that we can get a better outcome if we can do more intensive work. That applies equally to those who are in prison and those who are in the community. We just need to work with them for longer periods of time to get the best results. Q508 Chairman: With a better prison regime you could be doing more with short-term prisoners than you currently are. Would that be fair? Mr Narey: Yes, and we are. Although obviously we want to move people out of prison, we are always going to have some short-term sentence prisoners because when people have abused community penalties we need to use short-term custody and we need to adjust. For example, the majority of the people who get drug detoxification in prison certainly will be short sentences because characteristically they are in and out quite frequently. We have hugely increased the number of detoxifications to about 60,000 a year. We are very close to getting accreditation by an independent body in terms of its likely efficacy for a very short drug treatment programme. Up until now what has been beyond us is to find something that works in the area of drug treatment or, indeed, in terms of cognitive skills that you can do in a short period of time precisely to fill this gap. We have tried to develop something which will work. The sentencing problem and the increase in the population does erode that progress. While you were talking to my colleagues from the PGA, I worked out that last year the Prison Service produced an extra two and a half million activity hours for prisoners and it was absorbed entirely by the increase in the population of 2,000 people, so the average of 23.4 did not shift at all despite this huge expansion in work. If we got the population down and kept those work levels up we really would have the sort of regime for all prisoners that you would want to see. Q509 Bob Russell: Minister, when did this part-time or weekend prison experiment come into being? Paul Goggins: It began at the end of January in Kirkham Prison for men and Morton Hall for women. Both units can take up to 40 prisoners at any one time. We will be evaluating the success of these pilots and if they are successful we will be rolling them out. Q510 Bob Russell: I wonder if you would allow me a degree of smug satisfaction when I point out that in the last Parliament this Committee in its Alternatives to Prison Services proposed just such a scheme which was rubbished by the then Home Secretary and the Home Office. I am delighted that four years down the line it is at least being looked at seriously. To come back to the new wonderful regime of seamless service between the Prison and Probation Services, is it possible for short-term prisoners to commence courses in custody and complete them in the community? Is that what is going to happen? Paul Goggins: Yes, that is exactly right. We have heads of learning and skills in our prisons now whose job it is to put in place the right kinds of courses and skills training for the inmates there. Part of their remit will be to extend that beyond the prison out into the education providers in the wider community. I want to see that happen so that the people do not do the same course twice and there is a continuation and people get the benefit of the investment. Q511 Bob Russell: So you are giving the Committee an assurance this afternoon that the community social service agencies will be engaged in the rehabilitation agenda to facilitate that approach? Paul Goggins: That is absolutely the approach that we are going to follow. Q512 Bob Russell: I am delighted to hear that. So far as vocational training and rehabilitation within prisons, as I understand it only about 10,000 prisoners out of a prison population of 75,000 are thus engaged. Why is the Prison Service not giving a higher priority to engaging prisoners in constructive prison work and expanding the type and number of its prison workshops? We have seen examples in Sweden and Germany and yet we have been told this afternoon of an example in this country where men are using sewing machines to make fishing nets, for which there is not much demand. Paul Goggins: Martin may want to comment. I think we are beginning to see some real shifts here. Perhaps I can illustrate my answer by talking about a recent visit to Manchester where I opened some new facilities for skills training. Manchester is the city that I represent in this House and it is a city where there is major economic development going on, a huge amount of construction. What is happening in the prison there now is that the kind of training, the workshops that are being provided, are linked in exactly with the kinds of jobs that are increasingly available in the construction industry outside. We have involvement from the Learning and Skills Council, we have got education providers coming in from outside, we have got employers engaged in a whole new way of connecting those prisoners with the real economy outside and trying to connect the two together. Q513 Bob Russell: I am greatly encouraged by that answer. I have just one further question. Will the prisoners be able to gain recognised trade qualifications as part of that training? Will they leave with a certificate showing that they have an element of expertise and excellence in whatever skill or trade that they have been doing? Paul Goggins: Indeed, that is essential. Where it can be gained during the period that they are in prison it will be gained in that way but, going back to your previous question, it is also important that if they are not able to complete the qualification whilst they are in prison, they are able to carry it on afterwards and complete the qualification in that way. I might say one of the most encouraging little moments in the last few months was when I went to Everthorpe Prison to the finals of the bricklaying competition, which is a feature of life in the Prison Service. I presented the prizes to people who had achieved an outstanding level of skill and was joined in giving out the prizes by the winner of last year's competition who was now released from prison working as a bricklayer and earning £750 a week. When he informed people of that, it was not just the prisoners' eyes that went up to the sky, as you can well imagine. That is a success story. You could see how that individual inspired the prisoners he was speaking to. It is that kind of aspiration that we need to build on. Q514 Bob Russell: Again, a further encouraging answer. Finally, Minister, when do you expect vocational training and prison work will become an integral part of the Sentence Planning Process, again as part of this joined-up holistic approach, if I can use a word the Leader of the House will not allow me to use? Mr Narey: It was going to be this year that we were going to bring vocational training and education together. We decided to postpone for a year because most of our money for education of offenders in the community is now routed through the Learning and Skills Councils and prisons would have stood alone in what would have been anachronism. We have delayed it for a year. Next year we will bring in vocational training, the old- fashioned skills courses, many of which need replacement and renewal, as part of education so we bring together basic education and trade training so we can really do everything necessary to make people employable. I think making people employable is what we should be about. Workshop experience can be very useful, but there is not very much evidence that they teach anything like a work ethic. What transforms people's job chances are getting qualifications. Q515 Chairman: Is it a possibility that over the last ten years the Prison Service broadly put too many of its eggs in the basket of treatment programmes and Offending Behaviour Programmes and not sufficient in developing a work ethic and practical skills for employability? Mr Narey: As you would expect me to say, I do not think that is the case. We are more usually criticised for putting all our eggs in the basket of education where we have made the major investment. Investment in cognitive skills programmes has risen over the years but this year we are still only providing for about 8,000 prisoners through cognitive skills programmes, many fewer than we are putting into education, for example. It is not because I do not think that work can help but I think one has to be realistic about it. I recall a few years ago being referred to Wayland Prison, or the constituency, where we had developed some very impressive work in food packaging, won a major contract from a major British supermarket for food packaging worth thousands of pounds to the prison, employing, many, many workers but we had to withdraw that when the constituency MP, quite understandably, became very irate at the prospect of some of his constituents losing their jobs in a very similar industry. One has to tread very carefully in terms of what we do in prison industries and the effect it can have on the local economies. Chairman: I could not possibly name my colleague Chairman in another Select Committee in that context! Q516 David Winnick: Last Thursday we visited a prison near Woking, which will be known to you, where the prisoners work as in a factory for 36 hours a week doing useful engineering jobs and they are pretty well occupied during the course of the day. How many other prisons have that regime? Mr Narey: That is the only prison, known as the industrial prison, which was built 30 years ago as an industrial prison with a whole emphasis on engineering work. Other prisons have a very significant amount of engineering work. In Whitemoor Prison, for example, in the North East, about half the prisoners are employed in making cell doors and windows and so forth. That is the only one that is exclusively an industrial prison, although even there we have worked hard over recent years to make sure that industry is balanced by education and making sure that people get some qualifications rather than simply go to work. Q517 David Winnick: The Internal Review recommended that a 36 hour week should be applied in prisons but, as you were saying, that is only prison that is doing it. Mr Narey: It is very difficult to get that sort of output. In any case, in recent years we have tried to move away from measuring simply the input, the number of hours that people might spend in purposeful activity or in work, to try to measure real outputs. The KPRs which the Minister has set for me this year are all about education and qualifications, Drug Testing Treatment Order completions, rather than inputs, real evidence of us achieving things which will make a difference to people's future reoffending. Q518 David Winnick: Minister, have you visited that prison that we went to last week? Paul Goggins: I have visited 36 prisons now, I think; I have not visited that one yet. Q519 David Winnick: I appreciate you visit prisons as part of your job, I do not dispute that for one moment. May I put it to you, Minister, that just as I was impressed, and I believe I am speaking for my colleagues who went along, you too would be impressed. It does seem to me that, to some extent at least, this should be a model of what prisoners should be doing rather than wasting their time doing work that will not help them in any way whatsoever when they return to civilian life. Paul Goggins: I shall certainly take your advice and look for an early opportunity to visit that particular prison. I visit a lot of prisons and I see a lot of things that impress me in terms of work that is undertaken, in terms of education that is undertaken and skills training. To re-emphasise the point that Martin has made, of course it is a good thing for people to be properly occupied, constructively occupied whilst they are in prison, but, in terms of resettlement and rehabilitation, what matters is that they develop the skills and the qualifications and the connections to be able to move into the world of work after they have been released and that remains our main focus. David Winnick: This is what is happening in that particular prison. Q520 Chairman: Can I just come in on this one. Minister, the Prison Service's Internal Review Report of 2003 was only last year and it sounds as though both you and Mr Narey are rejecting what we understand to have been a major conclusion of that review. Paul Goggins: No, we are not rejecting the fact that we should be seeking to maximise the amount that people are working, and this example is a good model of that, it is a question of emphasis, of what the real outcome is that we are looking for. The outcome is not the work for its own sake, the outcome that we are looking for is an aptitude to work, the qualifications to work, which means people can sustain a life without crime after they have been released. That has to be the overriding priority. Q521 David Winnick: Reference has already been made to the visit to Germany, which I did not participate in but the general view of those who did is that much more is done in Germany in pursuing various education courses and full-time work for prisoners. Have we studied the situation in Germany? Mr Narey: I do not know what the current figures are in Germany, Mr Winnick. I would be astonished if they could compare with us in terms of the progress we have made on education in prisons. On the latest DfES figures, 18% of adults in this country who gained literacy and numeracy qualifications last year did so in prison. We have got 46,000 basic skills workers, more than 100,000 work skills qualifications. I am confident there is nowhere in Europe that is getting those sorts of results in terms of tangible outputs from what we are doing with prisoners. David Winnick: No doubt in our report we will make reference to Germany and that visit. Q522 Mr Singh: Minister, just on this point of work, the evidence that we have seen and heard is that most prisoners, or the majority of them, offenders, have not had a working lifestyle but a very dysfunctional lifestyle and, whilst I agree with skills training and education, the one thing that work gives them in prison is a "normal" routine. For the first time in their lives they are getting up, getting ready, going to work, working, going home and then doing other things in their spare time. This is something that many of them have never had. Just purely getting the qualifications when they are not used to work is not the answer, is it? For the ones who have never worked prison must have a central role in training them by doing the work and not just training them with skills. Paul Goggins: I think what we are trying to say is there will be a balance between all of these things. There will be a balance between the amount of offending behaviour work that is done, the amount of time spent undertaking drug treatment, the amount of time spent doing education and skills training, and work itself. In different prisons, at different stages in a prisoner's life the balance might be a different one. In our open prisons, for example, 1,500 people go out to work during the course of each day and, of course, that is perfectly right, they work full-time, they earn a wage through doing that and that can help in their long-term rehabilitation. The balance is different at different times. I think the point we are seeking to make is this is not an end in itself. What we are trying to provide through this balanced programme is a means to an end and the end is a sustainable life beyond prison. Mr Narey: Can I tell a story, Mr Singh, just to emphasise the point the Minister is making. Two or three years ago now I went to Latchmere House Prison to meet the Chair of the Board of Visitors who was also a local builder who for many years had been employing prisoners from Latchmere House on his various building sites around London. He told me he was having to stop that, not because they were not good workers, not because they did not turn up, not because there were any problems, it was that as an employer he could no longer risk having them on his site because they could not read the health and safety notice. You are right, we have people who have never worked, we have people whose fathers never worked, we have people who do not think the world of work is anything to do with them, but if they do not have some basic qualifications, even if it is only a food hygiene certificate and they will get a job at McDonalds, if they do not have any qualifications they will never get work outside no matter how well they might have done at work inside a prison. Q523 Mr Singh: I absolutely agree that there are horses for courses. However, having said that, what I am trying to get at is work should be the centrality and these other things should be satellites around the work. We should have a central aim and there should be radii coming off that central aim of providing education and skills or whatever. We are getting the basket without what should be in the centre of the basket. You are offering a picnic basket and I am saying there should be a central core around which the other things revolve. Paul Goggins: The balance will be different at different times in different prisons. David gave us the example before and the balance will be different in different locations. As I say, the balance is certainly different in open prisons. Q524 David Winnick: Regardless of the example you gave earlier, is there not a case for all prisoners to be paid a fair wage and deductions made accordingly for prison board, lodgings, etc? Paul Goggins: There is some history to this particular debate and I am sure Martin will want to comment. What I would not want to move into is a system that becomes a huge bureaucratic exercise in paying people imaginary money so that they can pay imaginary board and lodgings. I think that could be a very expensive exercise in bureaucracy. What I would encourage is that we have a proper and transparent system of payment for the work that prisoners do and, where possible, and this is something I want to emphasise for the medium to long-term, we encourage prisoners to begin to think of making provisions for their own release from their time in custody to see that they can save a little money and they can start to prepare for life beyond prison. It is very much part of the resettlement process that they begin to understand that. The amounts of money that prisoners are paid are extremely modest, of course. One of the issues which I am still reflecting on deeply is how we can encourage more education given that prisoners will receive less remuneration for undertaking education than they will, for example, for cleaning the wings. There is a slight imbalance there that I am seeking to address because I want to encourage prisoners to spend more time in education for the reasons that we have just explained. In answer to your initial question, I would not want to create a bureaucracy of people being paid an imaginary amount to repay for board and lodgings, I think it would be a bit of a distraction. Q525 David Winnick: So what we saw last Thursday where work is being done, there would not be a case to pay them the same sort of wage, or near it, which would be received outside with all the deductions for board and the rest of it? Mr Narey: I am surprised that in Germany they are deducting any charge for board and lodging and if a prisoner there were to take them to the European Court they would lose the judgment, as we did. We were charging board and lodging to prisoners working in open prisons and going out to work in real jobs in the community and we were sued, we lost and we had to refund considerable sums of money. Although prisoners can pay tax and National Insurance, it is illegal for us to deduct the costs of board and lodging. Q526 David Winnick: The European Court of Human Rights ruled in March, as I am sure you are aware, that preventing committed prisoners from voting is in indeed a breach of their human rights. I understand Government has yet to formally respond. What is your position on that? Paul Goggins: The position of the Government is as it has been, which is that where people commit an offence which results in them being sentenced to a period of imprisonment they lose their right to participate in the democratic process. It is part of the penalty that they pay. That has been the position of Government and remains the position of Government. Whilst I understand there are people currently campaigning for a change in that policy, at the moment there is no intention of changing it. We are considering the judgment but at the moment there is no intention of changing the policy. Q527 Mrs Dean: Can I turn to the role of the private sector. I think you mentioned earlier on about the need to work with industry outside prisons to look for links with work inside prisons. Is there an argument for setting up a not-for-profit agency to act as an interface between the Prison Service and the private sector to identity and exploit market opportunities? Obviously there are gaps where there are vacancies that cannot be filled in the private sector, such as HGV drivers, for instance, in the construction of Terminal 5. Would a not-for-profit agency help to bridge that gap? Paul Goggins: It is an interesting suggestion which I think would require some reflection. Increasingly we see the Prison Service working with the Learning and Skills Councils at the more local level and, of course, Learning and Skills Councils are able to bring an appraisal of where the gaps are in terms of skills and will have knowledge of where the jobs are in the local economy that are there to be filled. I think the input of the Learning and Skills Council in that way will be very important, but at least as important is the involvement of employers. I am pleased to say that we have improving links with the CBI who at the highest level are very interested in working more with the Prison Service. We have some good examples of companies who more and more are coming into our prisons to see what links can be made with the purpose of making sure that appropriate training is provided and the opportunity is there for employment afterwards. We had some interesting work going on in the North West with support from the European Social Fund precisely to try to create these more dynamic links. I want to encourage employers to get more involved in that way. It is not just employers being generous, this is about them filling vacancies which they have because in the economy that we now have with high levels of employment they have got an urgent need to find people. Potentially this is a two-way street which could be very beneficial. Q528 Mrs Dean: I take it from what you have said that that has been encouraged nationally in a wider way than just individual prisons trying to make links. Paul Goggins: Absolutely. Obviously it will be for individual prisons to do that and it is one of the questions I frequently ask on visits. Nationally we are working with the CBI and we want to see that kind of strategic development. Q529 Mrs Dean: Our series of prison visits suggest that some prisons have developed a strategy for helping offenders find jobs after release whilst others offer no or negligible support. How integrated is the Prison Service's Custody to Work initiative across the prison estate? What is the current rate of prisoners obtaining employment when they leave prison? Paul Goggins: I think the work now which JobCentre Plus are doing in our prisons is invaluable in providing connections with local JobCentres and the FRESHSTART interviews and so on and so forth. Another little anecdote: I visited Bedford Prison a few weeks ago and found JobCentre Plus staff there not just finding new jobs for prisoners but ringing up employer and persuading existing employers to hold out a job for a prisoner who had worked previously for them and was returning back to the community, they were only in prison for a few weeks, and the employers were responding. Again, that is a reflection of the kind of labour market we have. There is a very, very important role there for JobCentre Plus. If we look overall at those returning to employment, to training and to education, we are seeing around 30% of people leaving prison moving into education, employment or training. That is an improvement on previous performance but we need to do better. I think the joining together of the JobCentre Plus system and the prison system will be a very important feature in that. Q530 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: In my numerous visits to prisons up and down this country, I am always impressed by prison governors who seem totally consumed by the day-to-day management of prisoners, getting them from A to B in custody suites and so on, but I never, ever got the sense that there was a driving passion to get prisoners into work or, indeed, to engage the public or private sectors in providing greater work opportunities. Our universities are now being encouraged to set up satellite business, to go out there and get in private funding. Where is there evidence of that taking place in prisons? Where are the proselytising governors going out there, getting the business, making the connections themselves and coming to you, Minister, saying "I delivered this. This is a business initiative and it is going to work in my prison. It suits my prisoners' needs and here it is"? Paul Goggins: I can assure you that those prison governors are out there and increasingly the message is getting through that the focus on resettlement is absolutely fundamental to everything they do, whether it is support with drugs problems, whether it is housing needs that are a priority for a particular individual prisoner or whether it is a job. The resettlement of that person is a job which starts on day one of the prison sentence and does not end even at the end of that prison sentence but goes on out into the community. I mentioned before that I was at Bedford Prison recently and the presentation that I received whilst I was there from a whole range of staff who were involved in this process was a deeply impressive one and it included JobCentre Plus and a number of other agencies. I think it is out there. Maybe not everybody feels it to the same extent at the moment but the message from the top is very clear that resettlement and the focus on employment, on housing, is absolutely crucial. Q531 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: That is not my impression but perhaps you and I are going to different prisons. I would like your list because I would be mightily encouraged to go to some of these prisons and meet these wardens. The ones I meet are a disaster. Mr Narey: There is a national statistic which suggests we have had some effect because we are now getting 30% of discharged prisoners into employment or training. When NACRO surveyed this in 1994 the figure was 10%. That is a huge change against a bigger population. Q532 Chairman: We were told that about 15,000 of those are people who score half a point simply by going for a FRESHSTART interview. Can we really claim that someone is in education and training if all they have done is had an interview at the JobCentre or JobCentre Plus? Mr Narey: I think you can because, indeed, JobCentre Plus have pressed me to accept that we may be underestimating the hit. They believe that if we can deliver prisoners to JobCentres for interviews they will get more than half of them in jobs. They measure getting someone into a job over a 14 week period. They are confident that more than half of those we send to the JobCentre Plus will take up employment. Chairman: I think for the purposes of our report it would be very useful to see the detailed statistics on that. Q533 Mrs Dean: Can I turn to women prisoners. I was disappointed to hear that you foresee that prison numbers will continue to rise, especially when per head of population compared to Germany and Sweden it seems so much higher. Do you think that the number of women prisoners will continue to rise, especially since we have seen such an enormous increase in the last few years? Paul Goggins: Certainly we will be doing everything we can to make sure that no woman is in prison who does not need to be there. I will briefly set out how we are starting to do that. On 11 March I launched the Women's Offending Reduction Programme which will do a number of things to try and counter the exponential increase in women prisoners. If we look over the last decade, the overall increase has been 50%, the increase in women prisoners has been 173%, so this is a huge issue. Obviously we will be seeking to develop community alternatives to imprisonment. I will be particularly following that through with Rosie Winterton in the Department of Health seeking to work with her to bring forward programmes which can assist women who have got mental health problems, who have got drug treatment needs, to make sure that those women are not in prison because they have got those needs but they are helped with those out in the community. We are also seeking to extend and improve bail information systems in local women's prisons so that those women who arrive on remand but who could actually be supported back at home in the community on bail we are able to make sure are returned on bail in those ways. Finally, in terms of hostel accommodation, I am concerned that we are not making the maximum use of all women's places in our hostels at the moment. Some people suggest to me that is because some of the women's places are in mixed accommodation and whilst we have made attempts through the National Probation Service to make sure there is always separation between the accommodation for women and men, it does trouble me that some of that female accommodation is not being used. I want to make sure it is used because for every place that could be used in that hostel it would be one less woman in prison. I intend to review hostel accommodation over the months ahead and will be making some proposals later in the year on that. I am conscious that 8,000 children a year have their lives disrupted because their mothers are sent to prison. Sometimes that is necessary, but where it is not necessary it should not happen and I am determined to make sure that we try to reduce the number of women who are sent to prison unnecessarily. Q534 Mrs Dean: Thank you for that. Women and men prisoners present very different problems for the prison system and react in different ways to the experience. Why has the Prison Service chosen to disband the women's prison estate? Paul Goggins: I mentioned earlier on the increasing regional focus within the National Offender Management Service. I think that will produce huge benefits in terms of managing the prison population, in terms of making the connections we need to make for effective resettlement. I do not think you can do that and leave part of the equation out. Leaving women out just would not be helpful. I want to see Offender Managers in the National Offender Management Service able to do the same kind of work with women offenders as they are with male offenders. There was an argument and there was a time when it was right to separate out the women's estate but I think now is the time to include them back in and for them to be managed as part of the overall provision within a region. I have to say, we are also keeping a national overview of women in prison in terms of developing policy, developing good practice and monitoring what is going on. The management in future will be part of the regional structure. Mr Narey: I agree with all that. It was very necessary a few years ago when we had to make some significant improvements in our care of women just as the population began to explode but it is important now that we work on resettlement of them and work with the Probation Service as we prepare for the new single service. I do not think women's prisons are losing out in any way in the support they receive from a central policy and operations unit. Q535 Mrs Dean: Can you guarantee that the particular rehabilitative needs of female offenders will be addressed and met rather than simply transposing the male offenders' rehabilitative regime onto the women's estate? Paul Goggins: Absolutely. Again, the offender management that will be part of, and central to, the National Offender Management Service will be seeking to meet the needs of individual offenders and where that offender is a woman then her specific needs will be absolutely at the core of what they are doing. We will keep that very, very clear, I promise you. Q536 Mr Singh: I want to move on to Offending Behaviour Programmes. I know Mr Narey mentioned the level of these a bit earlier on. I think you said there were not as many programmes as we imagined but in terms of my work on this Committee I have imagined that these were a big thing in terms of correction services and the approach to reoffending. Interestingly enough, they were very impressed by these programmes in Sweden and have taken them on board. Our research also shows that while the programme between 1992-96 did contribute to a reduction in reoffending, the next wave of programmes between 1996-98 appeared to have had no impact whatsoever. In terms of these Offending Behaviour Programmes, are we keeping the faith in them or are we losing faith in them? Paul Goggins: I think Martin will want to comment. Let me just say by way of an initial answer that I think some of the Offending Behaviour Programmes that we run in our prisons and, indeed, in the Probation Service are very impressive indeed. They are intensive, they are detailed, they are well researched and well run, but they are not necessarily suitable for everyone. I think the real challenge is to make sure that the correct Offending Behaviour Programme is available for the right individual prisoner at the right time in their period of incarceration, that is the real thing, not to assume that everybody will benefit from every kind of Offending Behaviour Programme. It is getting the fit right and, frankly, where it is more important for somebody to get basic numeracy and literacy qualifications that is the thing they are doing rather than the Offender Behaviour Programme. It is important that we keep them there. It is important that we sustain the level of integrity which they have but we target them and link them to the right people at the right time. Mr Narey: The research seems to show that they work for the right people but they cannot be on as large scale a basis as we had once hoped. You are quite right, the most recent research is very disappointing. I think there is still sufficient to suggest that we can make these work but we have scaled back the number we are doing. We have taken the investment from 2,000 general offending programmes and transferred it this year to provide more drug treatment programmes which meets a growing need and where we have a more confident research base at the moment in terms of the effectiveness in terms of reducing reoffending. Q537 Mr Singh: Were we choosing the wrong people for the last wave of programmes? Surely they cannot all have been wrong? Mr Narey: I do not think we were choosing the wrong people. As research has emerged we have discovered where the programmes appear to be most effective. For example, the programmes do not appear to be very effective for low risk offenders. Where we have placed low risk offenders on the programmes in prisons, and it would be more particularly a problem in the community, then the effect in terms of reduced reconvictions has not been statistically significant. They appear to work best for acquisitive offenders who are in the middle range of seriousness, they seem to have a reasonable effect there. What we are doing now is we have a thing called the OGRS, a seriousness of offending measure, and we are trying to make sure that we put the right sorts of offenders on these programmes because we think that will give us a payback in terms of reduced reconviction. Q538 Mr Singh: So we are keeping the faith but not at the same level and not with the same priority attached. Mr Narey: That is exactly right. Q539 Mr Singh: I am glad you mentioned drug offenders because one of the things that concern me and my colleagues is the waiting list for people to get into treatment programmes. After leaving prison I think it is three to nine months and surely that is not acceptable, is it? Paul Goggins: The waiting times are certainly coming down. We could provide a note to give you the precise detail on that. The waiting times are coming down. Through the Criminal Justice Interventions Programme we are getting a much better joining up between what happens in prison and what happens beyond. You are absolutely right, one of the most vulnerable times for a prisoner being discharged from prison who has had a drug problem is those first few days after they have been released and it is important that there is a seamless transition in that way. 80% of people arriving in some of our local prisons have serious drug or alcohol problems, they need a detoxification programme and then they need to move on into the treatment programme. If we have a system that as they are released does not intervene any longer then we have wasted our time and money and potentially their lives. We have got to go on improving that. I think you will be encouraged by the reductions in the waiting times and I think the CJIP programme will make a real difference. Q540 Chairman: It would be helpful to have those figures. Is it right that an offender released from prison will now have to wait longer for drug treatment than someone who has not yet been convicted but who gets fast track treatment in a high crime area? What is the logic between having fast track treatment in a high crime area and, on the other hand, releasing a prisoner into a high crime area who will wait a long time for treatment? Paul Goggins: I see the point that you are making. All the time we are trying to get consistency between these different programmes. I accept at this stage in development there may be some inconsistencies. The biggest inconsistency of all, of course, is that somebody has to commit an offence before they get the fast track to the drug treatment but what about the people who need the treatment who are not offenders? We have to get real consistency into the system as we develop these different strands. I think the CJIP programme will help us to do that. Q541 Chairman: Can I move on from that to explore the powers that NOMS will have, and particularly the Offender Managers. It is presented in a sense as the solution to a large number of the problems that have been there for some time. For example, will Regional Offender Managers or somebody else within the system have the ability to secure faster drug treatment? Will they have the resources to do that if they identify that as the biggest single failing in the rehabilitation regime for a group of prisoners or will they still be depending on health or the national treatment agencies? Mr Narey: There is some dependency because it is a partnership with the national treatment agencies. In the last year or so I have seen some dramatic improvements in waiting times. We now have a financial arrangement with the NTAs that we transfer a significant amount of the money that we have for Drug Testing and Treatment Orders direct to them and in return we have guarantees in terms of access to treatment and the timeliness of treatment. It is now the case that with Drug Testing and Treatment Orders, which is our flagship in the community, 70% of those who get the Treatment Order see a treatment provider within two days of the Order. That is an absolutely massive change from just 12 months ago. Q542 Chairman: I understand that improvement and it is very welcome and it is clearly taking place, but the Regional Offender Managers and the NOMS system as a whole has really been sold on the basis that there are going to be people in the system who have the ability to commission services effectively, whether commissioning certain types of prison services, commissioning community punishments and so on. It sounds as though there are big gaps in the services that they ought to be able to commission. Would it not be logical for Regional Offender Managers to hold the budget for drug treatment in their area and be able to commission what is necessary for prisoners coming out of prisons in their area? Mr Narey: Essentially it will be their budget initially, but our policy at the moment is to transfer that to the NTA to the single treatment budget precisely to overcome some of the potential inconsistencies which the Minister mentioned by having competing streams. We did have some real difficulties two or three years ago. For example, when I was Director General of Prisons I was employing drug workers as fast as I could, I was drawing people from the Probation Service, from other aspects of drug treatment, and we got into a hugely competitive environment as we fought for scant treatment resources. Although I was nervous about transferring our money to the NTA I think it is one of the best things we have done. We would reserve the right, subject to the Minister's approval, if at any time that was not providing us with the acces that we needed for offenders to revisit that. I feel tremendously supported by the NTA, I think they have made a real difference. For the first time in any governor's memory the CJIP Programme is making a difference by picking up people outside the gate and building on getting people clean in prison. Q543 Chairman: Can we try and pin down exactly how much power the Regional Offender Managers will have. If for policy reasons they are not commissioning medical services, we heard earlier that there will be real constraints on their ability to retain people in prisons within their region and you have suggested in evidence that Regional Offender Managers might opt to move investment from one prison to another. That does not sound entirely realistic given the current levels of overcrowding. Can you identify for us what real influence Regional Offender Managers are going to be able to have over the operation of the Prison and Probation Services in their area or are they going to be overwhelmed by the sheer problem of dealing with the numbers of people you have? Mr Narey: Certainly the problems could continue to overwhelm, there is no getting away from that fact. Both the Minister and I get early morning pages telling us what the population is, it dominates every working day. I happen to believe we will solve that. I am hugely encouraged by what is happening. There is some emerging evidence that we might be slowing down the present expansion of the prison population and I think the projections which are being formulated at the moment and will be published shortly will show projected growth which is much smaller. We have a long way to go but I think we can do that. Making a success of offender management is not entirely dependent on that but it will be a lot easier if we can create a bit of headroom. The Offender Manager will essentially fund every single prison in his or her region and, therefore, will prescribe what that prison does in terms of basic skills classes, drug testing, drug treatment, detoxification and so forth. They will buy given outputs for the prisoners who are placed there. I think that will make a difference because they will be able to join what happens in custody with what we do with those offenders when they come out on supervision and when we introduce Custody-Plus everybody will get supervision after release, which is a grave weakness in the current arrangements. I acknowledge entirely that Offender Managers will have much more power if we are not completely bursting at the seams. If the governor of the worse prison in England and Wales is going to fill his beds every night there is going to be a limited incentive to run a better and more competitive prison. Q544 Bob Russell: I want to talk about the Offender Assessment System which has been billed as the answer to lots and lots of the difficulties within the prison regime. Can you tell us exactly how that is going to solve all of these vexed problems? Who will have responsibility for ensuring its effective integration under the new NOMS arrangements? Paul Goggins: It is a very important part of the new arrangements. It is happening in different stages, both in the Probation Service and the Prison Service. It is a somewhat complex operation in terms of linking them all together. It is being rolled out in the Probation Service, it is being rolled out in the Prison Service, initially as a paper system but increasingly as an electronic system. The ultimate goal is to make sure we have a proper electronic system of information where information can be transferred from the Prison Service into the Probation Service. As we move into the world of offender management it is going to be absolutely critical right from the first contact and the assessment pre-sentence that the Offender Manager will have to do that we have all the information in the assessment and that forms the basis of the sentence planning for that particular individual. We still have some way to go yet in order to get this fully rolled out, it will be some time before it is completed, but it will be a fundamental part of the new system. Chairman: We would like to pursue that further but we know you have got another engagement. Minister, Mr Narey, thank you very much for your time this afternoon. |